Sky watching

When you are a glorified taxi service the horror of early morning overtime by your partner is only deadened by the fact that you are half asleep when the reality of having to move about comes home to you. The darkness of night convinces you that you should be tucked up snugly in bed and not stumbling ineptly towards the finicky business of contact lens insertion. Multi tasking shaving and brushing your teeth is not a convincingly combined activity when sharp and fully awake; it is merely a recipe for disaster when still emotionally in the Land of Nod.

There are few advantages in being up and doing before you have to be. There is the malicious pleasure in returning from taxi duty and swiftly passing all the stolid commuters resignedly crawling their way to work. There is the realisation that your tareas can be completed almost before the day has started.

But the real pleasure of early morning driving at this time of the year is the sky. Whatever develops during the rest of the day, it is often the case that early morning is one of the best parts of the day when you consider the weather. We have seen some wonderful skies on the early morning run.

This morning the sky was absurdly spectacular. The cloud was relatively low and the rising sun bathed the bottom of the clouds with bright orange, tinged with liquid gold with a few burning rays escaping though the clouds into the darker reaches of the higher sky. The picture was so beautiful that it almost became kitsch: a painting of what I looked at would have been dismissed as unimaginative and chocolate box Romantic. It was the subject matter of technically inept amateurs, but it was actually real and in front of me as I drove.

As I was driving someone to his work rather than going to work myself, I was able to indulge my aesthetic sense, but I wonder how many others were lost in the deadening effect of their immanent work rather than able to appreciate the wonders all around them?

Believe you me, the splendour of the skies didn’t last long. By the time the bread had been bought from Tesco’s on the return trip, the clouds had closed in and the dull skies of a Welsh February had re-established themselves with the courtesy detail of a wet windscreen from a sharp shower!

The one thing that being brought up in a damp island does for you is to encourage the ability to find positive in depressing negativity. The dark, grey wet days of winter do many things: depress the population; nip flowers with frost; confuse vegetation by not being consistent; rot wood; create puddles in irritating places and deny us the sun.

On the positive side the cold kills certain suspended vegetation that lurks in my pond. The water, magically, clears and loses its deep green tinge, or rather colouration and clears, revealing that, once again, the fish have survived.

Having a pond with fish in it is a constant source of worry. During what I refer to as The Verdant Months when the water of the pond is an opaque viridian, the complete lack of visible finny activity convinces me that the entire fish population of the pond is dead and rotting on the floor of the pond, each cadaver gradually filling with light organic gas prior to the entire tribe’s zombie-like resurrection as they float shimmering with putrescence to the surface – dead torpedoes of guilty accusation leaving a vivid message of neglect for the RSPCA.

It never happens! The clear water shows that The Verdant Months have hidden all sorts of knots and genderings of the finny folk and lo and behold! multitudes of small fish have appeared as if by magic! The large orange goldfish not only have survived but also have thriven and grown more stately.

It’s amazing!

As I type this Barca has just been defeated by Liverpool in the Champions League. I have never seen Barca play so badly (and over the past few years, I really have seen Barca play on a number of occasions) and give such a poor account as a team. There seemed to be no cohesion, no understanding of team mates positioning on the field, no finish.

I am still astonished that I feel so involved in a game of football; Toni has a lot to answer for!

Roll on the next round in Anfield!

Take care of the little things

That well adjusted friendly madman, William Blake, wrote that you can see “a world in a grain of sand.” Let’s assume that he hadn’t been at the laudanum (so he wasn’t having a Salvador Dali moment) and that he was actually saying something with the clarity of his humanist vision in the simplest and most direct way he could. Perhaps he would have been sympathetic with the title of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

I’m sure that William would have been joyously enthusiastic to endorse the sentiment which led to the title – though I’m sure he would have interpreted it in a more than individualistic way.

In some ways it is an unsettling observation: if something as inconsequential as a grain of sand can effortlessly contain a world, then why is it necessary to strive to create something infinitely more complex like the intricate painting on a roof in a chapel in a very small city? Was Michelangelo wasting his time completing all that back breaking illustration when the smallest particle of his paint pigment could, apparently, have contained all of his artistic vision and much more?

Blake himself completed drawings, paintings and prints, but I suppose that many of them (all of them?) are imbued with his own mystical appreciation of the world around him, so he never produces a prosaic representation of the world, but indicates the numinous in the quotidian.

In fact in a painting like his depiction of Newton at the bottom of the ocean he consciously rejects the attempts to circumscribe Nature by Science. Nature, according to Blake, can only be truly appreciated by much more than the intellect, hence the way in which he paints and writes.

It is now either an anti climax or a complete justification of the sentiments of Blake that I reveal that the inspiration for the preceding piece of writing is something tiny and domestic.
White sinks in the kitchen obviously look more stylish than clunky old stainless steel ones, but they do demand a more rigorous regimen of cleaning than a swirl of water which cleans the metal version. Bleach and soaking is necessary for the pristine whiteness to shine.

It reminds me of the disastrous plain red carpet in my parents’ house which covered the floor of the hallway and the stairs. A wonderful choice of carpet if you live a light footed singular life, but not the sort of carpet which lends itself to everyday life if you have a family and, more importantly, a molting yellow Labrador who liked to sleep in the sun on the red carpet in the hallway!

Constant hoovering would have preserved its integrity, but as Shirley Conran remarked about stuffing mushrooms, life is just too short. For moments after hoovering the carpet looked superb and then the dog would meander out into the hallway and collapse and shiggle about leaving a yellow haired impression on the now grubby carpet. They eventually got rid of the plain red and bought a multi coloured modern carpet which showed nothing until you got a shovel and dropped the dirt on it in conspicuous piles!

Back to the sink. I had run out of bleach and so took whatever was to hand and splooshed it with reckless abandon in the optimistic hope that quantity would obviate the necessity for specific directed work.

It was what I used that caused me to think. The cleaning liquid (courtesy of ‘Flash’) was truly and startlingly fluorescent! It looked like liquid yellow light – and smelled of lemons. It was so distinctive that I actually stopped cleaning (not difficult for me) and watched as it dripped down the draining board and formed fiery rivulets of light slipping down the plug hole. How in the name of god does yellow fluorescence equate with cleanliness? My alternative cleansing liquid was gel with a wild orchid scent. I could have used wipes with orange zest. Who decides the flavours of clean? And why are we so conservative about the selection of what sprays from the nozzles of our cleaning bottles?

I think that Dettol should be produced with the scent of fine Rioja. After all, we are not so naïf that we actually think that anything natural has produced the scent in the cleansing material. And we constantly see the good and the great sniffing fine old wines, so it must be a positive fragrance. It’s all just a factory produced amalgam of chemicals which tickle our olfactory organs in exactly the right way, and our wonderful scientists can produce the scent of anything. So why not Chardonnay table polish – at least the factory version would never go off, it could preserve that ‘just opened’ fragrance to give personality to the home. Why not espresso scented window cleaner? Mown grass toilet paper? Supple hide toilet cleanser? Burnt wood car freshener? The possibilities are endless and so much more interesting than the present pedestrian alternatives.

