Talking to the cat...

Okay, so I talk to my cat and answer myself in a cat voice. Is that so very strange? Some people talk to the dead, others to themselves, so talking to your cat is okay, right? At least Luna is another sentient and living creature and it’s better than talking to vegetables, which I find myself doing sometimes, particularly carrots, maybe it’s the colour orange because I don’t feel the need to talk to onions.

Talking, what a strange gift it is. I used to talk all the time particularly in meetings. Of course I never actually said anything and in many ways it was like talking to cabbages because nobody was really listening. These days though, when I’m not talking to carrots or cats, I keep most conversation to a minimum; or at least a minimum for me as I do have a tendency to be verbose. As I often say, ‘Why use one word when you can use a whole dictionary, lexicon, vocabulary, or thesaurus worth?

Sometimes I gabble, my words running out of my mouth without me really thinking about it. This can be quite dangerous because, although my brain is engaged, the part of my mind that stops me saying what is in it seems to shut down. It’s like my conversation becomes a machine gun with the safety off and I rat-a-tat out words based around what I want to say and not what people want to hear.

Quite often I say things that aren’t even meant to come out and sometimes they are things I didn’t even realise I was thinking. It’s a bit like mild tourettes except I’m sure that I could control it if I thought about it. And there is probably the nub of the matter, it’s not that I don’t think about what I am saying, it’s just that I don’t care how people hear me.

Perhaps I should simply put a sock in it, shut my gob, close my cakehole and keep shtum. Or maybe I should just keep on talking to my cat.

Face swap...

Despite swapping faces my daughter Holly and I hardly look any different. How scary.

F*** off...

F**k it, 1984 is here and those b******d thought police are all around us.

Manchester 2016, a few f******g years on from 1984, but it’s caught up with us and that t******g Big Brother seems keen on controlling what we think, what we say, and now even the words we use. What a crock of s**t, whatever has happened to this once great and liberal land of ours?

Some of our most ancient words have been f*****g banned by those f******s at Salford council. What a bunch of c***s. Salford City Council have really p****d off human rights charity Liberty by introducing a Public Space Protection Order at Salford Quays. Now, if you say the ‘F’ word (let alone the ancient and mystical ‘C’ word) out loud (rather than in your head like we all do from time to time) you will be fined on the spot.

The order was passed with the backing of local residents who complained that rowdy behaviour, mainly from football fans on their way to Old Trafford, was making their lives a misery. What a bunch of miserable f*****s. Perhaps they should have f*****g thought of that before they bought a b****y posh flat near a football ground. Stupid f*****g b*****s. Now, because of this small group of t***s, just 76% of a paltry 130 local residents, it is now deemed a criminal offence if anyone is heard using ‘foul and abusive language’ around the Quays.

What the f**k is the world coming to and who is going to write the list of offending words and deem what and what isn’t foul? Is c**k s****r foul (pun intended)? How about a******e, b**k, b****y, g*t, j**k, w****r, t*t or t**t?

Now I know a foul word or two (see above), but Shakespeare’s insults, put downs and cussing were second to none. He used many of the very same words considered ‘foul and abusive’ by those t*****s at the council offices, words that were in common usage until the Victorians decided they were swearing and sent them to Coventry (think about it). He also used words considered abusive in his time but would not raise an eyebrow today, cockered, toad-spotted, clack-dish, and fen-sucked to name but a few.

By the way, did you know that the word berk, quite often used in an affectionate and joshing way, is cockney rhyming slang and a shortened version of Berkeley Hunt?

Then there’s the question of body language? Will they arrest you if you flip the finger or present the reverse victory sign? Does it count if you swear in the sign language deaf people use and is it okay to semaphore, Morse tap, or smoke signal your insults?

To my mind, each time national legislation is used to shut us up, stop us using a word or phrase, or make it illegal for us to swear, we are one step closer to living in a police state where every word is monitored and nobody speaks out for fear of repercussions. How does this end? Well, for a start the authorities will be monitoring our calls and written communications, then there will be a list of approved words and words we are not allowed to use, and finally we will all speak in a meaningless drone saying nothing really just in case we offend anybody.

Oh fuck! We’re already there aren’t we?                                 

Tackling the problem...

There’s been talk in the press of banning tackling from the game of rugby for school age children. I used to play rugby for my school and county and I loved it. It was about the only sport that I’d ever been good at; except for a brief growing spurt where I seemed to be able to run faster than the wind.

Rugby, like lots other competitive team sports, has lots to offer. It’s a great team game and teaches you a range of skills from strategy and hand-eye coordination through to singing a good sweary song in the showers. Unfortunately, according to the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the structure at the heart of the game, namely the collisions and tackling involved that moves the game forward, has a ridiculously and frightening high injury rate.

One piece of recent research followed 825 school-aged rugby players for one academic year. There were 426 injuries, of which 204 - almost a quarter of the total - kept the children from playing sport for 28 days or longer. It also found that there were 81 diagnosed concussions – that’s ten percent of the players in the survey. Thinking back I probably realised this when I played, in fact in my day it was probably higher.

We live in a society where kids are coddled. They don’t climb trees or play out late. They don’t take themselves off to school aged seven and hardly any of them have ever swum in a river on a hot summer’s afternoon. Parents wrap children in cotton wool and health and safety, along with the fear of litigation, stops schools from allowing almost anything in the playground including conkers. Of course rugby isn’t conkers. It’s an extreme contact sport more dangerous than boxing and many more schoolchildren play rugby than put on the gloves.

