When I go bonkers...

What a great word ‘bonkers’ is. It makes you smile as you say it and although it’s really an insult, it’s actually quite inoffensive. Say it over and over – bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers, bonkers – and it gets even funnier. Say it too often though and it will probably drive you bonkers. Say it to music and the sky’s the limit, innit.

The Oxford Dictionary states that the origin of this delectable word is unknown, although it probably started being used in the 1940’s. Well, it does sound a kind of ‘chocs away’, ‘bandits at three o’clock’ kind of word. “I say old chap, Ginger’s gone completely bonkers just look at how close his Spitfire is to the…. (BOOM). Oh dear, it looks like poor Ginger’s bought it.”

If I’d had money on it I would have said that it was a made-up word. It would be nice if it had been one of Shakespeare’s, “He's bonkers that trusts in the tameness of a shrew”, failing that either Edward Lear or Lewis Caroll. But sadly none of these can lay claim to 'bonkers', although it is attributed to Caroll in a few places on the Web as this:

Mad Hatter: “Do you think I’ve gone round the bend?”
Alice: “I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

But no, it seems that this quote is from the 2010 "Alice in Wonderland" movie and therefore Tim Burton – who didn’t invent the word either – came up with this one. I’d love to know who actually did invent ‘bonkers’ though and how it came to pass into everyday usage. If it was invented in the forties by a very small boy then the inventor might still be alive. Of course he’d be in a straight jacket, unable to remember his invention, absolutely bonkering bonkers, but alive nonetheless. Now that would be bonkers.

Anyway a quick burst of nonkers on bonkers.

When I go bonkers

When I go bonkers

I’ll carry conkers,

An old car honker,

A fluffy pink monster.

I won’t get sponsors,

Nor be awarded honours,

But a trip to the doctor’s,

Might conquer my bonkers.

Death of an unknown man...

I was listening to PM on Radio Four yesterday when a report of an unidentified old man taking himself to the top of a hill on Saddleworth Moor to lay down to die came on the radio. Nobody knows who he was; he just got off the London train, went for a pint and then wandered up on the moor to lie on the ground until he ceased to exist. Of course my mind buzzed with questions, but as I listened to the three minute report I found myself keying this verse. I have no idea why, it wasn’t an experiment as an experiment requires planning and intention, it just happened almost automatically as I listened to the newsreader stating the facts. It was done by the time the report ended and I was left wondering where it had come from and why.

  

Death of an unknown man

I traveled from London on the day of my death

Train on a Friday

To Indian’s Head.

A pint at the Clarence

Then hard up the hill,

Darkness descending

To lie down with my ills.

It was wet, it was cold

I was done, I felt old.

Don’t ask who I am,

And don’t question why.

I am my own man

I’ve chosen to die.

Now as I lay me down to sleep

Shrouded in my mystery

I know this hill my soul will keep

As I become old history.

A bad night...

I had a bad night last night. The dreams that visited me colluded to tangle my fifteen tog duvet and threw all four of my soft plump pillows onto the floor. I must have woken five or six times and it took me an age of counting to fall back into slumber. Yes a very bad night for poor, poor me. Maybe I should try sleeping on the streets.

There's a romance around living on the edge. In our world we have it all so very easy in so many ways; we get soft, self satisfied. I ease my conscience by giving to charity, cry sometimes when I see the injustice and pain in the world. It makes me feel better about myself, and I usually sleep soundly at night, all the realities of poverty and pain going away until the next time I am so ungraciously reminded that I am supremely fortunate to have been born into a country that has so much. There is a part of me that wishes to walk in their shoes, but it's that part of me that sees romanticism in everything. I wouldn't last a week without my cosy bed and central heating and yet I still sometimes walk past the rough sleepers in our own cities and move past as quickly as I can. I must be a monster because, there but for the grace of a God I don't believe in, go I.

Once when I was in India I saw a young girl, no more than seven or eight, carrying a small roll of thick polythene along the road. She was clutching it to herself like it was the most valuable thing in the world. I asked the driver why she was carrying the polythene and he replied that it was her shelter and at night she would find a place, wrap herself in it and try to sleep. To her it was the most valuable thing in the world. It was her home, perhaps even her life. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

I remember seeing people wrapped in blankets and asleep just off the main streets in Bangalore. Not a few, but scores and scores. In cities all over India when night falls thousands of people hire blankets from the blanket Mafia, a group of street vendors who hire out dirty blankets by the night. Their customers settle down in the streets in an attempt to get some sleep and keep warm to survive the night. They call these blanket hirers sleep vendors and they are highly organized and officially nonexistent. The sleep vendors divide the pavements and public spaces into quadrants and when night comes their customers arrange themselves into blanketed townships of bodies. Some of these people have come back to the same spot every night for years. They call it home too I guess.

