Saltire and Little Baby Nothing

Listening to The Last Broadcast - Doves - Very Loudly

Weather Report - Slight drizzle - but very nearly a no-weather day.

It is nice to know that my daughter's school is keeping up the cultural education. My wife wore a T-Shirt with The Sunflowers on it for the school run yesterday. She noticed a pair of top infants children pointing at her and nudging each other. They eventually plucked up enough courage to come over to her and one of them punched the other lightly and said "See! Told you! Monet!". My wife pointed out that it was in fact Van Gogh to which the reply "oh! Right! Yeah" was received followed by a statement that he cut off his ear and shot himself in a field. Unfortunately, this high-brow stuff has to give way to more popular pastimes this evening as I am accompanying daughter to the kids' disco. Just as long as I don't have to dance; I once nearly broke a long-haired rocker's nose with my rug-cutting some years ago and have been traumatised by it. Oh all right then. I dance like an epileptic mongoose.

I am thinking of a whole day in ten seconds, from deep contrast of the neon lights against the rainy tarmac, through the evil lightening of the sky, to the gradual fade-out of everything. There is a Saltire flapping in the wind just here, a blue-and-white rag of nationalism for no apparent reason. It adds to the gentle soundtrack, the sound of rain on water or the distant homogeneous sound of a city moving. The coffee is still hot though maybe not quite like coffee should be but it works as refreshment this early. I wake up worse off than yesterday, a day older which frightens me into some thoughts that really should not have to trouble someone like me. I have heard no music this past two months save for Sunday and dancing is something I know nothing about. Nothing seems right. These are all just boys games against the sky like flower scent gone in a season. The huddle of sleep now seems so inviting. I could sleep all day, or maybe lie just this side of sleep, listening to the rain on the window not worrying about whether I should be doing anything. This may be depression but it is comfortable. Somebody somewhere is having to march across the mountains in this same rain, forced out by the senses of some extremist somewhere. Yes! I sleep the whole day, curled up like before I was born waiting for the light and hoping it will never come.

Come Out to Show Them Again.

Listening to I Can Hear the Heart beating - Yo La tengo

I need something more structured. I was going to go on about how I have looked back over some old posts and how they appear longer and more focused. Actually I have also noticed some howlers in there which I would have though I would have stopped doing when I was still in my second decade. I am now into my fourth and things are going backwards.

How to write music again? Not musical notation but words that define music. My colleague from Bristol and West (Gareth) had a degree in Divinity and Philosophy I think and introduced to me Godel, Escher, Bach and told me that it was about how music and words are linked together. (He didn't mention the maths at all though maybe that was a given.) I wish I could find a contact for him. I have forgotten his surname. If you know who you are then contact me. I went straight up to George's by the University and got GEB. Now it took me ages to read and most of that was done while laid up in plaster for the summer but I read it and understood some of it as well. I may have to get a new copy as my original one is falling apart badly. Some link between worlds there maybe.

Nothing here either, just same old stuff.

More Spin than Din

Listening to University - Throwing Muses

I was not going to bother watching Dan Cruickshank's second programme in his Best Building in Britain series. After the power and drama that is Harlech Castle, I didn't think that Hardwick Hall would be anywhere near as good. However, I was stuck in the chair with Number one son asleep and any move I made would wake him up so with nothing else to watch I started the programme with a view to turning it off before the end. Now Dan has a wonderful small-boy's enthusiasm for his subject whatever it is which suggests that he might actually burst into tears at the beauty or complexity of his subjects. I was hooked and watched the lot. I was hazily aware of Bess of Hardwick as an ambitious old battle axe but despite the show supposedly being about the building itself, the history was dealt with well. I should not start on Harlech Castle. We used to stay in a house on the coast nearby and of course the castle was always on the visit list.

