Escapology…

Looks like after all these years I’m getting to know the ropes. They get a little closer with each passing day and I wonder if soon I might be on them.

Ropes; this isn’t the way it was meant to work out, tying ropes to the clouds and jumping. This wasn’t in the plan. I’m freefalling, just waiting for the bump at the end. How did that happen? I made provision. Sensibly denied myself all those things I would have liked just to protect my future and now all that are left are clouds and ropes and bottles to drown in.

Yes, not everything makes sense. Lesson learnt. But when nothing makes sense…

Watch me fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Now you see me, now you don’t. The one and only… the greatest show on Earth…and ‘Hey presto!’ - The lady vanishes.

So tie the ropes to my ankles. Yeah, that wasn’t the way it was meant to work out at all. And heck, how did that happen? Maybe the sky was just too big and it escaped, or maybe the ropes held tight, or maybe the life of a trapeze artist isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Peter Allen and John Walby would know.

Happy birthday Albert Einstein...

This may or may not have relevance relatively speaking, but in theory it should do. After all, it's all part of the equation.

Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday, that much-loved absent-minded genius who gave us the theory of relativity (two of them, in fact, special theory and general theory of relativity), but did you know that Einstein was born with such a large head that his mother thought he was deformed? Or that Einstein had a secret child before he was married? Or that he liked to play with puppets? Or that his brain was removed on death and taken on a cross-country trip to California in a Buick Skylark with Einstein's brain sloshing inside a jar in the boot to meet Einstein's granddaughter? Or that he married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, but only after being turned down by her daughter? Or that he wasn’t poking his tongue out at all in that well known picture, he was licking some barbecue sauce from his chin?

Hmmmm… happy birthday Albert are you sure that E = mc² ,or could that have been some spilt barbecue sauce as well?

Here’s one I did earlier…

It seems to be one of those days when inspiration is not only in short supply, but has packed its bag and left without even a goodbye. Hopefully it’s just gone off on a break and will return refreshed and full of ideas because I don’t have any.

On days like this I find my mind returning to Dubby the duck.

Ah, Dubby – arch enemy of Misty the cat, explorer, hero of my rubber duck soap opera ‘Little Duckington’. I often wonder what he’s up to. The last I heard of him he was off on honeymoon with Doris, newly married and leaving behind the terrible murder of the local duck vicar.

Yes, my Dubby days - they all seem so long ago and far away now.

Sometimes I think that I might bring him back. Probably not in a ‘Little Duckington’ tale, they are a lot of work - this photo alone took me hours to set up and the only bit of Photoshop is the smoke from Dubby’s fag. The rest is real. Well, when I say real, staged upon my kitchen table.

Yes, maybe it’s time for the return of Dubby... Dubby II - the sequel.

Perhaps I’ll make him darker this time. Yes, The Dark Duck... Watch this space.

Luna's birthday, the internet, Douglas Adams, and fish...

Today is Luna’s first birthday. Thank God... without this celebratory event I’d have probably ended up writing about Douglas Adams’ birthday - which was yesterday and his sixty-first – well it would have been.

She may not have gone where she intended to go, but I think she have ended up where she needed to be. Yes, she’s made it to fifteen in cat years and is officially a teenager. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. Cat birthdays aren’t like human birthdays. For one thing there’s no cake - just fish and cat treats - and the first year of a cat’s life is equivalent to fifteen human years and not one. After that the second year is equivalent to ten, and then each subsequent year is the equivalent to four human years. Cats, as you can see, grow up pretty quickly. I know this to be fact as I read it on the internet.

Luna meanwhile doesn’t really care about the internet. All she wants is lots of food, to be allowed outside for a play, have plenty of time for sleeping and limitless places to sleep. For Luna time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so, as lunchtime is any time she wants it to be. The closest Luna has come to the internet is falling asleep on my laptop. Why does she do this? Well I asked her and she refused to answer that question on the grounds that she didn't know the answer.  How utterly cat-like. It would seem that in some ways cats seem to be a little like human beings, almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, and also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Mind you if cats do ever become internet users I think that we can expect a few changes. For one thing there will be even more pictures of kittens… if that is possible. Mice and fish will probably feature a little more than they do currently and all online games will feature a ball of wool that rolls around waiting to be chased and caught. Seems pointless to me, like thinking fish is nice is some undefined way, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Who knows? Maybe the internet might be a better place for the intervention of cats. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. This could just as well apply to cats, except instead of mucking about in water which most cats hate (not Luna, she loves it), mucking about with balls of wool would apply. But then you never know with cats. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. And that would never do 

Douglas Adams would have been 261 in cat years today, which unfortunately isn’t the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything. It seems that life is wasted on the living and the answer, as all cats know, is Forty-two.

Anyway that’s it. And as Luna would say if she could be bothered - so long, and thanks for all the fish.

A new lost world…

The world just got a little bit bigger; at least it did for me. After all, it isn’t every day that something new turns up on this planet. I’d pretty much got used to the idea that we’d found pretty much everything ‘new’ and then scientists find eighty ‘something news’ at a place that goes by the fabulous name of The Hindenburg Wall.

