Friends!

Anticipation.  

The slight shaken-up feeling that the immanent appearance of an old friend always gives.  The usual desultory cleaning by me and the rather more directed cleaning by Toni, including the obligatory “Wiping of the Black Base of the Television” because it shows the dust so clearly, and therefore when it is cleaned it means that you have done your duty because it is clear that it (the major fault is clean!

The weather, after the delight of 25C yesterday, looks as though it has settled into the usual “Visitor Sulk” – in other words, visitors who are seeking sun have to look at clouds and listen to the indigenous inhabitants talk wistfully about how it would have been so much better if only they had arrived the day before.

The most horrific example of this was when I once visited Gran Canaria and was met at the airport by Jonathon as, as we were driving to his house, he asked me casually if I noticed anything.  I looked around and I could see no new features and I turned to him blankly.  He, with a smile that could not be described as kindly, and then advised me to look at the landscape a little more closely and say what colour predominated.  It was only then that I noticed the predominance of the dreaded colour green on what should have been a dusty vista.  Green!  Grass!  Vegetation!  If vegetation then rain!  And Jonathan said that the weather had been awful.  People washed away in floods.  I was horrified.  I did not go to Gran Canaria for Culture with a capital “C”.  I went to get brown and to see the twisted envy on the faces of my colleagues on my return.  Vegetation was very low on my priorities!

So, one hopes that the microclimate along the coast does its stuff and Andrew has a warm time here.  The temperature looks promising with 24C promised for the time that he is staying, but without the sun one does not feel that one is getting real value for money!

I still have not washed or shaved.  This is a direct result of writing my “Morning Pages” when we are supposed to stagger out of bed (or even stay in bed) and start writing.  Writing anything which suggests itself and to go on doing this on a daily basis for two or three weeks – then read through what you have written and see if there is anything in the mass of words worth keeping.  Woolf described it as “diamonds in the dust” – I will be satisfied with sparkling glass crystal, or perhaps a glint of fools’ gold!

The sheer physical effort of writing is something which slows one down.  I am far happier typing than writing, but there is a qualitative difference (I think) between typing and writing so that I continue to write my Morning Pages with pen and all other writing is done on the laptop.  We will see where this leads and it may be that I change my approach.

In poetry I need the pen and paper, but for prose the laptop is fine.  At least with pen and paper you can see the process of editing, whereas with the laptop all of that tends to disappear as words magically change and it appears that the pellucid prose just flows.  How false that is!

I suppose that having a guest might limit what I write, but the tutor would say that far from being a hindrance, it was an opportunity and make sure that one of your notebooks was to hand to note down anything which might be of use!  If I do that religiously then people are going to get progressively more wary of what I am about and become ever more circumspect!

I now ought to go on to the web site and complete a Freewrite – the stream of consciousness sort of writing which throws up (or should throw up) interesting (I would have written “intriguing” but I can’t spell it – the machine gave the right version) insights into the unconscious and even typos can be used as part of later writing.

I must now make sure that I write religiously and do not use the appearance of a guest to allow me be negligent about my work.  I should write because we have a guest and I should make the most of it.

It is perhaps ironic that I am doing a course on Creative Writing and a secondary one on the importance of Brands in the modern world, when Andrew was a copywriter for an advertising agency.  What a source of raw material he could be!  I shall drain him dry!

Why?

“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” is the sort of book which is worth reading from its title alone, but what I want to know is does a similar sort of book exist about the formation of queues and what people do when they are in them?

I suppose that I should go on Google and find out if such a thing exists, but that is something for later.  For now, I just want to think about what such a book might contain.

I am sure that there must be academic studies galore on the “Queue and its formation” and I seem to remember (or may have made up) that one person was employed in the Festival of Britain organization to go around and disperse spontaneously formed queues which formed when someone stopped and then someone would stop behind that person assuming that a queue for something or other was forming and they were second in line.  This attitude is perfectly understandable given the scarcity of virtually everything during World War II and the fact that the British had therefore to queue for everything. 

But this begs the important question of what happened in other countries which were just as stretched as the United Kingdom.  What happened to queues there?  France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Russia – there were shortages everywhere.  Rationing was, I think, almost universal.  How did they queue?  Did the queue become a national institution in the way that it did in Britain?

Obviously not if you go to these countries today.  And I understand that Germans are the worst at queuing.

