Writing as if humans mattered.

Everything is back to normal after what seemed like a very long break. Even my daughter is back at school. As usual I have made all the unvoiced, internal resolutions to start everything with a clearer mind and also as usual my mind staggers to a halt like a trolley rolling over syrup. Only poems ever seem to exit my mind with any velocity of note. Maybe I should write everything as a poem where I can flit from idea to idea without having to worry about the consistency of it all.

It is cold all over the country today and the forecasters are suggesting significant snowfalls for next week. My daughter will be happy as the only time she ever saw snow was on a visit to Malvern two years ago and although that was quite deep and nice to look at, it was powdery and wouldn't stick together at all so no snowmen or snowballs. We only seem to get snow here every eight or so years. The last snow we had here was about 1994 and I took loads of pictures to send to people who were writing to me from Bali as they never see snow. I explained this to the kids in the street and they said that they had never seen snow either. Maybe I should have said nothing the other week when I said that we didn't get really cold winters anymore. When I was at college, there were many days when the temperature stayed below freezing. I have probably mentioned this already but I used to walk to the phone box to call home listening to tapes of Gregorian chant which made the whole thing quite unreal. Further back, when I was still at school and we got days off because the weather was so bad, we would skate across the Icy ponds on our bikes. We felt reasonably safe as the ponds were really just foot deep depressions in the common land where we lived and the ice was nearly frozen through. We did scramble out on one permament pond with a view to testing the depth with a plumb line which was probably quite dangerous but you don't think of that at that age. My brother fell off his bike and got a lump the size of an egg on his head. Where do lumps that big come from? Must be something Lymphatic I suppose. There's a great title for something - The Morphology of Lumps.

I want a machine to speed up time or to enable me to jump to a specific point forwards. No need for any worry about time travel paradoxes as I would still exist in the gap between the start and end. I used to dream of having such a machine to allow me to skip to a time after some bad thing coming up like and exam or a driving test. I was far more bothered about the actual event than the results of that event. Now I just want to speed up the time until I get to go home. I don't feel inspired by anything here other than lunchtime. Still, my life is within my control to a certain extent so I suppose I just have to get on with things. I think my brain runs far ahead of what I can actually type as do most people's when they are blogging like this, without definite ends or structure. I have the ideas arrayed in my brain and they fall out onto the keyboard at a rate which I can't keep up with. The random fridays are only an extension of this idea. They are like word association without the direction given by the trigger words. In fact, my mind has just gone into this terrible loop where I can't think of anything other than the loop to write about. Hopefully, this very act of describing such a loop will allow me to look at it and find a way out which is logical rather than doing what I normally have to and ending the paragraph until I can find something else to carry on with. It hasn't worked. All I can think about is a loop in my head ... but what is that? ... The lane down the hill over the common from the house where we used to live. This was back way to Upton-upon-Severn which I could cycle along (ten miles) without seeing a car or even a person. It went through fields and alongside streams, passed farms (one very smelly poultry farm I remember) and big old manors but I rarely saw a person; I would have regarded them with suspiscion if I had and they would have felt the same about me; I was a scruffy oik then. I used to cycle that road at least once a week for years, whatever the weather. I had no purpose other than to visit what I considered a metropolis. There were no cities in the world as far as I knew. Malvern was the biggest place there could possibly be. Worcester, London and New York were all imaginary places that were made up to fool us into thinking that big was beautiful. Big is still not beautiful. I'm with Schumacher.