Atypical British bank holiday weather

The River Great Ouse at Newport Pagnell. The weather's been scorching, we had a dip in the cool, inviting water and saw a grass snake swim across the river, coming out of those reeds and slithering into the undergrowth on the opposite bank.

A timely reminder that there's more to life than whingeing about the state of the world.

Nirvana

I don't have much time for organised religion, but I do think that the Buddhists might be on to something when they tell people that suffering arises from attachment to desires. For me it's not a metaphysical thing, but I can see how life could be a whole lot better without the Pavlovian desire for this or that tugging your chain all the time and making you miserable when you can't have whatever you're currently drooling over.

I'm not enough of a self-denying ascetic to go all the way on this - we wouldn't be human is we didn't want a little bit from every level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, plus a bit of frivolous fun stuff as the cherry on top of the coconut pyramid. But there are limits. Living in a marketing-led consumer society that invests billions in persuading everybody to want ridiculous amounts of, mostly useless, new stuff all the time might drive our current economic model, along with some innovations,  but on a psychological level, it's a guaranteed recipe for infantilizing people, eroding their capacity for self-control, making them ever more needy, increasing desires and escalating societal levels of pointless dissatisfaction, frustration and suffering.

So I treasure little moments like spotting this advert for personalised car mats. A feeling of utter contentment washed over me when I saw it and realised that I've no desire at all to own a personalised car mat and that I'd struggle to imagine why anybody would ever want one. Pavlov's bell was ringing in my ears, but there was no drooling, no desire to get on the hamster wheel of getting and spending, just complete tranquillity. There's something soothing about ads for stuff that doesn't tempt me in the slightest - the feeling of total calm, impregnable detachment is like a small taste of nirvana.

After this moment of bliss, I was tempted to spend some time browsing the Past Times catalogue, just to get a fix of totally not needing a Downton Abbey wall calendar, a Limited Edition Union Jack Henry Desk Vacuum Cleaner or a set of "Keep Calm and Carry On" cuff links, but then I realised that I was actually starting to desire the sheer undesirability of everything in the Past Times catalogue It's trickier than you might think, getting off the Wheel of Suffering

Satisfyingly crunchy

Random observation for today. There's something deeply satisfying about the crunch of car tyres on gravel. There's a modest and fairly unattractive strip of gravel on our drive, alternating with equally unattractive slabs of poured concrete, but I love the sound it makes when I roll the car onto it. It's a cut-price version of shingle being clawed back to sea by a retreating wave, in much the same way that that the not-so-distant rumble of traffic on the M1 sounds a bit like the roar of distant surf in my Newport-Pagnell-on-Sea fantasy. Pop open a cold beer in the sun-drenched garden (now boasting a garden shed re-painted to look like a beach hut, in blue, with jaunty strawberry ice-cream pink stripes) and disbelief is is temporarily suspended.

Thank crunchie it's Friday.

The canary in the coal mine

Spring's definitely in the air. This morning dawned overcast and a bit cold but I was getting up in real daylight, not dragging myself out of bed at that bleary oh-God-it's-still-dark hour and, outside the window, a blackbird was pouring out its burbling brook of song. Then I turned on the radio and discovered that the tired old Lib Dem canary is feeling a considerably less chipper than the full-voiced blackbird:

Labour have won the Barnsley Central by-election, while the Lib Dems slipped to sixth in the South Yorkshire seat.

I think I heard the word 'humiliating' somewhere in the report, too. Isn't it great when something puts a spring in your step and a smile on your lips before you've even had breakfast? I definitely got out of bed on the right side this morning.

Peter, Groucho and Zaphod

The House of Lords is an undemocratic anachronism that the British establishment loves, because it's a legal way of handing out favours to cronies in a country where more overt corruption is frowned on. The fact that some people are ennobled thanks to their own real merit doesn't alter the fact that the honours system is corrupted by the unworthy bums of party donors, party yes-men and pliant Whitehall mandarins cluttering up the red leather benches.*

That's easy to say if you're still young and idealistic, or if you're older and just don't have a snowball in hell's chance of getting a peerage (whether - like most of us - you never did anything to deserve it and/or you never scratched the right backs). For somebody who's actually achieved something worthwhile to turn down the offer of a peerage, after a lifetime of hard work, effort and sacrifice must be much, much harder. So I'm impressed by Peter Tatchell who has - apparently - been offered a peerage and turned it down:

With the New Year’s honours list looming – and Bruce Forsyth, perhaps, hoping against hope that he might yet get a look-in – one maverick has had no hesitation in turning down a gong.

Arise – or maybe not – Peter Tatchell, the campaigner who has taken principled stands on many issues over the years, not least homosexual rights.

Tatchell, is reluctant to comment, but does not deny that he has been offered a peerage. Mandrake understands that, over the past five years, Tatchell has been sounded out about various other honours, too, but has declined them all because he does not approve of them. 

Like Groucho Marx, who famously refused to belong to any club that would accept him as a member, Peter Tatchell has class. When Douglas Adams, gave his unprincipled narcissist of a character, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the (ceremonial) job of Galactic President in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, he dryly noted that:

It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

That sums up why the sort of person who'd do favours for a big cheese in the hope of a peerage shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power and, conversely, why we need more people like Peter Tatchell.