In Spain it may look chaotic, but when you go into a place where there are service counters and a mass of people waiting, you simply ask, “Are you the last?” of someone and they will instantly indicate the person who is just before you and then you admit that you are last and so on.  It works.  But only to get you up to the window.

It would seem simple sense to me that you should get served as quickly as possible.  The correct etiquette is to get what you want and go.  Why?  Because there are people behind you.  Why is it that some people grumble through their waiting time, only to be extravagantly wasteful of the same commodity as soon as they get to their destination?

I am now (almost) resigned to the fact that, whatever queue I join the person or persons in front of me will not have a double digit shopping intelligence quotient.  You can see them relax, visibly, as soon as they are the centre of attention and they engage in astonishingly irrelevant conversation as time ticks away.

Both with supermarkets check-outs (note the last word because some people don’t) and government agencies some people adopt exactly the same attitude.  When it comes to paying, or producing the documents that they have come about, chaos results.  Increasingly desperate searches are made in clothes and bags and my nails dig ever deeper into the palms of my hands.

In my experience, I have always, without exception had to pay for the goods in my supermarket trolley.  Every time.  Payment is therefore to be expected.  Either cash or card – but payment is the way for every visit.  You would not think so but the constant look of surprise when the assistant tells them the cost of their goods, only then do they bethink themselves of a method of payment.  I could quite cheerfully slice their bloody heads off with their long looked for credit card or ram the eventually produced euros down their chuckling throats.  The search for the exact money, by looking along the inside seams of handbags or checking a fifth pocket takes me into another universe of frustration when only a flame-thrower will do.

Today the chief culprit was a man of a certain age in Lidl.  You have to be agile in Lidl because the cashiers are quick and ruthless.  He slowly pushed his trolley through, made no attempt to pack, merely touched each item as if to check its corporality.  His attempt to pay by credit card was a poem of ineptitude which could only have been equaled by Mr. Bean.  Perhaps it was he – how old in Rowan Atkinson nowadays?

Eventually the transaction was complete and the next customer had to circumnavigate the Obstacle and her good were diverted with the windscreen wiper thingie that pushes your stuff into the more inconvenient part of the goods checked tray.  Meanwhile the Obstacle picked up each article and slowly and reverently put it in his trolley.

Then it was my turn, and he still was not done and indeed did not complete until after I had packed my bag and was out of the shop.  If my trolley had been equipped a la Boudicca he would now be laying on the floor a stumpless torso in a pool of blood.

It is a good thing that I am such an equitable person and I merely let adverse circumstances wash over me!

This morning was the first time that I completed the “Morning Pages” exercise in my course which demands that on rising you take pen to paper and write solidly for half and hour.  Which I did.  Load of crud, out of which nothing is salvageable – or at least that is how it appears to me at the moment.  But, tomorrow is another day, and I think that I will go over the instructions of what I am supposed to do again to see if there is anything more that I can do to try and make this a little more productive.

The haiku however continues to go well.  I think.  I am almost at the stage where I have enough raw material to produce a slim volume printed on exquisite paper illustrated with prints produced by the author.  Fond hope.  Though having written those words, there is something strangely tempting about pushing the pretention just that little bit further!

To be fair, I have written more over this last week or so than I have ever done before, and I like to think that such an approach is a bit like taking digital photos – one of them is bound to come out well.  I am a great believer in the law of averages!

And one day I will actually have to read “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” rather than use it in the same way as I have used “War and Peace” – something to talk about in spite of not having read it!

Autumn Sun

On the positive side I was able to lay out in the sun. 

Wearing only a bathing costume before the more cynical begin to question the quality of warmth!  And I kept telling myself that it was the 13^th of October and wasn’t that a good thing!  It is at this stage of the year that I remind myself that I have sunbathed on Christmas Eve – and even thrown myself into the sea on the same date (and even more quickly got out of the freezing water) so, in theory there are months of potentially stealable sunny days ahead!

After the quite exceptional amount of work that I have completed over the past couple of days, it was always likely that today would be an anti climax – and so it proved to be via the down side of the OU (which is also its strength) the Forums.  One of the most important aspects of this course is that your writing is posted on line and it is commented on by your fellow students and your tutor.  This all depends on the willingness of the students to respond.  I know that I am in a fortunate position as I do not have to do a job (Ah! Savour those words!) and can therefore spend more time on the course than those who are struggling with full time family and employment.  But it is hard when you are raring to go and feel stymied by sluggard response.  Or at least by what I regard as slow response.  It is still early days and we are still getting used to what we are expected to do so I shouldn’t jump to judgement.  Yet.