I think that by their disinfectants may ye know them. The way that a society defines ‘clean’ probably says more about it than the arid impenetrability of economic statistics and descriptions of political institutions.

What percentage of dead germs is acceptable? If a liquid kills 99% of germs, what about the other 1%? If everything else dies then doesn’t that give an incentive for the other one percent to flourish and multiply and take over the world? Perhaps it would be safer to leave a few more percent of germs alive so that they can form antagonistic groups and keep their numbers down by natural selection. Who knows what harm we are doing by upsetting the natural ecosystems of germkind with our thoughtless decimation (times 9) of their delicate hierarchical organisations?

It is said that there are more germs on a kitchen table than on the top of your toilet. What does this mean?

I think it probably says more about the fanatical British abhorrence of bodily functions and our natural revulsion to bodily waste resulting in a demented determination to eradicate all sights and smells and microbes and anything else associated with defecation than with the dirtiness of the kitchen table. All things are, after all, relative.

We should never ignore the small scented secrets of a sweet smelling style of survival!

Listening . . .

Two heaped teaspoons of instant coffee together with four sugars make a distinctive drink and not one that I could easily imbibe. While I sipped my gentle cup of tea I listened with growing admiration to the reminiscences of the coffee drinker as he chatted about his life almost seventy years ago. He made the stories he was telling me seem as prosaic as the description of an outing by charabanc to Porthcawl during Miners’ Fortnight.

What he talked about in an unpretentious way took in his being parachuted into enemy territory; blowing up a military base; inadvertently putting the army, navy and air force on alert; being part of a small group or airmen who took over a thousand enemy prisoners; being taken prisoner himself; sleeping next to the second pillar on the right of the Parthenon when it was used as an Axis prison camp; walking miles through snow drifts shoeless in tropical kit; being in the same prison camp as the Great Escape; being smashed in the face by a German guard; breaking away from the German guards in the face of the Russian forces advance; not getting shot; being rescued by a British tank driver; borrowing fifty quid from the Vice Principal of the college he went to when he was a mature student, and . . . well, you get the basic idea. A conversation when what you do is listen because you are hearing oral history, your history; a history that helped ensure you (well, my, at least) birth and safeguard your heritage.

In a wide ranging conversation I was acutely aware that my contributions could only be those of a concerned and interested commentator; a participatory outsider looking in to history – first hand history!

It was an exhilarating conversation and one that I will remember with respect.

My respect has been working overtime today as I started my morning by taking my camera to Ceri’s to photograph the paintings that he is thinking of sending to the London gallery for the forthcoming exhibition. The photos will be inserted into the catalogue and they have to be digital so they can be emailed to the gallery for inclusion.

Ceris’s paintings are growing in confidence and he is using his landscape inspiration with greater freedom. Some of the tonal experiments he has completed are remarkable essays in colour and use the layered depth of colour that tempera can give to achieve an intensity that is astonishing. His draftmanship is assured and his charcoal studies are silkily alluring. I always find it difficult to visit his studio as I feel like taking most of what I see back with me! I would very much like to own his sketchbooks as the quick drawings with written notes always give me a sense of the immediacy and excitement that must come when you are applying obvious skill.

Seeing what is possible with pen, brush and charcoal stick at close hand is not something which pushes me to emulate; the difference between my embarrassing efforts and what a professional is able to achieve the gap is too depressing to contemplate.

This makes the watercolour that I have done even more surprising.

The witless way in which I applied the paint and the growing depression that I felt as I witnessed the general failure of artistic ability, intention and technique detracted from the sense of achievement that I expected to experience from the whole artistic enterprise. What is the surprising thing? Well, it’s not the wonderful revelation that, as it dried, it showed its real genius; but rather that when I took a photo of it, it didn’t look half bad! I reproduce it here so that you can share the wonder of the artistic effect of miniaturisation which has altogether compensated for my lack of skill! It almost encourages me to try another! Or is that another example of vaulting ambition which o’er leaps itself etc etc?

My resolution to deny myself the self indulgent frisson of peril my fixing my seat belt while in motion and steering past other cars has held for one day. I have started to move the car without being strapped in, but I have remembered my intention to turn to the paths of righteousness just before I hit the road: thank god for a small but memory jogging driveway!

My second resolution is to get back into swimming. This will mean making a rapprochement with the Eastern Leisure Centre from which I have turned in recent years, succumbing to the middle class lure of The David Lloyd Centre. Having rescinded my monthly payment to the David Lloyd I will now have to retrace my penitent steps to the local leisure centre and negotiate for a Job Seekers’ Allowance holder’s reduced price membership to encourage me to swim with the regularity which was once an essential part of my normal daily routine. I will have to do this step by step and set myself realistic objectives, so just getting the membership card will be sufficient!

The chlorinated water calls!

I am resolved!

It is now far enough through the year to be able to think about New Year Resolutions. One can assume that the common herd has made (and disregarded) the rules made at the woefully unfashionable period around the start of the year and it is now time for the more individualistic and fashionable to venture into the realms of Life Change.

I suppose that it would be more in keeping for a citizen of an ostensibly Christian country to utilize the festival of rebirth at Easter to affirm a new path in life. But I for one have never been fully convinced by the gnomic posturing that has accompanied the calculation of the date of Easter. I fear that much of our present confusion about the date for Easter may be traced to the deliberations of the Council at Nicaea. And we all know what that little committee led to. It really does put one in mind of the worst excesses of the French Revolution; but a French Revolution carried out by Sufis riding on the backs of Jains thinking Zoroastrian thoughts and mouthing tantric inanities. So Easter is out and Now is in.

Monday the 19th of February seems as good a time as any to resolve to resolve. Whatever that means.

In English essays which pretend to be of a factual nature, it should be a pen blocking procedure to start any essay with a opening like, “The Oxford English Dictionary defines “resolve” as . . . “ It is one of those clunking introductions that give you a very clear indication of what the rest of the essay is going to be like. And if the essay is written in light blue pen and you are marking it at night then you know that it is going to take the whole of your concentration to stop the words drifting into translucent nothingness beneath your sightless eyes. Or, alternatively you will feel the need to become a Super Hero Teacher wielding the red pen of truth and the literate way. But dictionaries have their uses.

I did wonder, in a casual sort of way, about the derivation of the word ‘resolution’ and lo and behold, it turns out to be a 14th century word derived directly or via French from the Latin resolvere to 'loosen up' and from solvere to 'loosen or dissolve'.

I do like the counter intuitive derivation which, ironically, seems to be the opposite of what the word has come to mean. However, I also like the idea that ‘resolve’ needs a dissolving of previously held concepts or perceptions; presumably to get back to a pristine state where the negative had been falsely added to a basic purity and the ‘resolution’ allows the superfluity to be excised and also allows a better life to proceed.