We went to Chirk Castle the other week and though this is more of a stately home rather than a fortress, it does have a section with simple spiral staircases and darkened dungeons. There was a notice about it not being suitable for young children which meant my daughter (5 to 6 as she describes herself) wanted to go up down and all around. I now appreciate the subtle nervousness which I can detect looking back at my dad watching us crawl all around Harlech Castle all those years ago. Harlech still has only very low walls around the high-level wall walks which never made me nervous then. We went some years ago before being toddler-bound and my wife wouldn't go up any stairs. Instead she walked around at ground level following me as I walked nervously around the top level. My dad having no worry at all about heights must have been seriously worried to have shown any concern at all. I think Conway may be the place to visit instead. Daughter is beginning to not show any fear of heights or dark places. At the William Wallace memorial in Stirling, she did get a little scared at the long spiral staircase to get to the top despite being described by one of the Canadian visitors as Princess of Scone.

I had forgotten how good an album University actually was. I think I bought it at a time when I began to have too much music to have that strange thing where your mind starts singing the next track as the previous one finishes. However, I know all the tracks on this album. Listen to it!

Educational Reading for the day here. You might not agree with it but it all seems so true.

Random Blog in the Style of the Video of The Letter by PJ Harvey

Down the littery streets under the bridge by the side of the river where the cars come from the airport, I found you skipping blankly over the empty boxes. These are the homes of the night staff, the plongeurs from the uptown restaurants. Here the night becomes the day in long mess of drear rain pouring from what I though was waste from some factory across the water. It lights your face turning it from grey to grayer as the watery light filters in like overflow from some city sewer. You want to look like that, that's your problem Missy. I made a message board on the wall of some community center over the way there. All those pictures of you lit up by the unshaded bulb and all those bodies pushing past you leaving whatever mess to colour up the building. They all told me you weren't ever here before but I can smell you over all this. The meat markets throw out anything they can't use, just toss it into the street and no one cleans it up ever. I think there is someone living under that mess of rotting protein there; I can see a pink hand in the blue flesh, calling for someone. I may go and help. It cannot be certain; this is a dangerous place, downtown. I am from the country and I don't know what downtown actually means. That last song you did was too structured. Maybe they had got you off whatever kept you going and made you clean in their eyes. See danger everywhere and make an exit before they get back to you. Those photographs, they make you immortal like Monroe or some other starlet. Mahler on the radio, that funky European dancer, those deep notes, bowed so far down in your gut that they make you think you are being cut in two by the strings. The wind blows its own note between the blank walled buildings on this street, this small alley to nowhere special. The lights are still on at mid-morning and no one has spoken to you. It might be winter but I am always so cold without you, it is difficult to tell exactly. The sweats hits me as well, dripping in my eyes until I cannot see anything any more. The bridge is above me and takes the cars to its bigger cousin, out over the river to other states, to other countries as far as is possible for me to know. I have not left this island ever and will never leave. Stop.

Me NotTheCoolPerson - a Steady-State Personality

It was misty here this morning. Being this high up is quite weird when you can't see the ground. It feels like we are on a mountain ledge on some cool summer climb with no target visible and no sight of where we have come from. This is a bit like my mind at the moment, no visible targets there either. There is a point in here somewhere though I can't see any clue as to what it is. I feel cut loose from causality, as if there has been no start to what I am doing right now and no definite end. The "Fred Hoyle" state of mind I suppose you could call it. For some strange reason, everything around seems to be slightly warm to the touch but that may be me. Like the joke about the man who goes to the doctor saying that it hurts wherever he touched on his body. It turns out of course, that the pain is in his finger.

I have been looking back over the pretentious rants of the last few weeks and it is time I calmed down a bit. I should do like certain bloggers I have seen and stop altogether but I'm not sure I could. By the way, for certain other bloggers, Kate Winslet was not in Casualty in 1986 but more like 1993. I used to live around the corner from where they filmed a lot of it - The Brunel Tech building in Bristol which is also just up the road from where the exterior scenes of The Young Ones were filmed, not that I lived like them - much. Maybe, just at the time, I though that Rick's poems (people's poet) were actually quite good. Well they were better than mine at the time.

I have looked up an Oblique Strategy and it was "Voice Your Suspicions". Now my suspicions rarely stay unvoiced. No! That's not true; there are plenty of deep, dark thoughts about all sorts of things hidden away. I am sure we are all like that which is probably not too healthy for us. Which of these can I put down here. I could be self-righteous (and egotistical) and put down some self-deprecatory stuff about myself but I hope that all my faults are plainly visible here already. So today I have been mostly having suspicions about Piers Morgan. There! Voiced enough for you? Thank you Brian Eno.

