Look before you leap...

It’s Leap Day, that strange day made up of all the left behind bits of days, left out fragments of the four years leading up to the great day itself. Just once every four years, 1,460 days of minutes already passed all packed together to form an extra day. It’s a day for hares, frogs, Christmas Lords, marriage hungry women and those wicked faerie folk.

Legend has it that if a pregnant woman steps on a frog on leap day and kills it and then has her baby, the baby will be stolen away by fairies and replaced with a changeling with the body of a man but the heart of a frog. Now I don’t know if that is the case, but I can almost believe it. The day has a very strange feel. That out of time feeling where nothing you do really matters - a dead day, a cousin to Twixtmas.

I’m not a big fan of this pretender of a day. I can’t help feeling that it’s an illusion, which of course it is. All time is an illusion and it’s only our silly need to measure it that brought about Leap Day in the first place.

Watch out for frogs.

Blank...

Blogging isn’t easy. Sometimes you have no idea what to write about, other times you do but it comes out as something else altogether. 

Today is another one of those days when I have nothing in my mind other than empty space and the knowledge that I have so many things that I should be doing that I really can’t spare the time to write about nothing. But today is a Sunday blank, so here I am writing about nothing again.

I sometimes think that an empty page is like a newborn child. At first it has nothing upon it – pristine, clean, white and pure – and then someone comes along, begins to make marks on it and in the process makes it into something else. Its personality changes with each stroke of the pen, scribble of the pencil, or stamp of the key. Some pieces of paper become letters (love, hate, blackmail, complaints), others become lists (shopping, to do, household budgets, favourite foods), and others become short stories, poems, essays, music notation. A piece of paper can go anywhere, turn into any number of things; and so can people.

I guess that what I’m saying is that I wonder if we are the sum of what others write upon us (how we are treated, the music we listen to, the interests we take up, our friends, our enemies, where we are born). It makes me wonder if there is any self at all. Maybe we are simply a mixture of learned behaviour, experiences, and influences. Perhaps we are just random marks upon pieces of paper inside our minds.

I wonder if that makes each of us a book?

Happy Sausages…

There’s nothing happier than a pig in shit. But us British love our animals so that won’t that really do will it? We adore and respect our cuddly animal friends so much that we have some of the most rigorous animal welfare legislation in the world.

We cuddle them as we rear them, move then in luxury coaches, build houses for them that an estate agent would kill for and later, when it is time for them to go into the oven or frying pan, kill them as gently and quietly as possible.

We have zillions of rules and regulations concerning how cows, chickens, sheep, pigs, goats, ducks, rabbits, deer and even ostriches are kept and reared. We like our animals to be happy and well rounded before we eat them, and why not? If we have to put animals in our sandwiches then the least we can do is look after them while they live their brief, but comfortable lives.

Of course a first class lifestyle doesn’t come cheap. Quality care pushes the price of production up because you can’t produce a happy sausage or contented burger without spending money in the process. But who wants to chomp on a miserable sausage or a sad sack burger? Our rules are far more stringent than the rest of Europe and therefore our animal products are generally more expensive.

We’ve self-regulated ourselves into being one of the most expensive producers of meat in the world. But so what? Who needs Europe or cares about cost when we have happy pigs for a bacon sandwich

Of course, there’s always the vegetarian option.

Going all philosophical…

Sometimes people question my homespun philosophy, even criticise me for it. That’s fine, I can live with that. But I don’t know why they question, after all philosophy by its internally generated nature has to come from an individual and, as I am an individual who thinks far too much, I don’t really have much choice other than to philosophise; homespun or not.

Besides, homespun is such a misused word. It assumes shoddy, made without care, second rate, not as good as the mass produced product you can buy off the shelf. Well homespun may be full of holes, but what is life without an escape route? Let’s not forget the care, the necessity, the practicality, the love that homespun actually is. Homespun means made for individual purpose in so many ways and what’s the point of any philosophy that doesn’t meet its purpose?

It seems that an awful lot of people feel that philosophy has to be a grand affair, only thought about by great minds, immortalised in Greek, swathed in religious or political cloth of one colour or another or taken with a French brandy and a Gauloise on the banks of the Seine. Well, I’ve drunk brandy and smoked a Gauloise on the banks of the Seine, although I have to admit that Greek is a foreign language to me. But I think that gives me some right to label myself a philosopher. As the Dalai lama once said: ' There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples.'