The idea of ‘loosening’ is also interesting which almost suggests that a ‘resolution’ is not an imposition, but rather an ordinary state which can be achieved by allowing the natural processes to take their true effect by a suppression of the more negative actions which bring the need for a resolution in the first place.

It follows, therefore, that resolutions should not be difficult because they should be actions which you want to complete anyway, elements that your essential personality should find naturally congenial.

All of this, of course, is pseudo intellectual justification and an attempt at bolstering my already fading resolution to effect changes in my behaviour – the hell with ‘dissolving’ and ‘loosening.’ What I find natural is the behaviour which calls forth the need for resolutions and any other interpretation is a wilful ignoring of self evident truth.

Years ago I made a conscious decision to be influenced in my everyday life by Jimmy Savile. Not everyone can say that, and indeed, not everyone would admit it! In 1971 Savile ‘starred’ in an advertising campaign to urge people to ‘clunk click every trip’ and ensure that they used their safety belts. I thought at the time that the campaign should have used a more ‘acceptable’ person that Jimmy Savile and I felt that the ‘face’ of the campaign should have been someone more ‘respectable.’ So, it was with a post modernist sense of fun that I decided that in spite of/because of Jimmy Savile being the personality I would be influenced by him and ensure that I wore my safety belt for each trip and I duly clunked and clicked.

And this brings me to my first resolution. As someone who clunked and clicked long before the wearing of seat belts was made compulsory I find that I now have to make a further logical adjustment to my precautionary driving skills.

If you live in urban area surrounded by numbers of commuters who all go to work at roughly the same time then you have to run the gauntlet of the equivalent of a motorised Scylla and Charybdis. As drivers leave the curb then, and only then do they decide to belt up, using both hands to secure themselves and leaving their cars to veer across the road at their own sweet will. A couple of male drivers attempting this complex multi tasking problem create a more perilous journey than ever Odysseus had to attempt.

I know that driving and putting on the belt simultaneously is stupid. I resolve not to do it any more.

And without the help of Jimmy!

Now say that I haven’t grown up!

Fragile!

What is the fascination with crockery?

For those of you who have no understanding of or suffer no visceral jolt of identification with crockery, I dismiss you as I would a rabid dog. You (and you know who you are) are lesser breed without the law, lewd fellows of a baser sort and contemptible beneath a Conservative.

I say this by way of justification for the falling away from the paths of parsimony into the slippery chutes of spendthrift indulgence.

I can trace the path of my own destruction and there is, as you will see, a terrible yet justifiable logic behind the inexorable slide to penury.

I am not one to slum it by drinking espresso from the wrong cups. I am also not one to pass by a reasonable buy to fill a perceived need. So, when a person like my good self finds himself in a designer outlet and sees cut price Royal Dolton espresso cup in a classic design reminiscent of early Josiah W in stylish white at a more than reasonable price: there is only one possible outcome. The fact that I ended up with more cups than saucers was merely a note to the power of serendipity to ensure that sooner or later the requisite saucers would ‘turn up’ at some point.

Needing two small saucers, of course, meant that there was ‘purpose’ in all future visits to the designer outlet – a mission, a rugged determination.

Today was no exception. Shops for Toni: shops for me. And one of them of course was the Royal Dolton shop. Here I was presented with my first challenge or temptation. My dinner service is in a now discontinued pattern by Wedgwood called ‘Aztec’. A year ago I had given myself over to an orgy of ‘sensible’ buying when the prices of the Aztec service fell to prices when it is a certifiable crime to pass by bargains of this almost insulting nature. It didn’t have all the sensible pieces that I wanted, but what was there I purchased, assuring myself that, if necessary, I would devise new and strange forms in the presentation of food which would necessitate the use of the odd dishes that I had bought.

This time there were mugs. I had been waiting for mugs to appear at a reasonable price for months and had officially given up hope because the last sale had been of the end of the range. Now, as if by magic, mugs! It transpired that another store had shut down and the stock had been transferred to the one outside Bridgend and was now displayed for me delectation.

I am not entirely convinced that I do not have a selection of mugs in storage, but at half price, surely too good a bargain to ignore? But I resisted and drifted (feeling like a traitor to my mother’s shopping memory) towards the back of the shop and there was a single cup and saucer of the espresso type I was looking for. And the saucer was only £1! Half way there! Another one and I could get away only spending £2! A positive record! But this is where things began to go wrong. ~there were no further saucers at cut price, only at full (half) price (if you see what I mean, this was a designer outlet after all.)

At this point the shop assistants leapt into action: the discussed, planned, searched and gossiped and finally produced not only another saucer at £1, but also a multitude of cups at 50p! They also took 20% off the saucers. It would have been churlish not to have bought an extra half dozen cups and saucers and then in the general euphoria of buying I was moved to buy six mugs as well.

The paths to destruction are paved with porcelain.

Growing beauty

There is something immensely sad about buying your own flowers. I don’t mean the sort that you plant out in the garden, I mean the cut sort that grace various tasteful vases (how do you YOU pronounce that word?) around your home.

A man who admits to liking cut flowers and their arrangement is risking his public sexual persona because a man enthusing about a well selected bouquet of flowers is a Huysmanesque stance, a number of steps down towards the green carnation world of the man given wholly to sensual pleasure, and therefore, of course, not a real man.

Though it is worth noting that most of the truly great horticulturalists were men, and on television the garden makeover programmes are almost always led by men (with the signal exception of that strapping refugee from water features. Ms Dimmock) and the great illustrators of flowers were men and, so on.

You’ll notice the complete lack of illustrative detail of male nomenclature to give substance to my statements and the only real person I mentioned by name was female!

The rose as a symbol is positively Jungian: our responses hard wired into the very people or species that we are. You can trace the use of the rose through music, paining, illustration, tapestry, poetry, prose, photography, horticulture and wallpaper through hundreds of years, or more like a millennium, it is omnipresent part of the fabric of our lives. So why do men get uneasy if they are given a bunch. Is the rose so associated with the female that a bunch of the flowers is an embarrassment of riches an open invitation to deny the moral myth of monogamy on which our society is built?

I salute our Eastern European brothers who have been flaunting their use of flowers as an essential male accessory for ever. Who can forget (well, not me for one, I’ve only seen the newsreel footage) the first visit of the Moscow Dynamos to Great Britain for their series of football matches in the last century just after World War Two where part of the opening formalities consisted in the Russian players presenting their opposite number with beribboned bouquets before the start of the match? Or the cringing embarrassment of the British players as they took their unexpected gifts. But were our Eastern Brothers dissuaded from this un-masculine practice? No, they went on doing it, handing out pretty and strikingly arranged posies to weightlifters and hammer throwers and shot putters through all the various forms of athletic competitions that they staged.

They have now, to all intents and purposes, won. All competitions seem to be bonanzas for local florists as first, second and third placed competitors are all presented with their obligatory bunch of flowers which they can use to wave at adoring fans so much easier for them than yanking up their medals and almost garrotting themselves with the ribbon.

