Jubilation!

When your birthday is in October then surely the most important element in the event is that fact that you have actually spent some time in the afternoon sunbathing!  How wonderful is that!  October, even late October and it is warm enough to lay out on a sunbed and worry about the lack of sun cream that you have applied!

It is very strange to be in a foreign country and not have the requisite number of birthday cards to justify the passing of a year!  There again, who the something or other cares!  I lay out in the sun on my birthday how often did that happen in the past!

So an odd sort o birthday, when I get up early and write my morning pages and then stagger upstairs again and brush my teeth.  This is not the way to do it.  I think.

I have tried to make sense of what I have written and extracted the phrases that I think have some significance from the dross that I have produced.  Some of them are partially interesting, but not convincingly interesting.  When they are listed, I mean the phrase that I think have some value; they do not threaten the position of Wilde in the aphorism stakes!  But I’m working on it.

Let me give you, O reader! a flavour of what I am producing!  If I am serious the only thing that I liked from many days of writing before I was fully conscious was, “He had the words for everything and the grammar for nothing.”  I am not entirely convinced that I understand what I have written there, but I am prepared to work at it for a few moments!  Just like the other quotation, “Life is a forgetting, of casting momentary importance into oblivion.”  That surely has to mean something!  Well, like the last one, I am working on it!

And that is where I am.  Working on it.  After all, by now I ought to know the ways of the OU, but I find that I am learning course by course and I am reading the instructions for each assignment with a more rigorous analysis.  I have no intention of losing another 15% by going it alone and trying for independent originality.  The OU will get what it wants, even if I give it after the fact.  How many times have I explained to students that they should answer the question and pay clear attention to the advice that they are given?  I fully intend to give the OU exactly what it wants.  As far as I am capable of interpreting what it wants!  At least I will give it a go!

My birthday meal this evening was not what I intended, but worked out better.  Why is there always a contradiction in the way I look at things!  So tapas and Sangria de Cava.  Delicious!  I drank all the sangria and didn’t eat all the tapas, though there was a new one of bread-crumbed deliciousness including black pudding.  Not something which, because of its absurd calorific value can be eaten with any degree of regularity, but as a once in a few weeks treat is something which I will do again!

Tomorrow I really will have to make a decision about what freewrite I choose to make as the basis for my next piece of writing.  It is a challenge and, of course, an opportunity.  I will have to produce some sort of draft in the next 24 hours and then work on it so that my ‘reflection¡ can be half way convincing!

My course on brands is taking something of a second place at the moment, but I have until the end of the week to get back on course as long as I do not mess with the timetable for the assignment.  It is more to do with time management than imagination!

I have had my birthday present which is a case and a power supply for something which, at the moment I do not have!  This is strange.  My new Kindle will not arrive until something like the 12^th of November; the date when the new version is issued in Spain.  So, when it arrives, I am prepared.

The time is tomorrow, even though this blog will reflect that it is still today: what it is to work to GMT!  But tomorrow is packed with things that I have to do and that is the delight of time which is my own!

Roll on my sixty-fourth year!  Because that is the one that I am in now and will be for the next 354 days!

And that gives pause for thought!

Passing days

So many days gone by without a post.  I have been writing every day, but not necessarily here.  Though I should have done as well rather than taken my other screeds as reason to stop after my so-called ‘Morning Pages’ of Freewriting.  Still, that is how I was and now I am back on an almost full tank and full attention.

Andrew’s visit was a delight – and full.  He only had one day off for good behaviour when he managed to escape to Barcelona without us.  But the rest of the time he was ours and packed more into his few days than most get through in a fortnight!

Food and drink and restaurants and town and shops and tapas and holy places and Sitges.  There is photographic proof that I went into the water and had a total submersion.  Andrew went into the water.  There is a difference.

The food in the restaurant of Montserrat was as good as usual and fortified by it we went on a trip up the vertical railway to a supposed hermitage at the top.  By the time we got there we were too tired to consider anything more than a desultory walk part of the way to the nearest place of worship and then gave up and come home!  And we had to wait in a traffic jam for an hour just to get into the car park before the visit started!

The other experiences were more fluid and more immediate with less waiting!

The immanent threat of the first of my writing assessed assignments is now well and truly in the front of my mind and I have done the first part of the work.  The easy part.  And now there comes the real work of making something of the short freewrites that I did for inspiration as the basis for the next part.

The forums have been getting on perfectly well without me, but I think that it is time to take a more positive part in their future development.

Over the last few weeks I have probably written more than I have ever written in my life during so short a time.  The jury is still well and truly out about whether my writing is changing in any way – but I live in hope.

Talking of writing, this piece did not quite turn out in the way that I expected.  Going through numbers of pages of my own writing trying to find the nuggets of salvageable material to transfer to my working reference notebook I think has drained my imagination in a way that is the complete opposite of what should be happening!

In theory my notebooks should be informing my writing, but that is a process that can only occur when you have something worth taking further in the notebooks themselves.  They are getting more interesting, but at the moment they are full of potential rather than realization.  Work in progress.

Tomorrow I need to make my selection of the freewrite that is going to be the basis for the second part of my assignment, and that choice is important because this bit accounts for the majority of the marks.

There is also the second week of my course on Brands to take into account too.  And there are other festivities to consider for tomorrow and Sunday.

I have to say it, everyone in position always does at some point or other: “How on earth did I manage to fit school into my life!”  There I have said it now, I can relax and get on with my school-less life! 

Which is not hard.

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!