Blank Stares and end-of-the-pier Humour

Just accidentally read some really reactionary stuff about the situation in the occupied territories. I will not link because I do not want even my meagre bandwidth to link to theirs. The authors (I struggle to work out how people with that attitude actually managed to learn to write) seemed to think that the only solution involved napalm, rat-poison and ploughing the ground with salt. The expletive count was way to high for comfort as well. Hooray for reasoned argument.

Sometimes I feel like a little child, who has not yet learned to walk, sitting in between two armies situated about a mile apart. There is no one else, just all these soldiers and little me in the dust. That seems to be the level of extremism. Democracy was invented two and a half thousand years ago and sometimes it just appears to be a sop to justify the building of weapons. You know when they start towards each other, exactly what is going to happen to me. Count my atoms on the wind.

Sorry! I have been keeping the dark stuff at bay; it was just the extremism of those sites that got to me. It was a 'what's the bloody point' moment. No more today I promise.

Did I ever tell you I was friendly with Trainspotters? Gricers I think they like to be known as these days though maybe that’s just one of the sub-divisions like in Bird-Watching, where true devotees are birders, Scalp collectors are Twitchers and those who only go out when it is not raining are dudes. My dad will insist he is a birder and I would have to agree with him. Back to the rail-freaks. At least two of my classmates were heavily into train spotting and I actually accompanied them on a rail-tour up to the North Yorkshire railway (that of heartbeat and numerous other period pieces).

Well now I have god rid of 90% of the few readers I have, can I start being depressed again? No? Oh well! Just a thought. Actually talking of trainspotting made me depressed anyway so I had to stop. It has reminded me of an idea I had yesterday. This blog is basically everything I can remember, interesting or otherwise so why not start at the beginning and write down everything? Of course it would not be complete and you might go back and update it. It would be a sort of fractal like this :- you would write down the main events like birth and marriage and then maybe fill in an event or memory for each year. You could keep breaking it down until everything you could possibly remember was in there. I am not saying that the following is the starting point for this idea as I am sure it should be done off line but I am going to start with what I can remember.

Early memories are not really of events; they are of places. I could say what my first memory was but I would still have earlier ones of place and people. I used to take 5 years of age as the boundary between the fuzzy memories of early childhood and the more definite ones that come with school. Of course the boundary is fuzzy in the extreme. My first definite memory that I can associate with an age is of running unfettered in a grass field by the sea. I have no idea where this was though I seem to remember being 4. Anyway before this there was the first house I can remember. It was a mock-Tudor detached house in Beeston, Nottingham. It had a piece of lawn off to one side with a tree stump in the middle. Sometimes I was placed on this tree-stump but it was too high for me to get down from. I seem to remember being able to climb it later but I think I was too small for that when we left that house. At the back, the house was pebble-dashed or had concrete over the wall. One year, this collapsed and killed our tortoise who was called slowcoach (after the one in Bill and Ben no doubt.

I can remember a Christmas morning when I woke up very early to open my stocking. Christmas day was not a big thing as far as I recall but I got a small blue torch and used it to read under the bedclothes. It had a tiny little bulb and was flat like a modern stick of deodorant. I think it may have been that year that I got a bike for the first time because I remember the kitchen of the house and going out of the door. I was allowed to cycle round the block on my own. This links me to the memory of a woman we knew round the corner. Her name was cybil and she had a house with lots of windows that probably meant it had a conservatory. There were certainly plenty of plants. No idea what happened to her. Down the road, either next door or a couple of houses down, there lived two girls, older than me, Amanda and Angela or 'Manda n' Angela' as I called them. I remember pretending to be a fish in their front room while they stood on the furniture and tried to catch me. An early crush was present at this point.

There was another 'girlfriend' who lived a couple of roads away. I think her name was Laura but I do remember that she lived in Devonshire Avenue (there direct clues to the location). I cannot remember who started the joke but we had a saying - "you've been down Devonshire Avenue 'avenue?" Somewhere close to Laura's house there was a nursery school. Now I cannot work out if this one is the same as the one I really recall. On one day, I was so sad at being left at nursery, that I threatened to walk home. It wasn't far and I think I may have tried to go. The nursery I do remember well was run by a Miss (or Mrs) Depechetoi (doesn't that mean hurry up?). It was a great place, a building on one side of a huge lawn with the owner's house on the other side where you might get invited if you were good. I don't think I ever went so I must have been really bad all the time. The school had a tree house and lots of toys and rope ladders and bikes and potted meat - er - no - that's in Ratty's basket in The Wind in the Willows.

Rubbish hey?