Dull and Duller! Off for a quick poem!

No Comment! Yes Comment!

while being amused at this story in The Guardian, I have to admit that I agree with it. I particularly like :-

"Nurses go where no other profession is allowed to go. Not even doctors and priests are allowed to become so intimate. Nurses have to come to grips with the philosophical concept that carrying someone else's shit is a privilege."

Now I am not sure whether this counts as a devastating dose of reality injected into our view of nurses, or a line which comes dangerously close to being a candidate for pseuds corner. Makes it point though.

My annoyance at the rest of the world has distilled into some sort of homogeneous mess out of which I cannot select anything to write about. Now does this mean that the world is getting stupider, madder or just that I am irrationally picking out all this pain for analysis? I should really just step back and accept that this is not a lot I can do to stop any of it other than the typical middle-class stuff of boycotting a few things.

A Great Big Concerto

The film this weekend was The Life of David Gale. I was expecting a sensationalist thriller but it turned out to be an attempt at a serious film, though if you want a real critique of the death penalty then you should watch Dead Man Walking. TLODG has to weave in a compelling story and a tied-up conclusion though any film, which tackles this issue, says something important even if, as one of the Amazon reviewers says, the political message descends into a sea of embarrassment. As usual with films with a complex ending, there is not much I can say without giving clues out so you will have to make up your own mind. I do have problems with the rabid announcements of "They should leave him [some famous murderer] tied up in Trafalgar square and let us get on with it". You may think I am exaggerating about this but it happens. I know my own feelings would be different if the victim was someone known to me but this goes back to my ideas regarding the mad little slavering one in my brain and his aloof brother who just waits for the end of the storm and steps in to take control again. Obviously this is something I hope never to have to put to the test but the anger is there.

Paulina In B

An earbuzz in the ear. Where else? I came ashore at Flushing, the great jewel of The Netherlands, those dry islands, clawed back from the cold seas, the graveyards of entire fleets. It was middle evening and the gold of the bars which line the dockside called us in, bedraggled as we were, to drink the unsweet beer and great meals which the bar owners forced upon us. There was music there, the buzz of raucus guitar from some band with something to say though not speaking Dutch we would never know what. Whatever it was, they meant it. And now we zoom in on some small event, a meeting of man and woman, sparked across the clean wood floor as first love affair in years. I made small notes, hiding my pen behind my glass as I saw the eyes show all that indicates something deep and chemical. My shipmates say that there is God in this moment, the leap of souls across the gap between faces, lubricated with spirits and beer but I just see some evolution come to its ultimate moment, breeding something which for all its mechanical reality is just love after all. They were not beautiful people; none of us are really, but the moment was right and we were happy to have survived that small sea, that break from our own country.

We trail through the dark town, empty of anyone this late, down by the river and content to suanter, amble, dawdle, any gait that might promote delay instead of ending the evening. Where is everyone at night? Like in Under Milk Wood, we can wander the streets and speculate at dreams inside each house, the deep secrets and fantasies of all those prone, white bodies. Earcom! I see delay everywhere now, the end of something and the doorway to the start of something else. And how much annoyance is sparking from these clattering keys. I can see some spark of petit mal beginning in those snuffles over there. The void has taken you and everyone to sleep and dream. What empty space within the glue and goo of mind? Two guitars played, one in each ear, at different rates to create a great phase effect. Hear that right now, as loud as possible in the quite of this room and close tour eyes. This is music that makes you think of nothing, no sound, no light, no vision other than the sound itself.

