Conch, Caribbean Chill, and Christopher Cross...

I'm taking life far too seriously. Tried to force myself to lie in bed past nine this morning but had to leap out of bed at one minute past because the guilt was just too much for me. I even rushed my shower to make up for lost time!

It’s always been like that for me, I’ve never really learnt to relax completely so the few times when I have been totally chilled really stick in my mind.

Yes, I’m going to give you another memory.

Twenty or so years or so ago Gaynor and I took a day trip to St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Now, I know what you’re thinking; the Grenadines is much too far for a day trip, but we were on holiday in Barbados at the time so it was just a short hop across the lush blue Caribbean sea.

We set off from the airport at six in the morning in a twin engined eight-seater flown by a very competent woman pilot and an hour or so later were approaching the landing strip of St. Vincent. Back then it was just that; a strip, and as we approached from the mountains a cow wandered across the dusty runway and we had to steeply climb to miss the palm trees at the end of the runway and circle again.

I hated flying back then, but eventually we landed (me still shaking with fright - well it was a tight squeeze between those mountains) and were hustled through immigration control. A sleepy, dusty looking chap in a frayed uniform, gold epaulettes and a gun waved us through a wooden gate as he stood inside a rickety tin shack smoking a cigarillo. Real banana republic stuff and not even a passport stamp.

St. Vincent was truly paradise, even the shark pool at the harbour. But we had to move on as the next part of our day trip was a tour of the Grenadines on a yacht.

Gaynor hates boats but I love them and we were soon sailing out to sea swigging Venezuelan beer from the bottles that our German captain had smuggled on board. He seemed a little dodgy, probably a gun runner, definitely a smuggler (he told us) and his only crew member was a really well-to-do English girl who’d run away to the Caribbean and was living in a tin hut on one of the smaller islands with her young son. She was 'never going back’, although the authorities were trying to deport her - all very high seas and romantic (lucky pair).

We sailed all day in the sunshine on the crystal-clear blue water; dolphins leaping up and out of the waves every now and then; past Bequia, Mustique, Canouan, and down to the Tobago Cays for lunch where we anchored up.

I don’t know the name of the small island that we stopped at, but it remains vivid in my mind because the beaches were covered with huge pink conch shells. Thousands upon thousands of them in huge piles.

This was one of the places that the local conch fishermen dumped the empty shells from their brightly painted fishing boats once they’d emptied them of the succulent conch meat.

We waded through the warm blue sea to the white beach and sat side by side amidst the mountains of pink conch shells watching huge green iguanas basking on the shells in the heat of the sun.

And that was it – total chill.

Those few hours on that island remain the most relaxed experience of my life. It wasn’t much of an island, just some scrubby trees, sand, the conch shells and a few iguanas; but for a short while I was without worries, concerns, no need to rush, no ‘something’ to do, nothing. Total relaxation. I was floating.

On the return journey the wind picked up and we had to shorten our final visit to Palm Island as it looked like a storm was brewing. Our German captain served us a white rum punch and hiked up the sound system to keep our minds off the choppy water. His choice in music wasn’t mine, a little too soft-rock-tastic for my tastes, but one song came on that summed the whole experience up for me; Christopher Cross and Sailing - schmaltzy and corny, true and beautiful, and I still can’t hear it without being taken back to the relaxed perfection of that day.

Before we left the island we picked up three of the conch shells to bring home. We still have them; placed besides the fire in the upstairs lounge where I listen to music - still pink, still full of the sound of the Caribbean sea, still full of that day.

Sometimes I put on my vinyl copy of 'Sailing' that I found in Oxfam and listen to the poetry of the words. I look at the conch shells we collected on that far away island that I can't remember the name of and try to recapture the quiet perfection that day.

But I never can.

It's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me, and if the wind is right you can sail away and find tranquillity. The canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see. Believe me. Sailing, takes me away to where I've always heard it could be. Just a dream and the wind to carry me and soon I will be free…

And for that short while on that beach I really was free.

Saturday jobs...

I have my appointment on Friday. Well it has to be done, after all what’s the point of mortgage protection insurance if you can’t use it and I can’t unless I’ve registered.

