The Secret Dairy

I did spell check that, though I didn't bother with yesterday’s entry. Find anything?

Listening to Random Playlist from media player - currently Breakout by Swing Out Sister.

Which reminds me that I didn't finish the top ten guilty secret records.

Today I don't really care about anything but myself and the music that is coming into my ears. I know I should be bothered about things but everything is just a personal thing. We watched Hotel Du Lac yesterday, a strange and slow play about not a lot though because it was from a Booker Prize winning novel(ette) and it is about a writer it did have a strange air of self-reference about it. I didn't think I would manage to keep interested but it was so short that I managed to stay awake. I should dig out the book sometime. I have three Booker-Prize-Winning books but I have only read one of them - Vernon God Little - though I have read my Cousin's book - Last Letters from Hav which was nominated but didn't win. I am racing through Carrie's War at the moment. I saw the first BBC version when I was ten and then read the book. The recent BBC version was excellent and I just happened to see the book while I was with my daughter at the library. I should have it finished by tonight. This is Nina Bawden's masterpiece. I must have missed so much of the subtle background when I read it all those years ago. At that time I though that Samuel Isaac Evans was the worst kind of nightmare you could have as an Evacuee. Knowing now some of the unspeakable horrors that other children went through it is difficult to make him out as anything other than firm but fair. All this makes me realise how safe my life actually has been. As you may have picked up from previous entries there has been one major bad thing in my life and it has left me with various hang-ups but then again my childhood was quite balanced despite this and I like to think that my Children's lives are happier than mine.

Angry in Tunbridge

It was nice to be confirmed as not yet having fallen into Daily Telegraphism last night. BBC3 showed the first part of Blood on the Turntable about the Sex Pistols and while it was slightly disconcerting to see how plain cuddy John Lydon has become ("I miss the silly sausage" - about Sid Vicious), I was still as angry about the various local dignitaries denouncing the Pistols and Punk Rock in general. Having said that, I bet all those bearded interferers went home to their Dave Brubeck records.

Currently Listening to Time Further Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet - How is this man still touring?

Still, Tank-tops do have that effect on a lot of people.

Not that I was into Punk at the time. It all seemed a bit silly really but then again I was at a rural school so far away from the various haunts of John and Sid that most kids thought it was OK to listen to both Led Zepelin and The Sex Pistols at one go. John Lydon did once admit that he quite liked some prog-rock anyway.

Geronimo and No Links

We Balinese have a certain attitude to life. If someone harms me, I should not harm him back. If someone throws shit at me, I will throw back flowers.

I Gde Wiratha: Owner of Paddy's Bar in Kuta, Bali, whose nightclub strip was bombed October 12 2002. Death toll: 202, mainly Australians, Indonesians

So she comes up to me as I was sitting on the rail by the beach and said "what you doing here mate?" I was deaf so I didn't hear anything then. The horizon closed in blankly, throwing in the great hulks of ships until the sand was littered with the dismembered hunks of metal that would become the next popular car for the nations that make up the Asian Tiger. Out in the distance there are more ships, skitting along the line between sea and sky like little flies and other insects, creating their own dotted lines on the ocean. Tear them and split the seven seas. The ocean will flow into the caverns produced and we will be left with the huge gaps and the resulting climate change.

Down by the water, I felt some great heavy thing leave me. It shuddered out of me like the devil's tail and became one of the shadows you see in clear, ocean water when the bottom is sandy, some suggestion of a sea-monster but it could just be a bank of sea-weed. But this one skittered away like some underwater UFO, one moment just hovering, keeping station in the water and then streaking away, almost making thunder as the water rushed in to fill the gap it left. And now the day is sunny, a clear and cool calm day with no more darkness. That thing had me cowering for so many years and just one sight of the wide-blue sea has it out of me like water drops in a frying pan. It melts into the God-like lack of religion that has us all worshipping someone like Richard Dawkins. You don't believe me? Look at what goes wrong at the building-collapsing, community-massacring, children-abusing level and what justifies all of them? Some belief that your belief is the only correct one. We can't all be right and what makes you the rightest? Either you are all right in the commonality or you are all completely wrong. I know what I think. And all the time that nagging doubt behind everything you think about in this strand; what if I am wrong? I know I'm not but I have logic as back up, not the ishy-fishy, because-I-say-so preaching of the preachers. Do we need something spiritual? You bet we do. I could invoke God at this point but it would be a word. Today is special. Maybe today is the final end of the hedge fund I have in place that says I don't believe until you prove it. You have no proof. Maybe you say I am the proof, a complex collection of machinery and software that could only have been designed but it just seems so right to me that we have become so perfect because we have adapted to every situation without the need for a plan. We are right because we are here and if we were not here to contemplate out rightness then we would not ... I cannot finish that sentence logically. There is no right way of ending that sentence. You must be able to see what I mean. It is not deep philosophy.