Remember when you used to visit the loudest club possible, maybe just to avoid the speaking that would show up how bad you actually were at it? There is no possibility of any conversation then but that is how us northerners pair up now, just eyes flashing in some disco light, and there you are, some coloured hair and splash of powder is on you like a drug, a cloud of gas. No words because none are possible. This void is worse. The deep loss of something or someone you saw everyday and then is gone, completely, dead maybe but gone at any rate. And with no explanation. Just dead or dying and never visited. Burnt and vented to the atmosphere to become part of all we breathe. I want to annoy someone really badly, making as much noise as possible within that permitted. My mind speaks to itself like a child and yet I think I am in parent mode, a random talk-down to the kids in the area. This puff of smoke, somewhere just behind the eyes, belies the war inside, the fight of conscience, of common sense with slavering irrationality. It is never over, the little angry one is never banished. The music is louder now, a repeating melange of phase and minus.

All that up there is true. There is something, some spark in there which I really wanted to expand on but it remains just out of reach. It is something about the loss of the most important thing and the years of covering it up because it is not right to bring it up at mealtimes. My descent crushes me with meaning, the breaking out of confidence, the realisation of where intelligence lies in all this mess that loss creates. This was suicide and I always knew it despite not being close by to see the method or the madness. Not mine, too cowardly for that but how could we be left alone by this? What point is there to inward terrorism, the removal of self from the world? Same as there is no point to external anger. Sometimes I think the world reflects my attitude to it and I suppose this must be true. I am happy, the world seems happy. I get crushed and the world has bad things in it. Each causes the other in some never ending loop of misery and blackness. The entire universe is exactly as I see it, not others; I am just one giant eyeball linked by some nerve of evolution or creation, cause and effect. Anthropic Principle. We think we are special because the universe seems made for us, or at least this little part of it but if it was not like it was then we would not have evolved to see it. We ignore God in all these arguments because, although he might have made us he never comes around. You think yourself special because you live in a democracy and have milkshakes and burgers. That does not make you special or even notable. That makes you small and not important. That makes me small and not important.

Relativity, special or otherwise. Special means objects that are in uniform motion and relates to light speed mostly. General allows for acceleration RELATIVE of course to other things and lets us see to gravity. How fast does gravity travel? Wylie Coyote always has to wait for gravity to kick in when he runs of the edge of the Utah cliffs but of course the roadrunner has red-shifted all the scenes because he moves so fast and when they follow him with the camera, we have a paradox. Einstein always watched the Saturday morning cartoons and knows all about all the characters. In fact he appears in one once, like Steven Hawking in Star Trek. Want to but Steven's hot air balloon basket? A whole quarter of an hour. Well maybe not exactly. Define a second and even then it needs some leeway doesn't it. Oh what's the bloody point?

Hear The Creak That Lets The Tale Begin

I found all the old school magazines yesterday while I was looking for the Bert Kaempfert CD. My wife sat reading them and giggling at the jokes and bad poetry (none of it mine - poetry was naff then). I am thinking of OCRing them and putting them up here for a laugh but maybe I need to get 'clearance' from the authors. The only things of mine in them are some terrible drawings of Space Shuttles and the A10s, which used to fly low over the school. This struck me as odd and an indication of my complete lack of political awareness at the time. Some of my classmates were brilliant at public speaking or won awards for community action, things, which made me slightly jealous of their application to these good works but never really bothered me. I was a bit out of the general community, being an incomer to the area. My colleagues here joke about my residual Worcestershire accent (Listen to The Archers to get an idea of what a Worcester accent sounds like); I do not think I have any accent at all but Liverpool people say I sound 'southern' at the very least or West-Country at worst. People from home say I sound scouse, in fact a few people said that at my graduation when I had only been here for six months. It has taken me years to recognise irony and micky-taking but this is enough to get me to make like Demosthenes though not quite as far as to put pebbles in my mouth to exercise the clarity. I have trouble with internal Ts which more often than not are glo''al stops. If I try to enunciate the letter, it sounds forced.