It’s easy to see the sleep vendors as making money out of other people’s misery. But they provide a service when no other options exist. I don’t applaud them, but at least they are doing something that helps; so who the hell am I to judge them as I toss and turn in featherbed luxury?

Here in the UK we have thousands of people sleeping rough in our cities. The problem isn’t on the same scale as many other parts of the world but we are a very rich nation and empty buildings abound in our streets. Five minutes walk from where I live is a huge old YWCA Hostel. It’s been shuttered for at least 10 years and stands like a magnificently empty citadel when it could shelter hundreds. Of course it is scheduled to be converted into luxury apartments at some point, but would it really be so hard to open it up a few to let people sleep there out of the wind and cold at night until then? I’m sure there would be volunteers to help. I might even volunteer myself.

My mind often goes back to that young girl in India carrying her roll of polythene. I wonder did she survive and what she is doing now. I didn’t know what to say then, and I don’t know what to say now, so I say nothing.

No wonder I can’t sleep at night.

Death of a goldfish…

The bowl was small, but big enough for a single goldfish. It was home. A watery sphere where on most days food would alight on the water without the effort of the hunt. It was safe. No big fish to eat little fish, no currents to sweep away; a couple of litres of goldfish tranquillity sitting on an old veneered sideboard.

Inside his world Billy the fish swam around and around. Sometimes pressing his fishy face to the glass, other times bobbing to the surface to gulp the stale air trapped inside the bowl. Of course his name wasn’t really Billy. Nobody had bothered to name him. He was just fish, but any creature without an identity seems wrong somehow - at least it does to me. Not to everyone though.

Billy didn’t notice the change at first. There was nothing to see, no obvious modification to his watery world. The first he, or it could have been she (fish are so hard to sex) felt of his impeding death was a tingling in his gills and a soreness around his already bulging eyes. The water smelled wrong, it tasted wrong too. It felt like water, it looked like water, but it hurt and burnt. He floated to the surface then sank down again, listing to one side as the change began to take effect. His tail flipped and then flipped once more as he sank to the bottom where he lay panting. His gills worked hard in a last desperate attempt to survive as he flew to the surface and failed to leap out of the water. Whatever was eating into his shiny golden body had won. He turned upside down on the surface before sinking once more to the bottom where he settled like a lump of carrot. If he’d only known he was alive, he may have felt his death. But do fish really have any understanding of their own mortality?

After a while Billy’s body rose again to float on the surface like some very unsatisfactory resurrection for a very small fishy Jesus. It was two days before anyone noticed him rotting on the surface, by which time his glinting shine had dulled to grey, his eyes had become a milky white and all signs of his small life had dispersed into the poisoned dead water. The smell of the bleach was hardly noticeable now, the only odour dead fish. Of course nobody noticed and nobody cared, and that was only part of the problem with this particular nobody.

After nobody cried at his passing he was unceremoniously emptied into a different bowl, white porcelain this time, and flushed away as if he had never existed. Just a small life, in a small world, doing small things to pass the time, so small it shouldn’t have had any impact on anything at all. But sometimes it’s the nothings that start the ball rolling and before you know it there’s an avalanche on its way.

And so the death of one small fish became the start of a big, big future. Of course not for Billy the fish, just for nobody really.

Abilene...

I was never really one for model kits. I did once make an Airfix submarine, well almost. I gave up when I glued the propeller in place badly and the damn thing wouldn’t go around. Today I was reminded of my kit by all this debate about Trident submarines. It seems that the propeller doesn’t really want go around on them properly either.

It’s been suggested that it might be best to have nuclear submarines in the water without the nuclear bit; in other words no warheads on board. What a deterrent that would be, a big underwater boat with a few sailors doing hornpipes and pretending to be dangerous. Mind you if we didn’t tell our frightful foe that there were no warheads on board then the deterrent would still be there. Take it a stage further and we could claim to have all sorts of weapons and, if we were very clever, there’s a very good chance that we would be believed. After all, there has to be some clout in being a world power for all those centuries.

There are 196 countries in the world today, only 9 of these have a nuclear capability. The big five are the United States, Russia, China, France and the UK. These are all members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology; in other words not to let anybody else in on their game. Outside of this exclusive club, but possessing nuclear weapons, are India, Pakistan, North Korea and probably Israel. The rest of the world including Australia, Canada, the rest of Europe, Japan, the entire continent of Africa have to rely on ordinary weapons, poor things.

Just think about it. Most of the countries in the world have no nuclear weapons or nuclear submarines to launch them from and I don’t see the Germans or Australians quaking in their boots or waving their arms in dismay - and as for Switzerland... In fact some countries, South Africa and some former Soviet countries used to have nuclear weapons but don’t any longer - so why all the uproar over Trident?