I'm expecting it to be a little grim and I’ve got my black hoodie and trainers all ready. I spent some time in front of the mirror this morning saying 'innit' and 'dunno' and 'nuffin', shrugging my shoulders and gazing into the distance - so at least I'll be trying to fit in. No, that’s wrong. I’m sure that it’s not like that at all; it can’t all be stand-up comic stereotyping.

It got me thinking about my working life and my Saturday jobs though. My first Saturday job was delivering milk with my uncle Len. I was probably eleven or so. I can’t say that I enjoyed getting up at five o’clock in the morning weekends and holidays, shrucking on my duffel coat and going out into the morning air, but it was a job.

Later, in my early teens I progressed from the milk round to gardening work, first at the girls horticultural college at Waterperry (I’ve written about this before), and then at a big house (Saturdays and holidays) helping out the old gardener until he got knocked off his bike cycling home one day and was killed. What was his name? Old something-or-other, I'll never forget his face though. He taught me a lot about gardening.

Still later I went to work at the carpet shop inside what used to be the old cinema. It was strange spending my Saturdays in the same picture house where I used to watch Casablanca and Rin Tin Tin on a Saturday afternoon for a tanner. Ju-Ju worked there with me for a while and two less likely lads you can’t imagine. We used to measure the carpet and then cut it with a Stanley knife guiding it with a long carpet cutting block with a slot for the blade – sliiiiisshhh. I’ll never forget the sound of that blade, or the blood when Ju-Ju sliced the end of his finger off one day. We used to make sure that we never cut too short by always cutting far too long, this worked well until we were spotted and sacked for giving away hundreds of pounds worth of carpet. I wonder how many box-rooms were carpeted with our over generous measuring?

It didn’t matter though, this was the heyday of the Saturday job and a couple of weeks later I was working at Sheargold’s the ironmongers on the High Street. I liked working at Sheargold's, weighing out the nails on the scales, counting out the daffodil bulbs and dropping them into brown paper bags, putting the brooms out on display in front the shop window. There always seemed to be a Saturday job available back then.

Oh to be back then in the time of the Saturday job.

I got a message the other day from one of my ‘back thens’, a message from so long ago that I’d hardly recognise myself if I bumped into him in the High Street. Not a Sheargold’s back then, but a Lewis's back then - a Saturday job at college back then.

I started in the basement on china at Lewis's and, apart from a two week stint in ladies underwear, stayed in the plates and dishes for almost two years. This person had been reading my posts late at night and it made them think about the past and how, as we get older, it seems to become so much more important.

I know that feeling. I spend quite a lot of time in the past probably because at some point there comes a time when your future crosses the line and becomes shorter than your past has been. Maybe that’s why I go back so often - to live in my past for a while in the hope of slowing things down just a little, stopping the future from coming so quickly.

Of course you can’t really, and as I’ve said before – you can’t change your past, but the future is full of opportunity. There must be Saturday jobs to be had still.

Innit tho blud.

The cat in the box...

Now this is hard to understand, but stick with it; after all it’s only a few minutes out of your life (lives), and you can always not have started reading it at all, or not have a computer, or maybe there are no computers, or maybe you didn’t live to turn your computer on – I hope not though, I don’t have that many readers.

Confused? Read on it gets better.

I listened to a radio programme about Schrödinger's cat last week. Well, I have plenty of time to listen to the radio, not like those other me’s at the office, foundry, hospital, bakers, space station, zoo, recording studio, watchmakers, abattoir.

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, best described as a paradox, thought up by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger was friends with Einstein. I would imagine that their conversations weren’t very easy to follow – Einstein going on about relativity and sticking his tongue out and Schrödinger parrying with entanglement and multiple universe theory

Schrödinger's cat demonstrates what he saw as the problem with quantum mechanics being applied to everyday objects. I can’t begin to understand it, except in really broad terms, but apparently atoms and particles behave in ways that larger objects (like cats) don’t seem to. For instance some particles can be in two places at once and occupy two different spaces at the same time, others can occupy the same space as another particle simultaneously, still others aren’t there at all – but are.

Yes, I know it’s all very confusing.

Anyway, Schrödinger's thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event (the leakage of some radioactive substance). The cat is inside a box along with the radioactive device and when it is opened the cat appears to be both alive and dead at the same time. Now of course this can’t happen - can it?