I have got a long way from the magazines. I don't have them to hand so I can't go through them much. There was some rudimentary political opinion about CND, which tried to steer a path between the two extremes of belief in disarmament. All the local kids including me went to the village hall once to see The War Game, the film about nuclear war which was banned in cinemas. Almost everyone went to see it; I have no idea whether my dad was happy for me to see it but I don't remember any screaming match about being allowed to go. It wasn't actually CND who organised the showing but some more fuzzy international and supposedly multilateral group. Bearing in mind that the DVD is rated 12, it wasn't actually that gruesome in itself. The real problem was that the events, had they really occurred would have happened to everybody which made it so difficult. Something which is not that bad in terms of its violence is much worse when the fear if projected locally, given a gloss of reality. One's own mortality or safety is threatened by such things and that makes it far worse. Maybe the 12 rating is the result of the lessened threat of nuclear war. If all the missiles were still targeted and ready to go in the four minutes would we give such a film a 15 or an 18 because of the worry it would cause. Not that it made much difference to all the kids (including me) who watched it. We didn't throw up everything and start quoting CND policy.

The Return of Douglas Bean

Strange this morning. Not quite like yesterday morning but I always listen to the early morning news with the idea that something bad must have happened in the night. Actually something bad always happens in the night but it is not always considered worthy of reporting. I suppose asking Congress for $25,000,000,000 (That's nine zeroes - count 'em!) is quite bad but it's not quite a bomb going off is it? It is of course a lot worse.

I dreamt about hacking into hospital display equipment simply to get it to display personal messages (Christmas greetings I think) to the rest of the staff. The normal thing in my dreams of rooms having no walls of floors seemed to have changed; there were walls this time but that may have been because of all the medical equipment above each bed. The actual signs I was altering were hanging from the non-existent ceiling like the "score-boards" we used to have up here to tell the help-desk staff how many calls they had and had dealt with.

I forgot all about In Search of Shakespeare yesterday. My daughter insisted on watching The Good Life, which seems a strange thing for a 5-year old to watch but there was much mirth at the love and hate given to the beans. I have to admit that a good deal of the laughter was mine despite having seen that episode several times. All the times when I ranted privately about having to mow the acres of lawn or help with the weeding of the vegetable plots and I still look back at the time of minor self-sufficiency with some sort of pride. I am living too much in the past here. All that stuff about school the other day has made me think that I should be looking forward but that of course leads to darker thoughts. Maybe I should not be listening to The Joshua Tree.

I sometimes get into work burning to get on with whatever it is I have to do; it is usually quite interesting and success is always good. However, at the moment, even with a major cutting-edge project, this is just a chore to be got through. Confidence in my own ability is lacking, though this is maybe due to the slavering monster in my head with the rational one knowing what he knows is true and right and will always come through. As I said, I am not exactly depressed, just feeling slightly odd compared to normal.

Nulls and Voids

Listening to Six Pianos/In C by Piano Circus

The problems of a normal working day have lifted the darkness of this morning and I am now a happy bunny in one of those fields I described. So of course now I have nothing to write about. As this is no poetry forthcoming, I will have to fill this up with the normal drivel.

I was watching Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare yesterday. A group of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company were taken on tour rock-star style to bring excerpts of plays to various locations (like the New Inn at Gloucester). All very well and good but did they have to put a hand-written page saying that Shakespeare was the NEW Rock and Roll in the window? Bearing in mind that Private Eye has a column for things like that. Well apart from that it was wonderful. The threatening atmosphere of the watergate and house around where Christopher Marlowe died was - can't think of a word here that doesn't sound like a candidate for a bad writing column. Well it was sinister; they had got exactly the right grey day to go there. I know I can?t write so don?t bother telling me. You weren't? That's all right then.

What turns this drivel over the edge into being random?