Besides, why buy an ‘off the shelf’ philosophy when you can spin your own? What’s wrong with going through life working out what you think and believe rather than picking up somebody else’s or some cultural organisation’s doctrine? I know that it isn’t very popular in these times of Facebook groupthink and governmental media mind control. But I’d rather think for myself that have my thoughts spun for me.

I like my homespun approach. I like homespun generally. In a simpler world I’d have no problem making do and getting by homespinning what I needed where I could and, as long as I had the basics, I think I could be happy. I like the idea of the Spartan approach but unfortunately, or fortunately dependent on your view, the world I live in isn’t set up like that, so my spinning goes on in my mind. At least my mind is my own and unfettered by religion, football, or political motivation. It’s a place where I can be free and do just what I want and it’s the one thing in my life that I have truly built myself.

Thinking for yourself should be celebrated, not mocked and poo-pooed by minds considered far greater than mine. Of course I’m no Plato or Proust, I’m not as inscrutable as Confucius or as devious as Machiavelli, but I’ve pretty much worked out what I think over the years and, homespun or not, it seems to work for me.

Or that’s my philosophy at least.

The great smell of...

Is it me or have pubs pretty much lost their smell? I can remember when you could walk into a pub blindfolded and know exactly where you were by simply using your nose. Not that I spent too much time blindfolded in pubs, I was sometimes blind drunk but that was what I was there for. Yes, in bygone years pubs had an aroma all of their own. The same is true of libraries, but for different reasons.

That pub odour was great. Apart from the sweet fragrance of beer and tobacco, there were those underlying hints of wood, straw, even the occasional pickled egg. It was rather like nosing a fine wine and some pubs, just like wines, had a different aroma to others dependent on their vintage. Of course the brewery beer each pub stocked helped the variety, as did pipe or cigar smoke. The smell of pipe smoke usually meant a farmer’s inn, cigars a bar far too posh for a spittoon. I can just about remember sawdust on a few pub floors which added an extra depth to the beautiful tang of the public house, especially when it was damp.

The type of fire would often have a say in the matter too. It seemed that all pubs had open fires to huddle around; some coal, others wood, and occasionally peat. There was one pub I remember in the back of the Oxfordshire beyonds that had paraffin heating and lamps, it smelled beautiful.

The only food served back then was crisps and nuts and the aforementioned pickled egg. Pork pie was a rarity reserved for darts matches and if you wanted real and non-hazardous, healthy, food then it was a trip to the chippy. Pub fare didn’t mask the pub aroma as pub foods do now, and of course no self respecting ale house would dream of having extractor fans. Who needed them when the door would open or close every hour or so to the shuffle of a regular? Is it really just me or do pubs smell of almost nothing but steak and chips, curry, and scented candles these days? Sometimes in those more pongy days there would be the smell of damp clothes and the whiff of sheep or pigs. Some would call it a reek, but I would call it character and there were plenty of characters – both washed and less so - to provide it.

I miss the old pubs, dim smelly places that they were. You didn’t go there to drink wine or eat a pizza. You went for the smell of your pint, the aroma of chalk from the dart board and, if you were lucky, a sniff of the barmaid’s perfume. Sometimes the smell of the pub would live up to their names. The Railway would quite often smell of trains, The Water’s Edge of canals, and The Cock… Well, let’s just say all of the toilets smelled pretty much the same. Bloody awful!

Crazy...

What is it that song says: But we're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy?

Well I think that Seal is probably right on that one. There are times when the craziness can keep you going, then again there are times when it can stop you in your tracks and other times when you really shouldn’t be thinking crazy at all.

Crazy, just what does that mean? There is so much craziness in the world today.

I remember when OCD was called being tidy, depression was being fed up, alcoholism was liking a drink, and being clinically obese was just enjoying your food rather than an eating disorder that would kill you in any number of horrific ways. Of course this was a world where medical professionals treated the illness rather than focussing on the cause and nobody talked about the child abuse going on next door or  Mrs Jones’ black eye, the one she got when she walked into that door.