Competitors in major competitions now expect their floral tributes and all possible sexes accept them with grace and uneventful looks, a far cry from the expressions of earlier male athletes who always looked as they grasped their flowers in a studiedly casual way, as if they had just been presented with a dead duck billed platypus.

So, if it’s ok for muscle rippling male athletes to disport themselves with garlands gay, why has it not translated itself into a different attitudes displayed by ordinary male folk? Because it hasn’t. If you watched men buying flowers in advance of Saint Valentine’s Day it was painful beyond belief. What most men wanted to do was grab the first bunch of conventionally ‘Romantic’ looking flowers they could find. There was no debate, no mixing and matching, no holding the flowers at arm’s length to judge the overall effect. It was look, grab, go. Pure and simple.

Of course Tesco, where I do most of sociological research, does not encourage invention on the part of flower buyers. The bunches are ready-made for ease of sale. The most that you can do is buy a selection of bunches and then make up your own display, but the one or two more expensive blooms become ruinously so when you have to buy more than you need to create the tasteful melange you are striving to achieve. This is one more occasion when the economies of scale and the stripping away of assistants with an interest in selling more than the ready made units of consumer consumption that supermarkets supply works against the inventiveness of the individual punter.

It is only in the area of vegetables (and not always a full selection of those) that the purchaser is in some sort of control. With vegetables you can (should you so choose) buy a single potato, carrot, swede, parsnip, brussel sprout, green bean.

There’s a thought: Arcimboldo shows what you can do with an over active imagination and a supply of vegetation. We could tone down the wild extravagances of Arcimboldo and using a quiet methodology and flamboyant spatial awareness produce a vegetative display that would delight any man (or woman.)

Vegetables are beautiful too!

Picture that!

Everyone, it is said, can draw. Everyone, similarly, can sing and dance and cook. Truisms like this are, ipso facto, true, but are of no comfort when you are drawing, singing, dancing and cooking. Especially if you are attempting all these activities at the same time. And you can’t really ‘do’ any one of them.

Every so often I get a spasm of creativity when I feel that I have to make something. Now I like words and I am totally surrounded by a partner who constantly urges me to write something in the deluded belief that it will bring fame, riches and a villa in Sitges. I have kept him at bay so far by assuring him that my daily writing of a blog is a form of limbering up for the putsch towards the Magnum Opus which will achieve world wide sales on a par with J K Rowling. At least.

But sometimes words are not enough. I yearn towards the visual arts. And, let’s face it, I could cite an impressive list of art galleries through which I have traipsed, being the "ardent snob" “emoting furiously” (Herbert Read ‘The Meaning of Art’?) in front of some of the most iconic paintings in the entire world of white European dead male painters, mostly. I’ve looked at drawings, watercolours, oils, acrylics, gouaches, pastels, prints, etchings, woodcuts, constructions, collages, found objects, Schwitter’s Merz, Pollock’s drips, Rothko’s blocks, Andre’s bricks, Riley’s lines and I know I can’t do it.

I’m well aware that I started by saying the exact opposite of what I’ve just said (some might say that’s a characteristic of my normal conversation) but it does still have meaning. ‘Everyone can draw’ is a statement without distinctions; if it applies to everyone - it applies to no one; it is, in effect, meaningless. When someone talks about drawing, they usually have a fairly clear idea of what sort of final result they expect to achieve. I am well aware that art is a constant disappointment between expectation and realisation, between what you want to put down and what actually appears. But surely there must be an understanding that some end results are so far from being what the intendee wanted that it can, with some degree of justice, be outlined as a situation where the ‘artist’ could be fairly described as not being able to draw. And that’s me. Not being able to draw.

The clinching argument, of ccourse if found in the drawing themselves: take the caligraphic scribble of Picasso's head of Shakespeare or the effortless drawing of the lion by Rembrandt. How do they do it?

This is the perfect opportunity to find a course to do something about it. I have constantly heard that drawing can be taught. People in eighteenth century novels and early nineteenth century novels are often described as sketching or drawing or producing watercolours and they always have ‘drawing masters’. Methinks I should get one. I hope that there are still some left after city council cuts to further education and continuing education!

I have spent vast amounts (£4) on buying coloured and other pencils together with a sketch book. If I produce anything which is worth looking at (or if when photographed looks half way decent; and believe you me photography can compensate for lack of ability!)

Talking of lack of ability, I recently watched the American remake of ‘The Wicker Man’. The overwhelming question at the end of the film was, “Why have they bothered?” There are so many ways in which the remake either misses opportunities or changes elements to no effect. Nicholas Cage wanders his affectedly bemused way through this farrago of half baked directorial ‘ideas’ to make it different from the 1973 British original. It results in a total ludicrous failure, but has left me with a desire to view the original again.

The second film that we hired was ‘Click’ with Adam Sandler as a harassed architect with a magic device (a remote) which can stop, pause and fast forward time with surprisingly funny and yet poignant results. Apart from the use of a modern electronic device the motivation of the film was, to say the least, old fashioned. ‘Click’ is a distillation of all those sloppily sentimental American films which nauseate with their manic affirmation of white middle class family values. Intermittently funny and wholly familiar from scores of identikit films.

Far more stylish and satisfying was the fortuitous glimpse of the second half of a Robert Taylor and Lana Turner film noir called Johnny Eager (1942) directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The outstanding personality in the film was Van Heflin with his presentation of the drunken, articulate and sardonic buddy to the villain. Yes this film was stilted and wooden to modern eyes, but the quality of the acting had a harmony and completeness which was deeply satisfying. Compared with the two previous films, ‘Johnny Eager’ was head and shoulders better than both of them. Together!

At least my failed drawings will have integrity that ‘Click’ and ‘The Wicker Man’ both lack!

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Anyone for books?

People (those mythical “people” you always hear about, who know everything about your life, but who you never meet) say that you rarely really feel older than about sixteen inside yourself, whatever your exterior might say about you. You get older and older with more and more responsibility and wrinkles yet the interior person remains a callow teenager.

This can be quite comforting, depending on how arrogant a person you are. Think of the logic of the situation: you know that inside yourself you are a sixteen year old; other people tell you differently; they cannot see the essential youthfulness of your soul and anyway, what the hell do they know? You can kid yourself along like this for a quite substantial period of time unless you come up against one of the TTMs that define your age. TTM are True Time Moments; those time specific incidents which clearly indicate your real age, and place your firmly in your own era.

For example, going to a supermarket and buying just a single apple. Nothing extraordinary in that, (though I could ask when was the last time that you went to a supermarket and bought a single piece of fruit, but let it pass, let it pass) but the TTM comes when you realise just how much you have paid for it (the singular piece of fruit) and then you translate the amount that you’ve paid in pounds and pence in to £sd. And you suddenly have a dark night of the soul when you realise the present day value of money!