My feet are caught. The sheet has wrapped itslef into my dream and in it I walk round the house, tied up, crippled by a few bits of cloth. This is no plan. Our mechanics will always be so powerfully correct but how we live our lives has no meaning other than for our bodies to exist in. Somewhere, it is a normal school day with the normal level of sadness and apprehension. Which is worth more? Want some more excitement in your day? Yes please! Think about it more and know the correct answer.

Very Smug

After yesterday's trip into the no-brow world of terrible pop music, today we have an entry about Ulysses - Joyce - not Homer. I have been carrying Ulysses round in my Palm Pilot for a long time now which puts me down as pretentious enough doesn't it. Al Alvarez says that he used to carry a copy around in the mid-forties just to wind-up his Headmaster at Oundle so it sounds like he got over the thing before the end of his teens. He doesn't actually say that he finished it though. I aim to because for all its randomness, there are some sublime and locomotive passages which make you ache with how right it all is. Anyway, my smugness today is related to identifying the chapter I am currently wading through as being the Cyclops episode. Maybe it is just obvious to anyone with a Classical education but I was happy enough. Half-way through now. Maybe it will be finished by the end of the year.

What now? I had a quick attempt at making a panorama with the digital camera yesterday but I didn't keep the camera level enough. The software had a decent-enough attempt at sorting it out but it was not good enough to put up on the site. I am stunned at the quality of the images. I thought we were going to have to get a new printer but using coated Ink Jet paper and the current printer, the quality is excellent.

Stammering

I am trying to drag myself up off the floor. So today we have list of Ten Guilty-Secret records prompted by stumbling across one of them on a tape in the car yesterday.

1. I Think We're Alone Now - Tiffany

Yes - we have to go for the biggie first. A triumph of unemotional commercial pop.

2. Carrie - Cliff Richard

Spooky this one and with loads of back-story.

3. Joe Le Taxi - Vanessa Paradis.

I played this about er approximately once. I can't remember anything else except that Lenny Kravitz had something to do with her.

4. Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley

You may think that I am covering up the truth here but I honestly bought this because I thout he was Virginia Astley's Brother. Her real brother is of course Jon Astley. Still got Rick's record - played once if ya wanna bid for it.

5. Coolest Cuts - Shakatak

Their album Night Birds was excellent - I first head it in a car driving back from London one dark and rainy night. The stuff which followed needed an image to make it work and I didn't know what worked. Apparently, they still hold the record for the longest bit of silence in the middle of a record though I always thought that was in Calling All the Heroes by It Bites (Who you may think should be on the list)

6. Ben - Marti Webb

A Charity record so it is slightly excused. I was sad when Ben Hardwick died. I have to say that Tell Me On a Sunday is a great album AND it has Elaine Stritch on it - the first person to say the F-Word on morning Radio 4 though we did hear This Be The Verse in the afternoon once. Yes – That is a long sentence isn’t it? Do I care? No!

This will have to be finished later as I can't actually think of any other records that I consider to be in this category. The first Kajagoogoo album is really quite good and all those Swing Out Sister records are not to be dissed in any situation.

An Oil Tanker Off Japan

Listening to Umbra Sumus by Jah Wobble

An extra for you - some poetry by Jah Wobble - I particularly like I am a Complex Man.

So much complexity in the news at the moment. I spend so much time having to tell myself that the terrorists are just that - nothing more - and then the little voice at the back says "But why do they do it?" and I am off in to the realms of tracing back the reasons for everything. It seems so bad of me to try and do this in the face of the terrible thing that has happened but surely the cycle can only be stopped by realising that it is a cycle and that it has to be stopped. Simply jerking into a reaction to each move makes each move just an escalation. I am deliberately not trying to give you any specifics because away from the number one story, there are plenty of tales of suffering which involve far more people. Do you go to sleep thinking about Darfur?

