A bucketful of Babel...

There’s a lot going on in the confusing state of affairs I call my life. Even so, along with all the drama I have long periods of empty time; well, I awake at six or earlier and just simply get up. Not because I want to - sleep would be a joy - but because the alternative is to worry and I hate worrying.

With all this extra early morning time on my hands I Google randomly. I’ve no idea what I would do without Google and today I Googled ‘best painting in the world’. I’ve no idea why I did that either, but life has become so random that I don’t really question why or what I do anymore. I just do it.

The ‘Best painting in the world’ turned out to be by Breugel. There were others in the search of course including the Mona Lisa (which incidentally is to my mind a pretty bland image, enigmatic smile or not), a couple of Van Goghs, The Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Scream and a few contemporary brightly coloured couples wandering through an abstracted Paris or Vienna.

Ah Breugel, I always come back to Breugel.

Perhaps it’s my Dutch peasant nose or those surreal TV landscapes in Neil Innes’ TV show back in the seventies that makes Breugel so special to me. Another person would have picked one of the Van Gogh’s, maybe there’s somebody out there that would have even picked the terrible painting of two white horses stood in a very green field by a very blue river. But I know that Breugel is in my very soul (yes, I really did just write that) despite never being completely sure just how to spell his name.

When I look at his Tower of Babel I see Dali and Cezanne, Rembrandt and Escher, I even see Reynolds and a little Turner. I seem to know its history instinctively, where it came from and why and who it has influenced since. It’s a marvel, just paint, brushes and canvas but look where it’s led us. Without this painting there would be no surrealism and, like a knocking-on domino effect, that would mean a very much smaller view of the world.

It really is the best painting in the world, or at least one of them, and it’s helped to form the world that we live in from sandcastle buckets to New York skyscrapers. 

What's the matter with kids today?..

In the words of the fifties song 'Why can't they be like were were, perfect in every way? Oh, what's the matter with kids today?'

Kids today don’t know they’re born. Says the man who left school with a load of crumby ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, pissed and slept his way through polytechnic, got a low paid first job but still managed to get a mortgage in his early twenties and retire mid-fifties on a reasonable, if reduced, pension with two homes and no mortgage or debts.

Yes, kids today have never had it so good and they don’t know they’re born.

It used to be so easy. You went to school, then on to college, and after that you walked into a job, because there were loads of jobs around, and climbed whatever greasy pole you were affiliated to. I never once had to question where I was going because it was pre-ordained, written in the stars. I always knew that I’d have a job in design, get paid for working, be able to buy a house and – because I am fairly sensible – have a pension when I finished working. I didn’t even have to work that hard. Certainly not as hard as a coal miner or some poor targeted person in a call centre. Work for many years was safe and fun. It didn’t set the world on fire, but it was okay, almost a career, almost exactly what it said on the can when I started out.

I hear people complaining about kids today and how they don’t have any interests other than their phones and game consuls and sometimes I’m sucked into that way of thinking too. People are always posting about how their generation climbed trees, played out until it was dark, walked three miles to school each day; and again sometimes I take this higher ground approach to those kids hanging out on street corners and making me feel slightly scared because they are wearing hoodies and trainers.

Of course they will never know why they might need a pencil because they have never owned, or probably even seen, a cassette tape recorder. Why would they and so what?

Kids today know that they’re born. They also know that the expectations of life that I took for granted when I was their age no longer apply. It’s a tougher, more results orientated, much, much more expensive and demanding world than I ever had to deal with. No wonder depression is so common in our young people, no wonder some of them are so angry. Sometimes I wonder how they manage not to scream given the uncertainty of their futures. How do most of them manage to be so accepting? Us oldies should get off their backs and stop being so smug. After all, it isn’t their fault. It’s ours. We made the world that they’ve inherited.

Kids today have never had it so good?

No, that was me. I am one of the lucky generation.

Watch the birdie...

Do you remember when taking a photograph wasn’t simply a matter of whipping out your phone, pressing a virtual button, reviewing, editing it in some app and then uploading to Facebook or the cloud or whatever?

Photography used to be all turning dials, carefully sizing up your view, not pointing into the sun and clicking. Of course I’m talking holiday snap photography and not the serious photography carried out by men who belonged to camera clubs with three cameras around their necks, dozens of lenses, light meters, and hundreds of rolls of film all with different speeds – whatever a film speed is.

Photography used to be hard and very hit or miss. How many times did I send off my free film envelope to have my holiday snaps developed only to find, when they were returned a few days later, twenty or so glossy squares of people with their heads cut off or obscured by my thumb. There were often some strange orange and black nothing snaps that were plastered with stickers in the packet too. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I might get two or three passable pictures out of a roll of thirty-six. But I do remember the elation of being returned thirty-seven prints from a thirty-six film even if thirty-four of them were really rubbish.

And what about loading the camera in the first place? Such a fiddly experience with spools and tabs to slot the film in and to top it all you had to shut yourself in a dark cupboard to do it so as not to expose the film. I remember once at Dudley Zoo going into the reptile house to load my camera only to find that I hadn’t closed the camera back fully and my - what were definitely thirty-six or seven fantastic shots of monkeys and penguins - turned out as a series of grey fogged nothings. Happy days? Probably, but I don’t have the pictures to prove it.

In my house there are hundreds of photographs, drawers and drawers full of them. Most of them were taken on all manner of ‘proper’, but relatively cheap cameras. Some were taken using those useless disposable things that were all the rage for a while and guaranteed to disappoint. Others were snapped using a camera that took a film cartridge instead of a roll. There may even be the odd badly fading and horribly asymmetrical Polaroid lurking alongside them. What a revelation; a camera that developed instant pictures, although the films were an astronomical price.