Everyone has a different TTM: for some people it occurs when they visit the homes of younger friends with children and they see how the present generation is being brought up; for others it’s the pocket money their progeny demand; others go to church and find that they cannot sing a single hymn because the ‘traditional’ tunes have been abandoned; others when they attempt to operate a video or DVD recorder and others when they realise that anyone can go to Florida and eat avocados now, not just millionaires. These are all TTM moments, and we should cherish them because they define who we are, or at least they keep trying to tell us who we are and where (in temporal terms) we belong!

I had a True Time Moment in Rumney Library.

I was doing something quite innocuous: renewing my library books. I called into the library with the books before I picked up Toni from work. I brought them into the library and was greeted with gentle pity by the librarian who explained that I didn’t really need to bring the books in to renew them; I could just call in or phone; anything, in fact to make it easier for me. And that is the TTM for me.

I grew up in Cathays with my local library (opposite my primary school) built with money from Dale Carnegie. The library was built as a fairly imposing building, symmetrical and church-like with high windows, dressed stone with solid brick. It was a temple to books and the sacred extended to the self imposed silence which graced the interior. The ceilings were more akin to ecclesiastical roofs than those in public utilities and there was even a decorative spire (as I recall.) So my attitude towards books was formed by constant attendance at the Church of the Holy Text or Cathays Public Library. To me the librarians seemed to be custodians of the books more akin to priests than paid public servants. Books were there to be enjoyed but with the right attitude of respect and humility.

So, brought up with these attitudes to the supply of books, the attitude of the librarian in Rumney was something incongruous: today the customer is the person to be considered and present day life style is the determinant for the way that the library works; the supplicatory attitude of my youth towards the library supply of books is finally a thing of the past, hence my TTM – because it just doesn’t seem right.

But I can learn to live with it

How kind of you to tell me!

“For some reason it hit some kind of nerve.” This was Robert de Niro talking about one of his early iconic films. And it came to mind when travelling in the car to dear old Tesco’s for some tomatoes and other requisites for the perfect salad for dinner.

I have learned to curb my responses to the criminal selfishness that characterises the parking and driving characteristics of a significant minority of customers in supermarket car parks. I can now witness cars parked on double yellow lines, on hatched spaces, on motorcycle spaces, in disabled spaces, blocking entrances, across two spaces, non indicating, speeding, and ignoring other road users, motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, etc. with some degree of equanimity. I have become, you see, a much more balanced person since the daily grind came to an end.

But, isn’t there always a ‘but’? But there are still some very little things which manage to penetrate underneath the excluding defences of my toleration.

The clue is in the driving: no, not the use of mobile phones when driving; non indication; speeding; cutting people up; wearing baseball hats in the car; not wearing seat belts; smoking when driving; drivers whose heads are lower than the top of the steering wheel; lane switching; incorrect indication at roundabouts – none of these are the true irritant.

I have never liked signs on the back window of cars as I have taken the somewhat naïf view that in vehicles windows are quite useful for seeing out of, given the fact that drivers are surrounded by homicidal maniacs in fast moving metallic killing machines called cars. So, anything which obstructs the view is, as it were, counter productive and stupid.

There was also the one-upmanship of telling the world that you had “seen the lions at Longleat” before anyone else. Then the little triangular signs expanded to include foreign locations so the one-upmanship was taken to a higher level and some rear windows looked more like badly completed jigsaw puzzles than an essential viewing opportunity to preserve life and limb on the ever perilous roads of our fair country.

At the other end of the car the fluffy dice syndrome handing from the rear view mirror has the same degree of opprobrium for me.

So the large yellow (why yellow?) signs in the rear window which proclaim to all and sundry that the driver has active and potent sperm is something which does not command my immediate regard. Presumably the sign is there to inform, “Baby on Board”; but inform who, what? How is the driver’s behaviour supposed to change because of the information that there might be a child on board the car in front? Does it mean that the normal suicidal way in which a person usually drives will automatically reform itself because of the glimpse of a yellow sign? You think to yourself, “Usually I would drive straight into the car in front, but, as I see by the yellow sign that there might be a baby in the car I will be characteristically restrained and not try to destroy the car by forcefully smashing into it!”

This attitude is difficult to sustain when the little yellow sign reads, “Princess on Board.” I then have an almost overwhelming desire to stop my car and phone some sort of Child Protection Agency and have any defenceless infant which might be in the car taken into care away from such wilfully deluded parents who can so shamelessly and publically flaunt a sign with such an absurd message.

The signs which read, “Naughty Person on Board” are more interesting and point the way to more specific designations. Why stop there? Why not be more accurate: “Depressed misfit looking for Death” or “Last Night Drunk Dreading Work” or “Shopper with Attitude” or “I Make Yellow Signs” or something.

My favourite though would have to be the little yellow sign which said, “Baby on Board. Thanks for your patience.” I was amazed at the complexity of implied interaction with the driver following that the second part of the sign indicated. Was it some sort of Cathar-like apology for procreation? An ironic twist by a disciple of Jean Paul Sartre? Existentialism with a sense of humour? A sincere apology for the havoc that the future behaviour of the spoilt brat in the car was going to demand from an unsuspecting world? Who knows? Too complex for me.

I think I will have a sunny sign in my car which says, “I don’t like little yellow signs.”

I think that has a nice post modernist twist.

Where do you come from?

My family: both sets of grandparents; lived in the valleys. My parents got to know each other in Maesteg Grammar School. Although I had no personal experience of living for an extended period in the South Wales Valleys the majority of my immediate family had significant chunks of their lives in an environment which is essentially foreign to me.

The time that I spent in my maternal grandparents’ house in Vicarage Terrace in Maesteg was hardly the normal valley experience. Maesteg is not the conventional narrow sided valley; the main street is quite broad and, in my memory, bustling and affluent. Vicarage Terrace allowed extensive views from the window to the other side of the wide valley; the garden of my grandparents’ house stretched back (seemingly for ever to my juvenile eyes) into a field with a small stream bubbling over carefully constructed mini waterfalls, through a gate onto the side of the mountain, down which I had bumped my way on an improvised sleigh wearing a wildly unfashionable bobble hat at an age when I didn’t care.

My experience of the ‘real’ valleys was when we did a grand tour of the relatives and, as a child of some six or seven years old I was paraded, presented and kissed by a variety of kind, old, frightening (and hairy) men and women who all (invariably) told me that the last time they saw me I was only that high and now, just look at me. All of them, without fail, the same words. Cups of tea and hard biscuits. And on to the next.
It was during one of these epic tours of the valleys and the relatives that my father stopped the car on a mountain road, took me out of the car and indicated the small village at the bottom of the valley and said to me, “That is where I grew up!” He said it with pride and a sort of gentle affection. And then he looked at me. And I was staring with open mouthed horror at the idea of growing up in a place which so obviously lacked all the necessary requisites of a city. I may have been young, but I knew that green mountain sides and acres of open space could not compensate for the trolley bus that took me from the end of Dogfield Street in Cathays to the Empire Pool. I knew that the only safe open space was Roath Park, not the side of a mountain. I expected streets of shops not corner shops. And I knew that I liked the anonymity of a big city to the comfortable fraternity and community of a small town. It just wasn’t for me to the same extent as it just was for my dad and his siblings.