It was a different world back then, although ‘then’ was only a few decades ago. We used to laugh at the imported sitcoms where our American cousins were all in therapy, giggle at the bus conductor as he pinched the bum of that teenage girl on his route, badly behaved children were just naughty, sex addicts were simply randy, a good daily clout from you father wasn’t abuse, and it was expected that there should be a place for everything and everything should be in its place - in its place, in its place, in its place.

Meanwhile unmarried mothers were locked away for life in asylums, homosexuality was treated as an illegal disease that could be ‘cured’, and you just didn’t talk about ‘it, no matter what ‘it’ was. Not a great situation and I’m sure that many more problems were caused as a result, but where did all this mental illness that surrounds us these days come from?

It seems that everyone just has to have something – ADHD, OCD, BPD, depression, bi-polar, various eating disorders and addictions. It appears that most of us are suffering from one neurosis or another and undergoing counselling, taking medication, or just quietly going mad. Of course life today is very stressful, or so we are continually told, but we’re not living through a World War expecting a bomb to fall on our house or waiting to get a telegram from the War Office at any moment. We can laugh about ‘Dunkirk spirit’ and ‘stiff upper lip’ but ‘getting on with it’ was just something people did because they had no choice and I’m sure that things generally, health and social care included, were much worse back then.

I know. They must have been crazy.

It would be easy to say that we have become self-obsessed, soft, molly-coddled, and even easier to say that we are all under terrific pressure, and all of that is true. There’s no doubt that we are more aware of our individual mental health these days and rightly concerned for our well being and there are many members of our society who are really suffering; suicides are up and metal health issues are at the top of our government’s health agenda if we are to believe what we are told. But why this mental health plague? Could it be that all the media focus, government interest, and the medical profession’s obsession with prevention rather than cure is making our mental health worse? Is that what is driving us crazy?

Look I’ve had my fair share of being down, panic attacks, anxiety, historical incidents that have taken me years to work through and others that I’m still dealing with, my alcohol addiction, my angry outbursts, but sometimes we all have to accept it’s our responsibility , recognise ourselves, stiffen our upper lips and just get on with it. Pondering these things can often make things worse. Our minds and mental state can be a problem, but we shouldn’t just pass it on to somebody else to deal with, because they won’t. It may drive us crazy but only we can do that.

And with that my therapy for today is over.

Headfull of hometown...

As I get older I become more addicted to the past, my past that is. Perhaps it’s because I have more days behind me than in front of me so there’s more to consider or maybe it’s just the ‘Good Old Days’ effect.

I’ve recently joined a closed group on Facebook, nothing dodgy or even swinging. It’s just a group that mumbles on about the town that they once lived or still live in, a nostalgia group sharing memories about the town where I was born, Thame in Oxfordshire.

It’s wonderful to see the pictures of the place that I lived in until I was eighteen and then moved out of to seek my fortune; wonderful and at times a little saddening. I am a man full of retrospective regrets. Of course, at the time I didn’t regret leaving, but then I didn’t really understand that Thame was a very special place in a special time and that the rest of the world wasn’t as special as the little market town I left. Of course the Thame I lived in is long gone now. The shops I wander around in my mind are shut, the open spaces of my early years are now housing estates, many of the people I know so well in my head are changed or unfortunately no more.

It must be that way for everyone that moves away from their hometowns never to return. Those in their nineties are living in a childhood memory town where there are very few cars, horse drawn milk carts, no McDonalds, man-made fibres don’t exist, and spaghetti hoops aren’t even a food. My 'in my mind' hometown has more pubs than you can shake a stick at, almost no restaurants or takeaways, a sweet shop on every street, and enough eccentrics to fill an asylum. Sometimes I wonder what and who I would be if I’d stuck around and lived my whole life there. Of course I’ll never know, but I find myself drawn back to it in my mind more and more.

They say that the past is a dangerous place to live, but I’m really enjoying wandering around my childhood home even if I am surprised sometimes by what has gone and what I didn’t even notice in the first place. For years I walked down Moorhen Lane to walk in the countryside only to find out a few weeks ago that it was called Moorend Lane not Moor Hen at all. Much of that that countryside is now houses. I know because sometimes I go for Google Earth walks in Thame and, whilst much of what I remember is still there, I can hardly recognise some of it, even the house where I was born on Wellington Street.

I guess that I can count myself lucky to have been brought up in such a lovely place and my Thame is even lovelier because I can leave out the people and places I really don’t want to remember. They have no place in my Thame or my good old days.