Well, according to quantum physics at a sub atomic level it can, so if it can happen in the sub atomic world it should be able to happen in the real world at a real life, full size, level – and who knows, maybe it does.

Schrödinger put forward the theory that at the time of opening the box the cat is both alive and dead because both outcomes have happened simultaneously simply because the opportunity exists; and at that point reality divides in two – one reality becoming the universe where the cat is dead and the other the universe where the cat is alive. So one reality becomes two and another universe is created. His view was this could happen over and over with universes splitting away continually around the various multiple outcomes of entangled random events, creating an infinite number of universes.

Imagine that our lives are splitting into different paths at each decision point or event creating different universes as they split, over and over, infinite realities, infinite opportunities, infinite differences.

Somewhere I’m a great painter, best seller writer, handsome, dictator, priest, paraplegic, mathematician, thin, poet, stillborn, athlete, bald, scientist, train driver. Somewhere I am anything and everything and nothing at all – and so are you.

Comforting? Scary? All those other selves thinking that they are the only one, except I know that I’m the only one and they know with equal certainty that they are the only one(s). How can there be more than one of me, more than one of you?

How?

Okay you can stop thinking now. I told you that it was hard.

I bet Dali got it though. He called the photograph above Atomicus - just see those cats divide.

The great leveller...

It was seven-thirty this morning that the earthquake hit. My bed shook for a full thirty seconds, the dog across the road began to bark, my book fell from the bedside cabinet to the floor and there was an ominous rumble from the road outside the house.

“Earthquake! Earthquake!” I shouted leaping out of bed whilst my wife just looked up at me shaking her head in erstwhile disbelief.

Apparently it wasn’t an earthquake at all, just the huge levelling machine that they are ‘doing’ our road with. Yes, the ‘doing’ of our road continues well over a year since the ‘doing’ commenced.

It’s nearly finished now, just another week or so, hence the appearance of the great leveller. The great leveller is a huge machine which scrapes away the surface of the road, removing all the bumps and lumps, potholes and patches, making the surface smooth and flat ready for the new road to be laid.

The appearance of the great leveller, like an earthquake ready to destroy and flatten everything in its path and sparing nobody, got me thinking about the other great levellers in all of our lives. You know the type of thing I mean. Those things that no matter how rich and powerful you are, what car you drive, who your parents were, how much you know, where you live, hit us all at times like an earthquake leaving the great leveller to come along and flatten us all regardless. Making us smooth and ready to face whatever new road is about to be laid.

Death, illness, loss of a pet, losing your job, the break up of a long relationship; they are all great levellers, bringing us all to the same place, giving us each a common understanding of some other’s situation. Of course there will be differences, different strengths of earthquake, more or less damage, different types of road – wider, narrower, shorter, longer, motorways, ‘A’ roads, ‘B’ roads, tracks – but broadly they are all pretty much the same, shared experiences that help us to understand each others situation, making us humbler than before.

All we have to do is survive the great leveller and try the new road. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be different from the old one.

Rabbit and Rooster...

Today is the start of the Chinese New Year and this year is the year of the Rabbit. Oh why, oh why, couldn’t I have been born in the Year of the Rabbit instead of the Rooster like I was?

Apparently people born in the Year of the Rabbit have it all. They are articulate, talented, and ambitious, and virtuous, and reserved, and have excellent taste. In fact they are so damned good that the list of their plus points just goes on and on; not only are they universally admired, trusted, and usually very lucky financially, but they seem to have no downside other than they like a good gossip. Even then they are tactful and generally kind, so it doesn’t usually amount to out and out bitching just friendly speculation and some minor tittle-tattle.

Worst of all though is that these bloody perfect Rabbits, with their long pointy ears and sticky out teeth, hardly every lose their flaming tempers. Damn them! They’re clever at business, conscientious and never back out of a contract. They are totally trustworthy, goodie-goodie, smiley, got-it-alls. Sounds to me like they’d make good gamblers, especially as they have this uncanny gift of choosing exactly the right thing, but they don’t gamble. There are more lottery Rabbit winners than any other sign, but oh no, not them. They are too good to gamble, they are conservative and they are wise, not like us poor Roosters.