All of these thoughts came to the forefront of my mind when watching a BBC 2W film on the Rhondda Valley. I joke that for me Caerphilly is North Wales, but the number of times that I venture north of that town in Wales is somewhat limited. Uncle Eric is the only person I have visited in Maesteg over the last year or so. All my other relatives who lived in the valleys are mostly dead, or at least those great aunts and two-generations-ago-folk that used to populate the valleys for me.

It’s ridiculous to generalise from me to the city, but I do think that we Cardiffians have a problem with the valleys: they are so close and yet so far. My version of the Valleys is built on what my parents, their generation and my grandparents were and are: the economy built on coal and the primacy of education as the way out. The quality in depth in the valleys of educated people with socialist principles and the rest of the myth!

When I used to go to the valleys regularly there were still coal mines working. I did not experience the soul of the valleys being ripped out and a new entrepreneurial system being put in place.

The BBC programme used a photographer and art teacher to point to the colour and new spirit in the valleys and question the black and white picture of deprivation which, as Patrick Hannan has pointed out, often populates the holiday park of the past which is such a popular resort in Wales!

It’s a challenge.

The little things of life

Some things stay in the mind because they seem like something which should be found lurking in a novel as a particularly telling apercu where the reader will say to himself, “My God, yes, that’s it!”

A past colleague of mine seemed to attract unfortunate events as if fragments of misery were magnetically drawn to his steely negativity. Incident would pile up on incident in a ridiculously unrealistic rickety tower of misfortune wobbling perilously on foundations of risible unhappiness. His weary sadness (invariably wreathed in pungent cigarette smoke) should have attracted a vast quantity of heartfelt sympathy from his acquaintances and especially his friends but compassion fatigue had become the default response and sometimes it was hard to suppress a smile. This was not out of callous disregard for his situation, but rather because it was all too easy to look on his life as one out of a rather overwritten sensationalist short story.

One time when, as usual, his personal life; family life; professional life and simple casual living all seemed to be in the usual state of chaos, he came back to my flat for a drink and a chat. It was one of those times when the function of a friend is really just to sit there, refill the glass and listen. He was by no means stupid, so most of the ‘solutions’ to his impossible situations would have occurred to him, my function was to give him the opportunity to speak. And speak he did. His misery was palpable and of that sort of overwhelming negativity that would have made virtually any positive remark on my part crass and inappropriate.

After listing his current series of miseries he said that he almost felt submerged by their quantity and complexity and the lowest point in his response had been a day previously when he, like many before him, had taken refuge in the one place where a sense of quiet fortitude can be achieved: the loo. He being him, his evacuation was accompanied by a meditative and consoling ciggie and he felt better at the end of his time on the seat. And then he pulled the chain.

“I flushed,” he said, “and one turd didn’t go. So I waited until the cistern was full and flushed again and still it didn’t go. And I almost started crying. Because it was the last straw.”

As an example of the pathetic fallacy it’s almost perfect; distasteful, but perfect. It’s that final embarrassing detail which is simply not acceptable, because it forces itself on your attention as a perfect metaphor for your life. Well, his life at that time anyway. The image has always stayed with me because of the perfect exasperation that my colleague used when describing this low point. I’m still waiting for the moment in my first novel at which this image will be the mot (or phrase) juste!

I was reminded about this little moment of everyday life when I was looking for something to have for lunch. As we have not been to our local market for organic fresh produce, I was forced to delve into the recesses of the freezer in the hope that I had salted away some interesting morsel that I had forgotten about.

The freezer in the kitchen has little mystery, but what is lurking in the freezer in the porch, God alone knows. So it was with trepidation, yet anticipation that I decided to navigate the lower depths of this frozen cornucopia. The second freezer is tastefully hidden away behind a wooden door which is rarely opened. When it was opened today I discovered that the freezer door had been left slightly ajar and the machine had tried to freeze the surrounding atmosphere, with the result that extruded wedges of ice poked out from the sides of the door. Chunks of ice had filled up the spaces in the baskets and I idly wondered just how much electricity had been wasted on the Sisyphean attempt of this brave little piece of electrical equipment to solidify the interior of the porch!

This, like floating excrement, is the stuff of ‘the final straw’. From past experience I know how superfluous ice can have the same consistency as high tensile steel when you try and cut through it and its tenacity when sticking to the metal surfaces of a freezer makes superglue look like Pritt (a particular teacher-like simile there!) I have wasted many hours sitting patiently outside a freezer compartment with a bowl of hot water and eventually succumbing to frustration and attacking the ice with a knife.

Unlike my ex-colleague, things did work out and the extraneous ice broke off with alacrity, almost as if I was clearing the frozen stuff by tearing along the perforated lines of weakness; ice fell away almost in response to intention rather than full frontal attack. As disasters go this one was cleared up in double quick time.

The turd, as it were, flushed first go!

Now for the rest of life to follow.

Please.

Flowers of ice

Is there a word for finding out that what you have been lying about is actually true? I know I can always use my favourite word that has seen me through my entire teaching career, ‘irony’.

Looking at that last sentence I can see that the ‘irony’ I mentioned can have a far greater significance than I originally intended. I did not intend that it should suggest that the whole of my professional life has been subterfuge and deceit, though of course one of Waugh’s most telling phrases was in ‘Decline and Fall’ when wrote that teachers must ‘always temper discretion with deceit’ – mind you, his insulting description of the Welsh does not endear him to us: 'The Welsh,’ said the Doctor,' are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,’ he said with disgust, 'sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.' I might add that, when trying to find the exact quotation for the second extract from ‘Decline and Fall’ I was directed to a web site which has many more insulting quotations about the Welsh than positive ones; check it out on http://bdaugherty.tripod.com/wales.html and you’ll see what I mean.
The irony that I am talking about (if there isn’t a more appropriate word for it) applies to the climatic conditions that obtain in Wales at the moment. I have been living on the tarnished memory that on a visit to Barcelona at winter time there was a mound of snow; I constructed a snowball and threw it at Toni. I lived on the memory of that moment because snow seemed to be in short supply in Wales and I was able to say (with monotonous regularity) that, “the last time that I threw a snowball was in Barcelona” much to the fury of Toni who vaunts the climate of Catalonia above all others.

The arrival of undeniable amounts of snow was a problem which I solved by informing Toni that the patches of whiteness that he observed were due to the sudden blooming of snowbells; a shy flower of surpassing virgin whiteness whose delicacy is such that any handling of the plant would guarantee that the flower would deliquesce into mere water, almost as if one were handling ice crystals. The white flakes that we saw swirling through the air were the petals of that delicate flower caught up by the wind. Toni was, I assured him, very fortunate to see such a substantial blooming of this rare growth and, as it was protected under the Wild Flower Act he was forbidden by law to pick, trample or otherwise disturb it.