Here in the UK having weapons of mass destruction is a source of national pride for many, a reminder of a time when we were a world power and player; days of Empire, Dunkirk spirit, defending our waters, good old Blighty and all that. Of course this no longer applies. We are not a hugely serious player in the world any longer, at best we are an influencer and we can influence without the need to possess bloody big bombs that nobody is ever going to use. In recent years pretty much everything we’ve done as a nation in terms of getting involved in military action has been less than a success, some might even say a disaster.

Not once have we had cause to rely on our hugely expensive and not at all used nuclear arsenal, not even our submarines.

From what I hear on the news it sounds like the main argument for Trident isn’t as a deterrent it’s about protecting jobs in the shipbuilding industry. How can that be right? We either need these things or we don’t and given that our real enemies probably aren’t nuclear wielding superpowers any longer then why would we need to continue to build these things to haul nuclear weapons around the globe or even at all? It makes no sense.

It seems that we are on the road to Abilene here, a paradox where a group refrain from rocking the boat (or should that be sub?) believing that everyone else wants to go there, when in reality nobody does and everyone ends up in a place that none of them wanted to go to in the first place. I’ve been to Abilene many times and each time ended up wondering why I allowed myself to go along on the trip in the first place. Well, I don’t want to go there again and neither should any of us. Perhaps it’s time for us to stop needing weapons we don’t really need at all, perhaps we should get off of the Abilene road.

Imaginary friends...

Did I have an imaginary friend? When I was a very small boy there was a boy that visited me sometimes although I’m not sure if he was imaginary or something else. He didn’t speak, he left that to me. In fact he hardly ever showed himself and when he did, as is always the way with me, he flashed into my line of vision and then flashed out again. Thinking about it, most of my real friends over the years haven’t been so very different; flashing in and out of my line of vision, not saying much, drifting away eventually.

Of course there are a few that remain constant one way or another, but friendship is a strange affair. It requires common ground, physical, experiential or attitudinal, preferably all of these or at least two out of the three. Rarely do you make a friend without common ground. Do you ever, is it even possible? I can’t answer that question; I’m too judgmental, quick to take a dislike, too fast to measure and weigh. Besides, I’m wary of the friendship thing. I tend to take these things too seriously and when they go or end, they take a small part of me away with them.

So, did I have an imaginary friend? You know I really can’t remember. I wonder if he remembers me? 

Talking weather…

Did you notice the snow? Of course you did. We British are experts on the weather and don't miss a thing. The fact that we don’t really have very much of it doesn’t stop us commenting and sharing our knowledge to anyone who will listen. On an extreme weather scale we’ve hardly registered until recently. Even now it’s mainly rain and the associated flooding that is moving us into a whole new area.

We do get the occasional storm, we even name them now. We’ve had Barney, Eva, Clodagh, Desmond, Abigail and Frank. Gertrude is next and Katy, Mary, Steve and Wendy will follow at some time in the near future. But most of them will probably amount to little more than some blown out umbrellas and a few big puddles. Perhaps that’s why we have given them such nice friendly names. We are more Postman Pat’s Windy Day than The Wizard of Oz in the UK.

I can’t be sure but I think we are some way off the tornadoes and hurricanes that rage across the Caribbean and the United States, even our lightening seems a little flat when you compare it to the electrical storms you get in other parts of the world. Maybe it’s because the British God doesn’t like his thunderbolts to be too devastating, okay to strike the occasional tree but not destroy a village. After all that wouldn’t be cricket would it? Our UK weather is generally bland and predictable and there’s one thing we can guarantee - our summers won’t be too hot. We may have a hosepipe ban or two and the reservoirs may get a bit low, but I don’t think we are likely to see hundreds of cattle skeletons scattered across our fields anytime soon.

And then there’s snow. Snow is a rarity in the UK, which is odd really given that we are pretty far north and parallel to Labrador where they have very serious snow indeed. A light dusting divides us British into those that can’t wait to build a snowman and those who dread going out in their cars. Of course our snowfall rarely merits either the excitement or the angst, but a few flakes of the white stuff and it seems that everyone has to post a picture of it on Facebook with supporting text that either decries or celebrates this amazing weather event.

Meanwhile in the rest of the snowy world it is business as usual. The roads don’t grind to a halt, schools don’t close and people even go shopping in their cars. Life goes on just as it goes in most of the world in extreme heat, winds, rain, lightening, storms and just about every other weather that this world can throw at them with hardly a comment.

The British have been living in a meteorological Eden with our temperate climate, sheltered by warm water streams and wind systems for a long, long time. But things are changing and we need to be much better prepared for extreme weather in the UK. If we get the worst of it we are all going to have to change, after all we are not a huge country and our population is large and dense. Extreme weather events could be more catastrophic in the UK in terms of destruction and death than it would be if we had a smaller, more scattered population.

That will really give us all something to talk about.