Even with all those happy memories of big rocks and ships in the very far distance gathering dust, I can’t remember the last time I looked at them. This digital world has made it all too easy. Everyone seems to be able to take a half decent photograph even if it is only of them pouting or a pint of beer and you can keep your whole life on a single USB.

I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

You can run...

I wish I had the words, but it’s complicated. I’ll try to explain. Somewhere between my silly battle with Amazon, my mother in law’s stroke, my mixed feelings about Rob and Helen, the illness that surrounds, and my drinking, I’ve become so disassociated that it seems almost not worth commenting on. No, not almost, hardly.

I’ll park it here as a reminder. But today it looks like it’s my turn. 

Bicycle to Blackpool...

Joan used to cycle to Blackpool and back in a day in the summer. A round trip of over 100 miles, leaving at dawn and getting back in the dark on the bike she bought with a tenner she borrowed from her dad. She paid it back at a two shillings a week and he wrote it in his book until it was paid. She was fifteen or so, it was 1945, it was her first job and she got paid eight bob a week (which was less than fifty pence) and her dad took half of it even before she'd paid her bike debt.

She was really proud of her bike, she'd worked hard for it. Sometimes it was just Southport that she cycled to and sometimes she'd stay in a youth hostel overnight, but just how she managed to cycle that far in a day is beyond my understanding.

Just goes to show.

Bicycle to Blackpool.

Is that where you are

Pedalling away,

Or are you riding

To Southport today?

Seventeen on your ten guinea bike,

Borrowed money, but you can go where you like.

To the tower and back

On a sunny Sunday,

Back then you had fun

And forgot about Monday.

An ice cream and a stroll on the prom,

Then back on your bike to where you came from.

I’m sure as I look

I can see you peddling,

And it’s not far now

So please stop trembling.

I don’t want to watch as you ride away,

But wherever you’re going it’s a summer's day.

Lost rabbit...

I’m always intrigued by the lost things that you find in the street. It makes me wonder what their back-story may be. Here’s a rabbit that I found today and placed on a wall in case someone should come looking for it. I guess it belonged to a child and fell from their buggy, but was it a girl or a boy and what was its name? Was it an Easter present and who gave it? Has the bunny been missed and is the poor child wracked with despair?

From here my mind as always runs wild, filling in the blanks and answering the questions to build a story which sometimes even I begin to believe. That’s the problem with an overactive imagination and needing to make sense of the world through using it.

The boys name is Tomas, goodness knows what happened to the ‘h’ and why his parents chose to call him that. All his life he will be a Tom, the difference that his parents hoped to make by the odd spelling lost in the truncation of his name. Tomas, as if he wasn’t different enough already.

Tom was two last November and already he’d become the most terrible of terrible twos. At first they thought he would grow out of it, but as each day passes they begin to realise that he won’t. He won’t eat his vegetables and is always screaming for chocolate. He’s one of those children that make people scowl and walk quickly away when they hear him shouting as he makes a scene in the supermarket. Old ladies 'tut', other mothers pull their children away as if Tom has a disease that may infect them.

The rabbit hasn’t got a name. Tom’s grandmother bought it for him at Easter instead of an Easter egg. Tom isn’t allowed chocolate any more, it makes him even worse. His grandmother doesn't call around much any more either, not since Tom started punching her in the legs and slapping her face. The nameless rabbit, which Tom thinks is just another piece of cloth, didn’t fall from the buggy accidentally at all. Tom had flung it as hard as he could when his anger boiled over and his mother, too tired and beaten to notice, wasn’t looking. Tom won’t miss it. He doesn’t even know it has gone. He forgot all about it the moment it hit the tree and fell on to the soil.

Autism can be like that, unforgiving and indifferent. It seems it isn’t just Tom's rabbit that is lost.

And it’s goodnight from him…

So there goes another national treasure. The Two Ronnies kept me in stitches in my teens despite the surreal chaos that was Monty Python being around at the same time. It says something for the genius of the Ronnies that they could capture a teenage audience when the Pythons were at large, although in many ways their humour and sketches were made of the same slightly surreal material.

Ronnie Corbett sat in his armchair, rambling on about pretty much nothing, was a fascinating thing to watch, a monologue that seemed completely off the cuff and so easily done. It couldn’t have been though could it? So at ease and so self depreciating, I challenge you to watch him without laughing. Then there was The Phantom Raspberry Blower, Four candles, their funny songs and my favourite F.U.N.E.X? - Swedish made simple.

It works just as well as a script, but it’s really worth watching. Here it is, say it aloud.

F.U.N.E.X?

Man: L.O.
Waiter: L.O.
Man: R.U.B.C.
Waiter: S.V.R.B.C.
Waitress: L.O.
Waiter: L.O.
Man: L.O.
Man: F.U.N.E.X.
Waiter: S.V.F.X.
Man: F.U.N.E.M.
Waiter: 9.
Man: I.F.C.D.M.
Waiter: V.F.N.10.E.M.
Waitress: A. V.F.M.
Man: R.
Waiter: O.
Waitress: C. D.M.
Waiter: O.S. V.F.M.
Man: O.K. M.N.X.
Waiter: M.N.X.
Man: F.U.N.E.T.
Waiter: 1 T.
Man: 1 T.
Waiter: O.K. M.X.N.T. M.X.N.T.4.1.
Waitress: V.F.N.10.E.X.
Man: U.Z.U.F.X.
Waiter: Y.F.N.U.N.E.X.
Waitress: I.F.E.10.M.
Waiter: S.I.L.L.Y. C.O.W.

So it’s goodnight from Ronnie, thanks for all the laughter. I don’t laugh enough these days, but you will always make me roar and that’s the mark of a true comic genius.