Stealing from the Sick and the Old and Weak

How bad do you have to be before no one jumps up to support you? They had a hard life under the bombs of the Russians; they saw many children killed and that made them want to kill more. How innocent does your victim have to be before your desperation is made completely clear? I can't focus; I never lived through any bad times. There were no machine gunners in my childhood, not real ones. My dad remembers stalking through the rubble of a bombed house while the woman who had lived there cried on the step. I want to make you cry but if you are not crying already then maybe you have no emotion. Maybe you don't care. Not enough of us do until it is ourselves we care about.

Listening to Gregorian Chant

Tithe! Tithe!

Very down at the current situation in North Ossetia and then this article about Médecin Sans Frontière is humbling and terrible at the same time. I can't tell whether the author's sign-off about reading time is supposed to be Ironic, or an indication that he has become blasé about the whole thing. I probably should not try analysing it at all. It all makes me think of the letter which the sister of a soldier killed in Iraq wrote to Tony Blair. It is a simple text though I am sure anyone in the PM's presence while he reads it will see him trying to dismiss it as a simplistic analysis of the situation from a person affected by grief. I actually thought it was amazingly restrained. It says all the things that we have in our heads but that we are afraid to voice in case we are seen as people without an understanding of the wider situation. Well I am coming out. I think that Britain joined the war in Iraq to avoid upsetting the president and that he started it for image, dad and oil just like Andrew Motion says. We may be simplistic but the things we want in life are simple things, things that do not arrive on the back of an army truck or in the bomb bay of an aircraft. I could complicate matter with my old argument about military personnel having to accept the risks but in this case, the 64 dead British troops have died for nothing tangible I can see. We are making the world a more dangerous place because of it. Those in power seem to sidle into some black spectre of Commander that is always placed and always leads us. No matter whom we vote for, the boss is infected with this evil and patronising character. I want this to be a scream and a shout for the dead. On our beloved leader’s terms, we should be in Sudan now. 0/10 -probably could not do better. I am one step away from crying at how bad things are and from the despair of having to live here with our current regime - and that is what it feels like to me.

Maybe I should not read the news. I remember during the first Gulf war, when we didn't have continuous news feeds to our desks. I would get home and read the paper at the Kitchen table, listening to the news and despairing. I was expecting (probably irrationally) to be called up and at that time I did not have the situation in my head clear enough to object conscientiously like my great mate, Oliver Postgate. Not a chance now. (Still Irrational you see.) I wish I were as eloquent as Oliver. He seems to have said everything I wanted to in the linked article. My education has failed.

You've Got Swimming on Your Mind

Listening to Gala - Lush

I have just read this extract from Richard Dawkins' new book - The Ancestor's Tale. You will have to make up your own mind on how good the book is. My reason for mentioning the book is because I was struck by how Dawkins does not even bother to make any arguments for evolution against creationism. In his head (and mine) there can be no argument unless you think that you can compare a cartoon with real-life. He does mention creationism but only obliquely - that old favourite of the Bombardier beetle. I will not even begin this argument as it just gets me worked up.

I just made the mistake of looking for a few Creationism vs. Evolution sites. I have got to go and have a lie down. This page stands out as a useful overview of the various degrees of theory.

Don't Drive For an Hour After Reading This Post

We had a final, family Summer Holiday trip yesterday. We went to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry with plenty of buttons for me - er - my daughter - to press. I hardly thought of the museums of my youth though for some strange reason, Holden Caulfield in the New York Museum came to mind. Anyway, plenty of planes, and looms - lots and lots of looms and other cotton related machinery though none of them working (unlike those at Wigan Pier). The best bit is of course the hands-on gallery with all sorts of interactive button pressing and things to see and do. There is even a Jean-Michel Jarry type laser harp and air percussion though the results created by hundreds of kids just walking through the beams are not really musical. NOS was slightly bemused though never bored. The highlight of the day was NOT quite seeing Fred Elliott driving a Morgan through the museum precincts but it was slightly chilling for some reason. I say it was slightly chilling.

Digital Camera has been purchased so watch out for more visuals in future.