I cannot, in all conscience, say that Toni was necessarily convinced by my enthusiastic description of this native flower. So, for added verisimilitude I decided to look up ‘snowbell’ on the internet and, lo and behold! the ‘snowbell’ exists and flourishes; in Texas apparently.

It’s good to see that invention is closely followed by reality! I’ve even found a picture to accompany my apparent fabrication.

I have obviously taken the wrong approach, not only to this blog, but also to my life.

You are encouraged to write about what you know and what you have experienced whereas, the ‘snowbells’ incident obviously indicates that this approach is quite wrong. What you ought to do is write about what you want and then wait for reality to catch up with you.

Talking of reality, I can feel my grasp on that precious commodity slipping away though the malign influence of television.

I think that most intelligent people have a hate/hate/love relationship with the idiot box: two thirds of the time you hate the bloody thing, but one third of the time it is worth every penny of the license fee, whatever channel you happen to be watching!

Toni is sublimating his desire to decamp to warmer climes by watching every programme of ‘A Home in the Sun’ type: France, Italy, Spain, Greece – anywhere southwest of the channel and he’s watching as though he’s going to get the property at the end of the show as a prize for his devoted attention!

To me these programmes are merely sunny salt rubbing into the festering wound of rain soaked envy as I watch yet another couple try and spend the mere £350,000 that is their trifling budget for their holiday home. I am beginning to loathe the chirpy presenters who urge me every time I see the programme to join them again as they search for that perfect holiday home in the sun. I can feel hatred seep out of every pore as I watch perfect place after perfect place being paraded for my delectation and destruction of my peace of mind.

The worst aspect of the programmes is when a villa is photographed with four bedrooms; wonderful kitchen; infinity pool; double garage; commodious space under the house suitable for a library; amazing garden and within spitting distance of the sea and a private beach, all, we are told for £127,000. “That,” you think to yourself, “is not bad. Not bad at all. It is cheaper living there, and look how much more house you get for your money. It’s worth waiting a little bit, because I’ll be able to exchange my present life style for a way of life that I thought was only possible in my dreams!”

The programme ends, and it is only then that you see that the date on the end credits which indicates when the programme was made puts it firmly in the eighties. “Perhaps,” you think with quiet desperation, “inflation in the Costa Brava has been very much less than in the Costa Cardiff.” But the sad ache of native, instinctive intelligence is telling your unresponsive brain that, as more than half of your fellow countrymen are trying to escape the drip, drip, drip of our damp atmosphere by fleeing to the Iberian Peninsular, that inflation may possibly be a tad higher than at home and that a semi in Rumney is probably not directly translatable to a detached villa set in its own bougainvillea filled grounds next to the Mediterranean. But who, I ask you, ever listens to ‘the sad ache of native, instinctive intelligence’?

Certainly no one that I know.

Whatever they pretend to other people.

I am typing this in the conservatory to the harsh percussive sound of fat raindrops hurling themselves onto the polycarbonate roof, reminding me, if reminder were even partially necessary that, “We’re not in Castelldefels anymore, Tonto.”

And how well that last word translates from Spanish.

Sigh!

Science fails again!

Friday is the worst day to have snow. For a teacher. Why? Because the best you can do is one day off and then there is the weekend for this fickle climate of ours to do its thing and probably get rid of all the white stuff by Monday, so that lessons can be resumed as normal. I suppose that given the totally unexpected weather today, giving teachers a bonus day, they shouldn’t complain!

After my strictures yesterday, there was a sort of ironic justness to the sudden whitening of the City of Cardiff. After the protestations of the weather men that the city was over and done with this wintry interlude, there was a sort of poetic justice in the morning bringing further heavy snow showers. As someone remarked to me, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about, they did, after all, give a ‘Severe Weather Warning’ at 4.30 in the morning.” So all those fools who went in to work in schools and then found that they were sent home again had only themselves to blame that they didn’t tune in to the radio in the wee hours to find out that the weather men were wrong again.

And, as the ‘disgraced’ weatherman from BBC Wales plaintively bleated, “It’s the fault of the French!” It turns out that a ridge of high or low or, as the railway companies always say, the ‘wrong type’ of pressure drifted further north from the mainland of France and deposited its ‘wrong type’ of air on our good Welsh air and produced entirely unforeseen snow. How extraordinary; and in February too!

It’s easy to take a distanced, magisterial stance to the weather when it doesn’t really impinge on your daily life. My only concern was to get Toni to work on time, and the manic desperation that I always displayed in getting myself to work on time does not transfer to others and their places of employment. I’m sure that it is that distance which ensures that my blood pressure remains at a level where the doctor says, “I can live with that,” whenever he takes my reading. I’ve often pondered on his use of the personal pronoun in his statement, but always translated it into the first person plural and rather liked his association of his own well being with my health: a very good stance for a doctor I think!

On a more serious note the ironing situation is now rapidly approaching the critical. It is a well known fact that I do not iron. Because of various traumatic experiences including the time when I ironed a pair of trousers and it ended up with more creases than a pleated skirt, I scorn the use of the hissing monster of heated metal as I would the use of a Ford car. I have never understood how it is physically possible to iron a shirt, given the vicious turns and twists in the material to produce the finished garment.

Why is it not possible to manufacture garments which utilize the principle of the Möbius strip so that one continuous ironing plane, so to speak, results in the whole garment being suitably smoothed? I leave the practicalities to clothing manufacturers, but I understand that the idea is quite simple and you do not have to indulge in the belief in further dimensions than the ones readily to hand to produce results. For goodness sake, the ingenuity of man can invent the paperclip which is clever, simple and understandable and useful, so roll on Single Plane Ironing. I await with some impatience, as the gathering mounds of ironing are getting difficult and embarrassing to explain away.

Another thing awaiting explanation is the phantom house agent telephone call: no word from Peter Allan, I think, as my Aunt Bet might say, a letter is called for!

Dickens and ‘Barnaby Rudge’ are fading into the background. The saga of my contact lenses and the different prescriptions continues. I am now sticking with a prescription which gives me less distance and a little more close up, which means that virtually everything is slightly out of focus, but I’ve always been good at guessing given a vague outline!

The ‘off the peg’ glasses that I have to read are only really effective with the previous prescription and their use with the present selection of plastic on the eye means that reading is something of a labour of love.

The frameless micro lenses that I am wearing at the moment perch on my nose and allow me to peer over the top at distant objects. Unfortunately as they are slightly ‘out’ in their corrective strength it means that the rims of the lens and the arms and the point at which the arms attach to the lens are all clearly visible as irritating blurs on the periphery of my vision and vie for attention with the printed word. I know that my brain is supposed to filter out the minor irritations of blurred dead spots, but it doesn’t, and it never has. I can see that I am going to be suckered into the usual opticians’ trap of having to pay for vastly expensive prescription lenses for a pair of reading glasses, which I will be constantly searching for so that I can read.