Yes I admit it, I’m a Rooster; born in 1957, the year that Harold Macmillan became the Prime Minister. He was a Rooster too. People like hapless Harold and me, Rooster people, are deep thinkers. We’re pretty capable, and some might say talented, but we try for things that are way beyond our capabilities and end up deeply, doomy, disappointed when we fail; which we invariably do.

Often we’re a bit eccentric. Actually a lot of us verge on the stark raving bonkers (but if you read my blog then you already know that), which is probably why we seem to often have quite difficult relationship issues with others. Our problem is that we always think they we right, but only because we usually are! Outwardly it might seem that we get on well with people, but we’re frequently loners and although we give the outward impression of being adventurous, we are actually pretty timid. So to hide our basic inadequacies and hatred of everyone around us we run around being busy and getting things done whilst our emotions, like our fortunes, swing very high and then very low, smashing to the ground in a pile of shattered debris.

Poor us.

Yes, Rooster people like me are bi-polar, argumentative, bolshy, introverts who are usually selfish and far too outspoken. On the up side we are almost always interesting and can be extremely brave when we have to be – or so I am told.

Up there with the great and good in their wonderfully perfect fluffy bunny Rabbit world are people like Angelina Jolie, Tina Turner, Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, Frank Sinatra, and my old friend Orson Welles. Whilst down in the dumps scratching around with us Roosters in the dirt are Emperor Akihito, D.H. Lawrence, Goldie Hawn, Errol Flynn, Peter Ustinov, who were all cocking at their own doodle-doo to some degree or other, and of course me – and it’s all about me.

Oh well, Rooster or Rabbit it’s better than being a Snake.

A55 - Sunset with swans…

Sometimes things just drop right and you have to pull off the road and simply take it all in.

It happened to me last Friday evening as I drove along the A55 towards the Llyn.

The A55 is such a wonderful road, castles either side of you, tunnels through mountains, the sea at your side for miles and miles. The first time I drove it I was so struck by the scenery. It seemed like a different world and it still does, even after driving along it hundreds of times I still catch things out of the corner of my eye that make me look and wonder – a sunset or sunrise, a cherry tree, low clouds on the mountains, the light on the sea - steel-grey-purple in the winter’s evening light. There’s always something more, I may have to blog the A55 as a series.

It’s my equivalent of the famous and long gone Route 66, just not as long, a lot wetter, and in Wales and not the USA.

Anyway, last Friday as I came through the last of the tunnels (the Pen-Y-Clip) I caught the setting sun. The sky above was a flat wash of light orange fading to blue and the sea a light blue-silver-grey and darkening all the time. It was so clear, so all encompassing that I had to pull off the road and simply take it all in. I sat in the deserted car park by the empty café just looking and then stepped out into the icy cold evening air, my breath hanging around me, and went over to the pond.

The poor birds must have thought I'd come to feed them because they swam slowly across to me - ducks, geese, and swans - and I took a few photographs.

Sunset with swans, how perfect.

Out of the wind…

As I drove away in my piece of past towards the uncertainty that is always our future, I felt it pushing me forwards as I drove, making me move faster, then faster still. I was running. It was driving me away.

It wasn’t until I’d got some way down the road that I slowed to look behind me - and there it was, the wind of change; that wind of change that people so often talk about but seldom feel until it’s raging all around them, blowing them about like broken branches in an autumn storm as they windmill their arms until they snap like simple twigs.

I slowed, turned into the side of the road and stood watching. I couldn’t see the wind, I felt it on my skin making me goose bump, but I couldn’t see it; only the effect on the things it touched. It was the wind that made the movement in the grass and trees, the wind that scurried the clouds across the sky, the wind that tumbled the red and yellow McDonalds carton towards the ditch and the wind that vibrated the telephone wires making them mewl like blinded kittens. It was all was caused by the wind – nothing and nobody had a say in its direction or actions.

I watched the wind for a while as I stood by the milestone. Who knew when I’d come this way again? Maybe soon, maybe never. Our futures are full of possibilities; our pasts have no possibility at all. They are known and gone.

Truth is I was sick of turning my collar up to keep the wind off my neck, tired of turning corners only to be hit by yet another gust.

As I drove away leaving the milestone behind I glanced in my mirror at the gusting plastic sheets by the pig pens. I was glad to be out of the wind.

Onwards and upwards? Well, onwards at least.