I have decided that when I am writing lots of poems, they all sound like tosh when I read them back as I have just done. When I am not able to write them, the ones that already exist sound quite good to me. I am trying to get my head around why that should be. I sometimes feel like Captain Picard in the captain's chair with a direction to do something sounded out and actioned with a commanding shout of "Make it So". If only I could control my mind like that. That of course is the difference between mainstream entertainment and real-life. Drama, to be popular has to have the structure and story to make it interesting whereas real-life is just constant repetition which gradual changes, a bit like a Steve Reich piece I suppose. I know that some deconstructionist of whatever they are called will have already got all this down but of course I am just trying to make sense of my own thoughts. I would suggest that you stop reading now because I can see that this is going to be mostly rubbish. This week, I have been mostly writing rubbish. Week? Year, decade etc. I would like a novel to be just that, a random collection of seemingly disconnected events because that is what my life is. Biography very often seems to be a novelisation of someone's life. The Philip Larkin biog didn't do that; it came very close to being what I just requested with his death just being the final event - yes I know that death is always the final event in someone's life but maybe you know what I mean. The Pepys book is clever in that it maintains the feel of being lifted from the diary all the way through even though the only parts of life know in absolute detail, are the years covered by the diary. There are enough events in Pepys' life to create a novelistic feel without having to dramatise it. Andrew Motion's strength in the Larkin book was making the stream of mundanity readable and compelling - "Not an ounce of boredom" said one of the reviews. Now Terry Pratchett. I read three and half of his books in correct order and found myself thinking that he was taking the paragraphs of the first and simply shuffling them. Maybe he has changed over the years but with so many other books to read, I think I will manage to complete my span without troubling the bookshop for any of those again. I know how many fans there are out there. I am not trying to be cruel.

I nearly got drawn into Mr. Pratchett's site then but I will resist. This worries me because it makes me think that I am growing up and I don't actually want to just yet - or at all even. This theme of feeling the same as I did when I was 15 is worrying me. I think maybe I can see a mid-life crisis brewing but then again maybe this is what happens when you get to 20 and realise that you have to grow up - it just never got to me. My sister says that I was always happier talking to adults, which I understand but was that the reason I never felt quite right at school. Does that give you a clue to which of the little cherubs I am on the photo below. Time to go now or I won't have time to spellcheck.

Archaeobotany Forever

I would like to say that I have learnt to let the bad things wash over me. But that would be a lie. Sometimes, they hit me out of the blue with a depression that makes Quattara look like high ground. I am not sure what today's is caused by but it may be some weird juxtaposition of some beautiful music I heard on the TV yesterday with yet more bombs going off. I often let the dark side worm its way into some bunker in my brain so that everything but me is the problem. I can sit there with this irrational self-righteousness in control while the rational bit left stands at the roadside shrugging its shoulders and thinking of ineffectual solutions. Today I have the idea that the bombers are little more than thugs who if they did not have their causes and their own self-righteousness, would be hanging around street corners, kicking dogs and shouting at the suits going by. Whenever I see the perpetrator of some atrocious crime being driven to or from court with the van running the gauntlet of a mob, I see the breeding ground for just such crimes. Abuse begets abuse. You don't need a study to tell you that. For all the papers running their campaigns to name such criminals, they are the breeding ground for the attitudes that are the base for the creation of such perversions. They are basically hypocritical, relying on our delight in horror and our lusts to sell papers. Yes, the dark side has me today. Time to find some Cocteau Twins for diversion.

The poems seem to have dried up recently. I can't work out what the trigger for the periods of creativity is. I have been feeling quite good for some time, which may explain why I don't need to write poems to cover that. Maybe some more will come out of this current time. Having told you that I am bluer than ever, that rational homunculus is sitting there still and seems to have actual control while the saliva-dripping one is just bouncing about causing no real damage. I have to find a visualization to get rid of it. I like Spring woods; they do it. I have a lavishly illustrated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that depicts the forest scenes in a beautiful way. Remember all those walks in the woods as a kid? Or the bit in AMSND when Bottom wakes up deep in the woods with Titania in love with him and all the fairies carrying out his every wish? Think of this, lie back and listen to something like Victorialand. There goes the madman! Out into his mad world with his mad friends, off to bomb something. Perhaps this should all be in the private diary, which I may or may not be writing. The problem now is that the lazy calm has emptied my head of any worthwhile ideas. I see the autumn corm, gold in the fields around our house, the sea waves blowing lazily across them, the catalogue of greens that forms the hills to the west and feel the heat built up over many summer months, promising to leave in deference to the early mornings of early autumn but not yet doing so. This was as I would want it to have been. Rural life is never quite so idyllic but there you go. Maybe someone envied us but all that would evaporate in the terrible cold and damp of the winter. Sometimes it went well below freezing, down into those depths of temperature which freeze the blood in the extremities and leave you wondering if you will ever be warm again. I see the autumn harvests, frozen into black knots in the trees, the berries and fruit, left rotting on the floor and then all mush turned to ice on hard ground. The mists flow through the valleys, like sleeping gas on some battlefield, a transmission of cold from the solid earth to the fragile bodies of all who walk through here. I would be back there in a second, made real again, but knowing all I know now. I said yesterday that I still felt like a kid; this is when I meant. What would you change about this? You have your own ideas I am sure so I do not need to tell you how to live your life differently. Time is over in this particular strand of existence, but all times exists in one universe. The me then is still real to me because I exist in memory and yet science might say that the me then is really real because time, although it cannot go backwards or move at a different rate from that which we experience psychologically, still exists, complete and with all its ethereal and momentary events. They will happen or have happened or are happening. That roadside bomb is just a tiny spark on this giant timeline. When the sun goes nova and humans have created themselves as pure thought floating in the nebula of the cosmos, that tiny release of energy will be nothing, a frozen ball of plasma in the great book that they mention in the Requiem.