If you have perfect sight then give thanks constantly that you don’t have to tolerate a whole life of irritation that constantly catches you out when you least expect it to. Just think about what happens to your sun glasses during the few brief weeks that we in Wales enjoy when there is some justification in the wearing of them: they get lost, sat on, scratched, stolen, broken, dirty etc. Imagine what it must be like to have the same frustrations all the year round. And don’t get me started on contact lenses!

The only positive thing that I can foresee in the near future is the excitement of bargaining with the optician concerning the worth of all the contact lenses that I have not used for the past year and which I have returned for some sort of monetary consideration from the optician. I am sure that all the money that I could gain will be hoovered by the opticians as they offer me a cut price pair of glasses which actually turns out to be hundred of pounds in good folding stuff. Ask anyone who has ever had a pair of glasses made and, by the time that you have said that you don’t want to look like the scientist in The Simpsons, you find that the cost of the processes which are used to make your prescription look less like two milk bottle bottoms held together with coat hangar wire and more like an ordinary pair of spectacles will empty your bank account. I think it is a technique which is taught to opticians during their first, second and third years of training, for most of the time of their training. Or am I just being bitter?

It’s obviously time for my sweet, sweet cough mixture which I am now drinking from the bottle.

Was there ever such dissipation?

Invisible buyers in the snow!

If there are any Canadians staying in Wales this week they must be stunned by the effect of snow on the daily life of the country. Five to ten centimetres of snow made front page news; top of the programme items on the radio and television; talking points on the street: it was the weather after all, part of our national obsession. And it’s pretty. Especially if you don’t have to got to work and have the leisure to look around at the cosmetic effect of a blanket of white over the imperfections of an urban landscape.

There was disruption, but not the usual total cessation of transportation which is the normal result of any deposit of the white stuff on the road system of Britain. And this is where the astonishment of Canadians must have kicked in; not so much about the difficult driving conditions which were constantly emphasised by the broadcasters, but rather the tone of self congratulation that the country was not completely destroyed by a light dusting of snow. Didn’t we do well? Only half the schools in Wales were closed! Gosh!

God alone knows what would have to happen for Canadian school to close; presumably massed hordes of rabid huskies armed with tactical nuclear weapons and helicopters spraying hydrofluoric acid might delay some pupils from reaching their scholastic destination, but they usually take what we regard as cataclysmic disasters in their comfortable stride. What we in Wales experienced today would, I’m sure, not even register on their news radar.

There is now eager expectation that we will be able to rise above the problems associated with the unprecedented phenomenon of temperatures getting lower during the night in winter time when things might even freeze. We’re ready and waiting to show that we can manage by not driving recklessly over ice; but this is a radical response and we are not yet fully comfortable with these strange and outré coping procedures.

The saga of selling the house took a new and odd turn today. There was another viewing of a lady from Marshfield who is thinking of buying a property with a view to renting it out. The viewing was set for eleven in the morning, so the usual procedures were instituted. The cleaning and tidying and sorting and putting away and, and too many things to enumerate.

And nothing happened.

Not just nothing happened, but nothing was due to happen. Let me explain. The house was prepared for a guided viewing at eleven thirty today and I duly vacated the house so that the agent could take the prospective view around. The cunning device of leaving on the light in the downstairs loo was utilised; by its being turned off when I return it indicates that the viewing has taken place. The light was still on when I returned!

When I phoned the agent they denied all knowledge of the viewing, any viewing; nothing in the diary; nothing that anyone knew about anything to do with a viewing of my house. The circumstantial detail that I was able to give seemed to prompt no knowledge. Who phoned? Who was the mystery buyer? This is something which will have to be taken further.

I have to know

America 'Tis Of Thee!

How much do we hate the Americans?

This is not as simple as you might think. The question was posed on a Radio 4 programme today where an American professor was responding to Professor Taylor about his book which detailed the negative European response to American values and culture.

A French commentator was dismissing the thesis of the American professor and pointing out the very real links that exist between, for example, the French and the Americans. Listening to her was odd because, God knows, if there is one nation that we do hate it’s the French! The entente cordiale is desperately recent in terms of European history for the British and you only need to scratch the surface to find the usual British response nearer to healthy hatred as far as the French are concerned. In the opera ‘Billy Budd’ by Benjamin Britten there is a wonderful duet of English naval officers singing a paean of detestation of the French:

SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
Don't like their Frenchified ways.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like the French.
Their notions don't suit us, not their ideas.
SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
Don't like their bowing and scraping.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like their hoppity-skipetty ways.
SAILING MASTER
Don't like the French.
FIRST LIEUTENANT
Don't like their lingo.
SAILING MASTER,
FIRST LIEUTENANT
These damned mounseers!
FIRST LIEUTENANT
England for me. Home and beauty!

This is what we know about, good, old fashioned anti-Gallic prejudice, when the two sides, England and France, were a little more equally matched.

There is no such match with Britain and the United States of America: the ‘special relationship’ is a sick joke which we continue to delude ourselves about. We are not even a junior partner in this relationship; we are just another European nation in that laughable organization which never actually flexes its muscle or uses its real strength and continues to allow the United States to be the only convincing Super State in the world.

We continue to believe that, as the United States speaks our language they must be like us and have sympathy for us and our ideas. This is deluded. Churchill once commented that we are two nations separated by a common language. I think that is perceptive: it is the elements which would seem to unite us that actually show our divisions. From their customs and Christianity to their politics and political institutions they are different, and disturbingly so. The simple idea of a local sheriff being a political appointee is anathema to us. The overt veneration of The Flag and the pledge of allegiance seem absurd. The size of the country is beyond our imaginations.

The French commentator observed that the relationship between France and America was strong because of the number of American influences in the country: McDonalds, Hollywood, pop singers etc. The American commentator pointed out that a country can adopt many aspects of a foreign culture without being sympathetic to its values. He cited foreign demonstrations where American flags are burned by people wearing NYC baseball hats and America T shirts. I find that concept convincing and with a French commentator speaking I was reminded of the attitude of the French towards film.

In ‘Les Cahiers du Cinema’ the French took an essentially American development and industry and gave is an essentially French interpretation: the study of film as a valid artistic and intellectual exercise is basically a French invention. So the French could talk about, for example, Buster Keaton, and in their idolization of his ‘genius’ and talking of him as a great artist almost claim him for their own, as their own special creation, talking about this comic actor in a way in which his fellow countrymen find mystifying.

Of course we hate the Americans. From what little we know of history, we do know that they are doing what we used to do and we are having to watch as they rule the world and do what they like.

But just as certainly we would be idiotic not to participate in the illusion of the ‘Special Relationship’. As the United States is the most powerful democratic nation in the world we have to link our fortunes to a country which offers so much as a major ally.

Doesn’t make it any more palatable when the leader of our major ally is someone as unprepossessing as the idiot Bush.

Could have been worse; at least he isn’t Nixon.

Though I still wouldn’t buy a second hand car from Bush.