Little Duckington - a reprise…

So after all those weeks in Little Duckington with all the intrigue, romance, mistaken identity, affairs, even the odd murder, this is where they all end up. In the bathroom in a large glass tube like so many ordinary rubber ducks before them, waiting to be picked up and played with – waiting for the chance to swim and quack, gamble and dance, sing and go off down the pub for a pint or two once more.

Who would have guessed that these are the very same ducks who led such wild and interesting lives for such a short while not so very long ago – Dilly, Dolores, Dilly, Dani, Dennis, Dunny, the Dave’s, Colette and Claudette Canard, even poor Father O’Mallard.

But, that’s the way with soap operas. One moment the whole nation watches or listens, the next they are gone. Brookside, Crossroads, Eldorado, Triangle, Mrs Dale’s Diary, all gone, no longer with us, deceased, almost forgotten in the unstoppable wake of ‘Stenders, Cora, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale (not Emmerdale farm you notice, they don’t farm much in those parts these days - too busy killing and raping), and Doctors (whatever that is).

Oh, sometimes they are revived. Who could forget the short-lived return of Crossroads in 2001? It didn’t really take off, but then what is Crossroads without Miss Dianne, Sandy and his wheelchair, Meg (who seemed to crash planes almost weekly), and the lovelorn, tea-cosy hatted, Benny?

Others, like Triangle, will stay sunk beneath the seas of time for ever hopefully. Just whose idea was it to make a soap opera about a ferry travelling between Felixstowe, Gottenburg, and Amsterdam anyway? Didn’t they realise that the North Sea is a trifle dreary, and the weather often a little more than inclement?

More recently, there was that awful, weird and thankfully short-lived soap Echo Beach. Set in the Cornish Town of Polnarren it fumbled along almost without plot whilst Echo Beach’s’ sister show, Moving Wallpaper, described the trials and tribulations of writing and making Echo Beach. What a silly idea – even Jason Donavan couldn’t save it.

Soap and rubber ducks, they seem to go together so well and who knows one day Father O’Mallard might step out of the shower to find that his murder was nothing more than a dream. Maybe it’s time for the return of Little Duckington, or at least the occasional special episode…

Who knows?

Catching up with my past...

I bumped into my past on the M6 motorway yesterday, not literally I hasten to add. I was driving along in pursuit of yet another straw to cling to when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that took me back to a time when I didn’t need straws. Back to when my future was an ocean to be sailed upon and not a stagnant pool to flounder upon, maybe even drown in.

At first, I wasn’t sure what I’d seen. In fact I almost didn’t see or remember it at all. But there was something about the line, the slant of the lettering which unlocked a dusty corner of my mind. So speeding up a little to catch up with the van, I drew alongside and glanced across. I'd been right, there it was. On the side of the van was the logo I’d designed for a Midlands based engineering company over thirty-five years ago. My past had caught up with me, or rather I'd caught up with my past.

For a moment as I looked at that logo, I was a long haired young man in jeans and a purple paisley shirt again. Nervously showing my designs to the managing director of Roltech Engineering on a dark November evening in his factory in Smethwick. He’d built the business up himself and was justifiably proud of it. He had strong ideas about his logo and wanted something simple, bold and modern, not fussy, easy to read - solid and workmanlike like himself.

At the time his company was making ducting sections and raised mezzanine flooring. It was doing okay and Mr Roltech (I can’t remember his name) wanted a logo to use on the side of his fleet of two vans and in the catalogue he was planning.

It was my first freelance design job. But Mr Roltech seemed to like my designs and asked me to produce the artwork for his catalogue pages. Back then there were no computers, so each evening for the best part of a week I spent my time pasting together the artwork in my little studio in the converted loft. Sometimes I worked into the early hours with my scalpel, rotring pens, rub-down lettering and cow-gum.

How simple it had all seemed back then. An opportunity arose, you grabbed it, made something happen, and got paid for it – and the work of those few evenings paid well, almost a months salary and I enjoyed it.

I can’t remember how I picked up that freelance job, but it was the first of many. I loved doing freelance, but it was never quite enough to give up the day job - and then one day I became either too busy or too old and didn’t chase the work any more. How I wish I’d carried it on now, if only for the satisfaction it gave me.

Okay, the Roltech logo wasn’t great design and it was never going to get a design award, but Mr Roltech liked it very much. I’m really pleased that the company (which has expanded massively and now makes all manner of gantries for the mining industry and suchlike) is still using it without change over thirty-five years later.

Perhaps I should have charged more.

Sentimental fools...

Someone who should know better and just happens to be my oldest daughter posted this status on Facebook the other day and it kind of set me thinking, the way that often statements that make no real sense do. The status was as follows:

‘is sad that old fashioned sentiment is mostly dead!’

Old fashioned sentiment! I ask you - what on earth is that? It seems to me that old fashioned sentiment is very much a modern invention, more marketing than anything to do with genuine feeling.