Voodoo Economics

I am trying to work out who I would prefer to resign over the Iraq abuse photos - Piers Morgan or Geoff Hoon - Hell! Let's just go for both of them. Sorry! Bit of politics there and as you know I don't do politics.

This current track by Yes sounds more like The Beach Boys. I was never really a prog-rocker despite the Mike Oldfield fixation but I was leant this CD and some of it is quite good. It all reminds me of that strange image of the seventies pub and beer garden which always crops up at these times. This in turn (in best James Burke Connections style) reminds me of a post-exam trip which our school arranged for us in about 1979 to some urban canals in Birmingham (Venice of the North?!?) and an industrial museum. It was one of those days promising thunder but we all had no more exams and six weeks of holiday to look forward to so we felt great. I don't remember many of the details except for the dead dog which caused merriment on board our narrow-boat I can tell you! Oh yes! There were lots of engines and cars at the museum, which interested some people. I must have read something on the bus up there but I cannot remember what.

This is a photo from good-old Friendsreunited from that very year - guess which is me. Answers on a postcard. Well, bearing in mind the 14 million items of mail which get lost each year - answers on an email would be a better idea.

I am not one of the little beggars down the front who appear to be doing sign language of some sort. What do those symbols mean? The teacher in the gown on the far left is the headmaster Mr Hutchinson of whom I cannot say much as it was all such a long time ago. Looking at me in the picture just makes me think about how I do not think of myself now as any different from me then. I know more stuff and probably have a better idea of what I fell about matters of conscience but in essence my mind works the same way. I am probably have more of an artistic interest than I did then. I was turned off poetry after quite liking it earlier and it was so lucky that we had A Midsummer Night's Dream rather than Henry IV Part one (Oh Look! Here Comes part 2 now) as I would have failed the O Level in Eng. Lit.

I keep looking back at all the time I wasted strolling around the school trying to look cool and "talking funny" with certain less rural companions when I could have been sat under some tree with a book or even a note book. What if we had blogs then? You don't have to spend much time searching to find out what my blog then would have been like. Teenagers have this sense of their own importance. Unfortunately, these days this carries on in adult life with an awareness of rights but none of responsibilities. I sound like that Teachers' Union leader yesterday). I also sound like Mr Daily Telegraph as well. This has to stop. Smoke, Drink and take drugs Kids.

I Am Sitting In The Morning At The Diner On The Corner.

I hate the equivocation of the past. Guess what film I watched on TV yesterday! Well it was filmed well anyway so maybe that doesn't matter as mutch. I wonder what the Japanese thought.

Was it raining with you for the weekend? It was sunny here but everyone I spoke to across the rest of the country seemed to have had rain. It has arrived here now, a glorious soak for back to work. I love the rain. Have I told you before? I sometimes wish it would rain all the time; it seems to be a great leveller which reminds me of the Pepys book - The interregnum - Cromwell and all that? I once read the first few entries of a shorter edition of Pepys' diary just before my daughter was born (which may explain why it was not completed) and I am now up the this point in the biography and it recalls all the excitement of the sea-trip that Pepys took with his Boss to pick up the new king. Bit of a lad before lads were invented I think.