Oh Michael! Michael

A Ruddy Frame! That’s what!

My daughter requested Bolero as her bedtime music the other day so I made her a mix CD which has now got her into Brian Eno and Pooka along with The Balanescu Quartet’s version of Computer Love which she now keeps requesting because “it is violins and I want to play the violin”. I can’t wait!

I had a dream within a dream today. I first dreamed of a strange, underground cavern, lit in yellow, seemingly made of creamy wet rock which turned out to be bone dry. Turning a corner, I found myself facing a cafeteria integrated into the walls of the cave, empty but lit the same way. I don’t remember anything else, either pre or post but I do recall trying to describe this dream probably because I want to blog it. The question now is am I still in the dream trying to describe me describing the dream. Chuang Tzu has nothing on me.

For some reason, I was thinking about this on the way here this morning and the string of thought got me thinking about A Canterbury Tale while I overtook yet another wagon emblazoned with clichés both visual and verbal. It was for this food company and had the standard cheffy picture of our white-suited-and-hatted hero, holding up a plump pepper with one hand and gesturing to it meaningfully with the other. There he is on the website. I can only imagine that he is making some obscene comment about the comestible in question. The slogan of “Bringing Food To Life” is also meaningless in the extreme. I suppose they may be a very good company; many are. It’s just that the advertising that goes with everything these days seems to be at a low point. I wonder if the companies simply throw their marketing and advertising out to someone else and never bother about it. Private Eye has a regular list of “solutions”, a set of tag lines for companies where the “S” word has simply been inserted into a complex way of describing the company product. “Domestic Waste Management Solutions” for rubbish collection etc.

I seem to have got off the point. Contrast this empty mess of marketing with the gentle visit to the carpenter/wheelwright in A Canterbury Tale. I possibly thought of this because of the bucolic reverie that results from listening to Cider With Rosie. It is of course a pipe dream, to think of going back to those less-complex days and of course there is always what I call “The Rickets factor”. We have things a lot better these days in terms of our welfare. It is just that I suspect our mental welfare suffers because of this complexity. Downsizing has always looked attractive but is of course impractical. I actually grew up in a rural area though my urban origins were obvious to the locals, and winter was hard. In fact a lot of the time was boring despite my rosy view of it from this distance.