There are now notebooks throughout the house.  There is one in my pocket, another by my bedside and another on the Third Floor.  The materials side of the course has therefore been catered for, I only hope that my writing can justify the amount of paper being used!

Tomorrow off to the garage to get the broken window in the car repaired and getting the placed ready for Andrew on Thursday.

Back to the forums!

Who are they all!

Horrific is the only adjective to describe the maelstrom of irritating bipeds who deliberately throw themselves in the path of a poor little shop visitor during the weekends!  One of the major joys of retirement from the treadmill of earning your money day by day rather than getting back some of the vast sums that you have thrown at the government for almost forty years, is that during the day you are surrounded mainly by your fellow retirees.  Admittedly there is a period round about lunchtime when the younger element and their irresponsible generators range widely but it is only after the witching hour of half past four that the untrammelled forces of screaming plenitude start swarming and simply taking up space.

A trip to Gava for a few necessaries ended in confusion today as we retreated in confusion from the ludicrously long lines to glum looking non-retired slaves waiting with that trip-wirely edgy look in their eyes.  We will wait until Monday.

Even the limited shopping that I did do necessitated my moving from queue to queue as the usual suspects of incompetent idiots showed their usual ineptitude when it came to displaying a basic understanding of the difficult transactional skills necessary in finding their wallets, producing a credit card, putting it in a reader, entering their number and taking their goods.  I know that sooner or later I am going to snap and attack some hapless cretin who puts their card in the wrong way round and upside down for the umpteenth time as I wait in line.  And I will surely get away with it with any jury of my peers!

And Monday will be the time when I have to go to the garage when the quarter window will be replaced.  I am still inclined to think the worst of the people around me, but Toni is slowly convincing me that it is more likely that the break was an accident possibly done by someone bringing some rubbish to the bins near which I had parked.  Possible but not likely.  Though it was possible through the broken window to gain access to the dash and there were things worth stealing and they weren’t, so it might be an accident.

I will be interested to see how much I end up paying for this bloody irritating drain on my reserves.  I am comprehensively insured but that means bugger-all nowadays with the various limitations that insurance companies write into the small print.  We shall see.

The writing continues for the course with my enthusiastic participation in all aspects.  I hope that my present attitude is one which is going to extend for the whole of the duration of the course and that I will be as enthusiastic at the end of it as I now am at the beginning!

The exercises that we are supposed to be doing at the moment ask for unstructured, impulsive writing aiming for more of a flow-of-consciousness approach rather than the more structured methodology that I feel comfortable with.  I am not alone at finding the exercises difficult, but I am persevering and producing stuff which is interesting, effective, rubbishy and insulting.  That is what we are aiming for – a lifting of the usual filters and finding what is lurking underneath the stone of the conscious mind!

I continue to write my daily Haiku with the last one being one of the more fluent, getting to what I regard as a satisfactory conclusion after only a few drafts!  Probably I will find the next almost impossible to complete – there is usually a sort of equilibrium of difficulty about these things.

The basic book for the course is referred to as The Big Red Book or the BRB and is generally treated like our bible.  It is a practical workbook with various exercises that can be extended infinitely.  This course is going to be very expensive in terms of my writing instrument of choice: the blue ink Pilot disposable fountain pen!  Experience has shown that this is the writing implement for me.  That and a pencil.  I will have to buy an electric pencil sharpener.  I am sure there is something wonderful waiting for me on Amazon!

I have decided to keep taking the two puffers for the rest of the weekend and, if I am not substantially better than I intend to go back to the doctor and demand something more effective – I really am not used to this extended period of being not well.  I don’t necessarily count this as “illness” as I can move about and carry on much as usual, but it is not what I want and expect!

And there is my flu injection waiting for me in the ready hands of the nurse in the health centre.  I hesitate to have it at the moment, as I am not sure what unholy mixture the melange of medicaments I am taking will have.  But it should be pushed into me this month to be effective.

It looks as though tomorrow is going to be sunny.  I intend to make the most of it.

And write about it afterwards!