In the past people were too poor and too busy staying alive for sentiment - there was work, war and death, and that was about it. I doubt that there were many miners who had time to ponder their luck and reminisce about how lovely their lives were down t’pit – basking in the light of a flaming fire as it cast a rosy glow of warming satisfaction over their old fashioned chintzy company hovels.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can be as sentimental as the next bleeding heart (as I am sure that you are aware). But I find it hard to believe that anyone who had lost their nearest and dearest in the first world war (or any war come to that) would look back on the experience with any degree of old fashioned sentiment. Even those old fashioned pastoral farm workers - up at five in all weathers to work twelve hours shifts of hand-tooling, back-breaking labour, returning home to a family too large to feed and a consumptive wife - might find the countryside just a little less idyllic than Constable sentimentally painted it up to be.

Yes, the past was work, war and death - a daily struggle with no room for sentiment. Still is in a good proportion of the world.

It was probably Mr Charles Dickens who invented old fashioned sentiment - what with his Great Expectations and Old Curiosity Shops. He certainly invented our sugar-plum view of Christmas. Before ‘A Christmas Carol’ it was all yule logs (as a necessity to keep warm) and as much sorrow-drowning alcohol as you could manage to consume before falling asleep in the unheated room you shared with six others. Toys and even play were a Victorian invention. Prior to those enlightened times children were too busy working up chimneys or in factories on Christmas day to unwrap their non-existent presents or eat their non-existent sweets and Father Christmas was still in Holland putting coal into bad children’s shoes.

And then along came the bloody Pre-Raphaelites, all long hair and poetic sentimentality, and that led to all the overly-sentimental pictures of cute spoilt brats and even cuter sad, protective doggies that the Victorians loved so much.

Yes, the Victorians have a lot to answer for. Not only did they sentimentalise life (whilst visiting prostitutes, contracting syphilis and drinking gallons of gin), but they were also responsible for the popularisation of greetings cards - that other driver behind the trumped-up miasma of nonsensical sentimentality that we seem to believe has existed throughout history.

Before the Victorians there were no Christmas or birthday cards, nor any Valentine’s and congratulations cards - but even the Victorians would have found it hard to believe some of the ridiculous cards available to us today. These days there’s a card for everything, and if there isn’t – well, you can simply design your own on-line with a printing batch of one.

‘Happy Divorce’, ‘Welcome Spring’, ‘Glad You Two Have Got Together’, ‘Happy Grandmother’s Day’, ‘Happy Birthday to my Dog’ - all invented by Hallmark and the rest of the card companies to get us to part with our cash and drive the misguided belief that ‘saying it with a card’ is somehow better than a phone call, text, e-mail, hand-written letter, or even a face-to-face conversation.

So, am I sad that old fashioned sentiment is mostly dead? Well, I don’t believe that it ever existed, but if it had the answer would be a resounding ‘No!’

Dogs that bark, birds that sing…

Ho hum, another day doing what I do these days and it gets really hard to find anything worth blogging about with all the stuff that isn’t going on around me.

Oh, the rest of the world goes on – although there was almost a hiccup with the world and the end of it last week. Turns out to have been a bum steer, an erroneous tip, yet another misguided religious fundamentalist getting it totally wrong yet again. They’re all the same regardless of doctrine or creed.

Of course, there are things happening. Another Icelandic volcano with yet another unpronounceable name is spluttering out yet another nasty ash cloud. Kathy Kirby - my Dad’s favourite - died yesterday at the age of only seventy-two; she was the highest paid female singer of her generation and very pretty with it. Oh yes, and Bob Dylan will be seventy tomorrow. Ryan Giggs may have had a few 'not quite as discreet as he would have liked' away games allegedly (or aren’t I allowed to write that). Blackpool and Birmingham are out of the Premier League (yawn), and those misguided whales have left that loch in Scotland, and it appears that the one that died wasn’t stranded at all.

Yes, things are happening – just not for me, and as always in times like this I find myself focussing on the minutiae just to stop the bigger picture (which at the moment looks like a very dreary landscape by somebody who has lost all the bright colours from his paint-box) from flattening me completely.

You can probably tell that I need to get out more - a lot more. Small things have become very important, ritual something to focus on, silliness a way of feeling better about things - and of course it is that gardening time of year.

As you might expect both my front and back gardens are pretty tidy at the moment. I’ve even begun raking the gravel into patterns at the front of the house again - and the hanging basket and pots are all getting watered daily. The gnomes out back are dusted weekly and the fish pond cleaned out fully almost as soon as required, even the wisteria is being carefully kept within the confines or the space allotted it. I’ve bought a solar powered light string to hang from it and the lights look like tiny dragonflies. I can hardly wait for night to fall – they make me smile a little. Well, they do say small things please small minds, and I’m sure that I can feel my mind shrinking.

Small things please small minds because they tend to take your mind off that big picture, the dreary landscape I mentioned earlier. They distract me -- and so to the point - dogs that bark and birds that sing.

Not a real dog, but my new doorbell which barks like a small terrier when the button is pressed – yap, yap, yap, yap, yap – yap yap yap – grrrrrr - yap, yap, yap, yap, yap – yap yap yap.