I’d never heard of The Hindenburg Wall until today. It’s a huge limestone escarpment in the Star Mountains in the far west of Papua New Guinea. The Star Mountains have an annual rainfall of 10,000mm a year, earthquakes are frequent, and massive landslides are common; so not the place for a quiet camping holiday. The name sounds like it might have been dreamt up by H. Rider Haggart, massively tall and remote the Wall could have come straight from the pages of Conan Doyle’s Lost World or King Kong’s mist-shrouded island. The sort of place where pterodactyls nest in the crags, giant rats scurry in the undergrowth, and huge carnivorous plants munch on unsuspecting intruders.

When I heard about it on the radio my old long-ago wonder began to bubble once more I became an eight year old boy again. I loved Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Dr. Challanger’s expedition to The Lost World with the dinosaurs and other wonders I found there.

The Hindenburg Wall is a real lost world, with over eighty new species of animals and plants discovered already. The scientists say that it’s one of the most bio-diverse spots on the planet. So far they’ve found a rat as big as a small dog, new types of carnivorous plants, a rose-pink orchid, a new species of spurflower and rhododendron, giant butterflies, previously undiscovered insects and frogs, and what could be the world’s smallest wallaby.

No dinosaurs yet, but who knows what else is out there waiting to be discovered? The expedition team were only there for four weeks so they’ve probably only scratched the surface of what is wandering around in the steamy jungle. Anything could be hiding in there just waiting to be found.

Shang-a-lang

So another year down the tubes. Somehow I don't have quite the same enthusiasm as I did for birthdays as I did as a child. It isn't that I don't enjoy them - I do - it's just that I hate another one rolling around bringing promises of new aches and pains and all the other stuff that getting older brings with it.

Excuse me a moment....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Sorry, I needed a wee and if I don't go when I feel it, well let's just say my wife complains about the all the washing.

I was surprised to be personally wished happy birthday by the WWW this morning. It was Google actually. Yes, Google wished me a happy birthday by name and posted a birthday picture for me when I logged on this morning. To be honest I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. They know my birthday, they know my name - surely they can't know about my increasing forgetfulness and how I say 'they don't write songs like that any more' and nod my head sagely whenever I hear the Bay City Rollers.

Google search or I'm feeling lucky?

Well, maybe I wasn't after all - a doin doo wop be dooby do ay.

And then of course there were my Facebook friends, all wishing me a happy birthday and clogging up my timeline all prompted by a Facebook flag. Seriously though, it was great that they took the time to drop me a message. Thanks to you all, there really was no need - and for those of you who didn't (and you know who you are) there really was no need (but it would have been nice).

So there we go, another one down and who knows how many more to come?

Shang-a-lang, as they say.

Kenny, Acker, and me...

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Kenny Ball had died, but I was surprised to see Acker Bilk on the telly talking about him after his death. I thought Acker had died years ago.

Apparently not, Acker lives on.

Some of my childhood was spent listening to Stranger on the Shore and Midnight in Moscow, Stranger on the Shore and the March of the Siamese Children, Stranger on the Shore and Stranger on the Bloody Shore. Some of my childhood was spent hating that song. Some of my childhood was spent hating Acker Bilk. Well, not so much the man, but his name.

My father was a fan of Acker and Kenny; as much as he was a fan of anything but himself, and had a few of their records in his limited and seldom played record collection along with Lonnie Donegan and The Batchelors.

He said he liked Acker Bilk. Liked him so much that he grew an Acker beard and therein lays the tale of why I hated Mr Bilk so much when I was a child.

That stupid beard was the bane of my life for years. The kids around by us would pick on any difference to catcall and snigger and having a father with a jazz clarinettist’s beard was bound to draw attention. They called him Acker and I was quickly labelled with the nickname too. Wherever I went on the estate I heard them calling ‘Acker’ after me and not in a good way; it was used as a criticism, a term of derision as if the speaking of that one meaningless but meaningful word was the ultimate insult. And to me it was – and a shame.

Acker, Acker, Acker, Acker, Acker…

I’d hear it everywhere I’d go, a slight elongation of the final two letters to drive home the fact that they knew how much I hated them calling me…

Ackerrrrr…

Sometimes they’d chant it…

Ack - Er - Ack - Er - Ack - Er - Ack - Er…

On and on, wherever I went, it came to the point where I wouldn’t go out to play any longer, keeping my eyes open when I was out and about so as to avoid the other boys.

Ackerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

‘Ignore them’ was his best advice. Yeah right, that would make them stop. But it didn’t of course. I carried that name with some of the local wags until my mid-teens, dreading it being used and more than once getting into a scuffle because of it. In retrospect I should have tried to turn that name into a positive, Worn the T- shirt with pride, taken up the clarinet, perhaps been seen around town in a bowler hat and a stripy silk waistcoat. But that sort of strategic knowledge didn’t come until later and even today I can’t hear the name Acker without recalling the feeling of shame I felt back then.

How strange and fragile we are as children. No wonder some never grow up.

Right Acker?