I’ve done both and I have to say, although my dalliance with the ring was short lived, I didn’t get the weekly injuries I did playing rugby. Nor did I end up in hospital flat on my back for weeks waiting for my inverted collarbone to fix itself back in place.

Thinking about my rugby playing schooldays I realise now just how much injury and pain it involved. Dislocations were common, bruises and bloodied noses not worth mentioning, and the pitch was often strewn with boys who had knocked each other out in a hard tackle. Once I heard the crack of bone as a femur snapped from twenty yards away and on one sad season a boy was killed. I still loved playing though. I loved the winning, the team, the muscles I developed and the thrill of finding myself on the team when I checked the notice board under the library. It made me one of the lads and girls were pretty impressed too.

Looking back though, it seems mad somehow. Why put yourself in so much danger and pain for a game? I was young, but I wasn’t stupid and after the incident with my collar bone I didn’t play much because I couldn’t go in hard on the tackle for fear it would pop again. I shouldn’t have played at all according to what the hospital said, but I still did for a while even though my collar bone threatens to come out even today when I lift a heavy box.

So where do I stand nowadays?

Rugby is a great game, but I wouldn’t want my kids to play the game the way I used to play it. You can get the benefits of the sport without the hard tackling that our team was infamous for back then. We were a fearsome side, went in hard, took the blows, and our aggression was legendary in the county. We were a big team too, and the competition didn’t really stand much chance as they were about half our size even though they were the same age.

Rugby is inherently dangerous and these days I believe that some form of touch rugby would be better; especially for the under 16’s. There really is no such thing as a safe tackle, any more than there is a safe punch in the ring. Tackling is an essential part of the game at an adult level, but not for ten and eleven year old children.

The alternative is that rugby will eventually die out in schools and that would be a terrible shame.

What's that?..

We had a few flakes of snow and Luna was so confused. I don't think she realised what they were. It looked like she thought they were butterflies or something and as she tried to catch them in her paws. She looked so shocked when she caught one and it disappeared in her paws.

The search for spring…

Damn it, I blinked and missed the start of spring. It was yesterday, St David’s Day, mind you it was just another fake. Meteorological spring isn’t the real McCoy, it’s just a mark in time in order to have a nice orderly seasonal world; something just for the met men really. Mind you it was a reasonable day, rain first thing and then a little sunshine. Cold though, really cold, but then we haven’t really had any winter yet which probably explains the snow today.

So when does spring really start? Most people go by the astrological spring that they find in their diaries. That spring is all to do with the position of Earth in relation to the sun, taking into account equinoxes and solstices of course. This year it won’t be for another few weeks and will finish halfway through June, which is summer to my mind anyway.

I keep hearing that the seasons are changing. Well, perhaps they are and perhaps they aren’t, but it does seem like they are all over the place. But are they? Can a season really have a drop dead date? For me spring isn’t a calendar event like Christmas or an astronomical event like an eclipse; it’s a feeling, an experience in the same way that a Van Gogh painting isn’t only about what you see, it’s more about what you feel.

I’ll know that spring is here when I feel the urge to start planting sunflower seeds and getting serious about my tiny backyard garden. I’ll know that spring has come when my bones don’t ache quite as much as they do at the moment. I’ll know it’s arrived when I wake up with a whistle and a smile instead of my grumpy winter face.

Spring will be here when I feel it; it’s as much a state of mind as anything else. I can’t wait for it to get here. 

Seeing things…

Sometimes when I post my blog I check on Google for visually similar images. It’s easy to do you just right click on the image and pull down to ‘search Google for image’. I don’t know why I started doing this, but I find it fascinating to see what pops up. Take yesterday’s frog for instance. It’s clearly a frog so maybe you might expect Google to bring up some frogs in its check. But no, instead it considers a duck, a wobbly elephant, a naked lady, a cow, a boy in dark glasses, a red haired child walking a goat, numerous birds, waves and monsters - but no frogs.

Maybe it sees my sad soul? I don't know.

It makes me wonder about what each of us see when we look at something. Google is obviously interpreting the image in some way, filtering and interpreting the image, and basically that’s what our brains do. I’m not saying that if I see a frog you might see a cow, but I’m sure the frog that I see is different from the frog that you see. Our eyes process light slightly differently so the colours will vary, very much so if you are colour blind, and we interpret what we see based around our own experiences. I quite like frogs, so I see a cute little creature. But if you once had a frog forced down your back by a bully at school or a shit of a father proving who's boss, metaphorically speaking, the reality is far worse, then you may see a frog quite differently to the way I do.

I don’t think seeing things is quite as simple as it seems, it isn’t simply a visual thing. Witnesses who give statements to the police are proof of this. The thief was fat, thin, of average build. He was tall, short, usual height. He had blonde hair, brown hair, no hair, was wearing a hat. They all saw the same man, but each of their minds interpreted what they saw differently. They all saw the thief and know exactly what he looked like. But in reality they saw what their minds – their experience and interpretation – made them see.

It seems to me that there is no shared reality. Seeing doesn’t necessarily mean believing and what is as plain as the nose on your face often isn’t. Even if you did see it with your own eyes and as clear as day we all see a different frog, and a few of us may even see a cow. It seems that illusion is all around and the only reality we can really trust is inside us.