And my bird, it’s a blue tit actually. Well, when I say blue tit a not-quite-lifelike resin rendition of a blue tit with a motion sensor embedded inside it. I keep it on the step by my front door and each time somebody steps onto my porch it sings a song to let me know I have a visitor. First I get the tweeting early bird warning, then the barking dog announcement that somebody is at my door. It is all very effective, even if it is a little tacky (well, quite a lot actually). It makes me feel a little better, brighter, it lightens my mood and that’s what counts there days.

Maybe I should buy an aquarium and some tropical fish?

Scumbles II – around the corner…

Remember that scumbled panel? Well, the more I look the less I see. He’s here though you know, they all are. Who would have thought that Breugel was up there, just above my head, scumbled onto the bottom of my wardrobe? Disney’s there too, and Goya, Donny Darko, Edward Lear, Sayuri Ichijō, Richard Dadd, and of course Dali.

I have to sneak up and catch them out of the corner of my eye. Hard to work out what I’m seeing. Well, you can never quite tell what’s just around the corner can you?

I’ve never really liked life around the corner. You know, that life that takes you by surprise, the unpredictable kind. I prefer roads that are straight and easy to follow. Roads with good, clear visibility way into the distance - as far as the eye can see and then some. Corners are dangerous. Anything can be around the corner, it’s an unfathomable place.

Once in my youth I was walking along the high street and, turning the corner, almost fell over a woman who lay on the pavement coughing up blood. An ambulance was called and as I walked quickly away I noticed the bloody footprints I was leaving. Another time, not too long after that incident, I turned a corner to find my girlfriend kissing a friend of mine. She wasn’t a girlfriend for long after that although he remained my friend until he died. On yet another occasion, not so long ago, I turned the corner into my road just as a car ran over my neighbour’s cat. The driver didn’t even stop, so I picked up the broken body of poor old Tesla, carried him over to my neighbour’s house and broke the bad news to her.

Around the corner can be an unexpected, frightening and often bleak place. Oh, good things can be found there too. I’ll never forget tuning a corner on holiday in Santa Cruz to see a wonderfully blue sea and a huge white wave crashing thirty feet against the cliff-face wall. Generally though there are monsters around my corners – blood and betrayal and death.

Anyway, they’re here – like the TV people they’re beginning to come through. Little by little they’re coming into focus, becoming clearer, stepping into view from around their various corners – ‘Y'all mind hanging back? You're jamming my frequency.’

I hope I can still run fast if I need to.

The end of the world is nigh...

So, today was meant to be the Rapture, and as I sit here at 7.00 pm writing this, it doesn't look like the world is going to end after all. So we can all breath a sigh of relief and go about our business. Well almost, there's still a few hours left although it was meant to happen an hour ago. I didn't even know that the world was going to end until my daughter Holly mentioned it the other evening in passing. She didn't seem that bothered by the news, just another event in an eventful world - besides there was her hair to sort out ready for the weekend, because if the world was going to end she wasn't going to have messy hair for the occasion. Heaven forbid!

It made me think a little. When I was a kid it seemed like the world might really end at any moment. The Russians hated the Americans and the Americans hated them right back and we all knew that they had thousands on thousands of nuclear missiles pointing at each other and at any moment it could all kick off and that then we would all be toast and the world would be destroyed.

I vaguely remember, aged 5, the Cuban missile crisis. For a while there it looked as if the world might really be finished, and although it didn't, it came pretty close. From then on the end of the world was only just around the corner, ready to happen at any time, and I often thought that growing up in those uncertain days of what has come to be known as the 'Cold War' accounts in part for what seems to be my generations fatalistic approach to things, their acceptance that we are all helpless to do anything about anything really.

Or perhaps that's just me talking for myself. It might sound silly to young people today but living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust did rather taint our lives back then. Hardly a day went by without somebody talking about the bomb - wanting to ban it, or news of another nuclear test out in the desert or on some far off pacific island, or warnings that we had moved from defcon four to defcon three and that the Doomsday clock was now set at three minutes to midnight.

It seemed that when I was growing up nuclear war was imminent pretty much all of the time. It's different today. Oh, there are still wars and the threat of terrorism seems ever present, but I don't think we live waiting for the world to end with the press of a single button any longer and I truly believe that for the forty years or so after the second world war ended, up until the collapse of the USSR, we really did expect the world to end at any moment. It may not be a safer world, and the world still might end at any moment, but if it does it'll be because of a comet or a plague, maybe divine intervention even. But it won't be because somebody decides to push a button in Moscow or Washington - or at least I hope not.

Doodle for the moon...

Here’s a doodle I did for a friend. I think she liked it. It’s hers to do with what she will. I made the charm for myself though. Well, you never know when you might need one.

Moon Charm

Osiris, Mawu, Bendis, Min,
Rhiannon, Mani, Arma, Sin,
Candi, Isis, Tanith, Juna,
IxChel, Selene, Heng-O, Luna.
Khonsu, Thoth, Somi, Cerridwen,
Arianrhod, Danu, Annit, Mên.
Aega, Ishtar, Diana, Mani,
Andromeda and Coyolxquhqui.

Gnatu, Zirma, Mah, Dae-Soon
Name charm chant by light of moon.