Peter Tatchell's latest campaign is Equal Love, a 'legal bid to overturn the twin bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships in the United Kingdom'. It would make the people affected very happy and wouldn't cost the rest of us a penny - what's not to like? The usual killjoys will probably start whining from  press and pulpit  about how terrible it is that they can't stop a group of people from doing something that makes them happy and harms nobody else, but I can't see anything approaching a good reason not to support this campaign. My best wishes go out to Equal Love, and to the (literally) peerless Mr Tatchell.

Hat tip to Harry's Place.

*the Bishops don't deserve to be there either, but that's a separate issue

Christmas time

With the annual Christmas shopathon just around the corner, here are some tips for a saner kind of Christmas:

Yes, it’s the thought that counts.  But if it’s the thought that counts, then it is perfectly acceptable for people to exchange the kind of gift that cannot be purchased in a store, namely, the gift of time.  Tell the adults on your Christmas list that this year you’re giving them the gift of free time; you are releasing them from the obligation to buy for you a gift, and you are encouraging them to spend in some other way the time they would otherwise spend at the mall purchasing a material gift for you.  Offer to make time in January for a long and relaxed lunch date (and then make good on the offer).  For friends with children, offer to babysit so that they may have time for themselves or for each other.  For far-away friends and relatives, resolve to write letters; real letters, with details and thoughts just for them, with questions and occasions for beginning ongoing conversation.

From 3 Quarks Daily. The British Retail Consortium has not approved this message.

Tea time classic

Sweet - but not too sweet - rich, moist, full-bodied, awesome

Banana bread

4oz (100g) butter or margarine
6oz (175g) caster sugar
3 ripe - repeat, RIPE - bananas
2 medium eggs
4oz (100g) plain flour
4oz (100g) wholemeal flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
half teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons very hot water
2 oz (50g) walnuts (chopped)

Preheat oven to 165 degrees C (gas mark 3)

Cream butter and sugar together, mash bananas and stir in. Whisk eggs and add slowly to the mixture. Sift the dry ingredients together and add alternately with tablespoons of hot water.

Stir in the walnuts. Butter* a bread tin or oblong casserole about 9 x 5 in (23 x 13 cm), pour in the batter and bake for about one hour 10 minutes.


*it's safest to line the tin with greaseproof paper as well as buttering it.

Short intermission

There will be a short pause in blogging, as I'm away for three days from tomorrow. My mother's moving house and I'll be helping out. I've just about packed my travelling-light bag.

Packing my bag reminded me of one of those really old, very slightly humorous lists which has been hanging about the Internet since before Google was a glint in Larry Page's eye. Entitled "Cool Things About Being a Man", it includes the observation that 'a five-day vacation requires only 1 suitcase'. It's a stereotype, but from my partner's reaction when I said I'd be taking one small piece of hand luggage on my coach journey, I think it's one with a nutritious kernel of truth.

Along with the fact that I don't have to factor in any extra hair-drying time after my morning shower (my profile picture illustrates this point more directly than mere words), I think the ability to travel light is, in general, one of the great things about being a bloke. A small sports bag. Three pairs of socks, ditto underpants and three t-shirts to wear. A compact sponge bag with the bare toiletry essentials. The trousers and outer clothing layers I'll be wearing will be good for three days. Light and portable, even allowing for an airport thriller and a portable CD player with some music CDs and an audio book to guard against the possibility of in-coach boredom. No worries. Sorted.

I'm sure that there are women who travel as light as I do, with as little fuss, but I believe that they're in a minority. Men may start wars, have less emotional intelligence and die earlier, but, in general, the ability to travel light without the fuss and bother of hauling great trunks of clothes and other mysterious feminine accessories around is one of the great life-skills and joys of being a man.

Abnormal blogging to be resumed as soon as possible.

Jazzed up Bach and Bached up Jazz

Here's something rather splendid - proof that the greatest music defies genres and laughs in the face of pigeonholes.

And speaking of cross-genre brilliance, I think I previously posted a link to late, incomparable Nina Simone on YouTube, performing Love Me or Leave Me. That was a performance of such sparkling brilliance, it deserves another hearing. In particular, listen for the way the piano playing morphs from jazz into a baroque Bach-like display of musical fireworks. Breathtaking. A potted biography calls her:

A protest singer; a jazz singer; a pianist; an arranger and a composer, Nina Simone is a great artist who defies easy classification. She is all of these: a jazz-rock-pop-folk-black musician.

All of these as well as a civil rights activist and classical musician, trained at New York's Julliard School of Music. A huge talent and an inspiration.

IDiocy update

Hip, hip!

Climbdown on compulsory ID cards


Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports

Hooray!

But...

However, in a statement, the campaign group No2ID said the "humiliating climbdown" was not the end of the scheme.

"It's just part of the ongoing attempt by senior Home Office officials to fortify the scheme against cancellation and to bind the hands of a future government," the statement added.

Well, modified rapture, anyway...

Sraps and fragments

I've just been taking some old fibreglass insulation out of our loft, which we're going to have re-insulated. We could just have had the new insulation laid on top of the old stuff, but the insulation that was already there looked pretty disgusting, being covered in a decades-old layer of black dust, so I decided to take it out. It was mucky job and I ended up covered in dust, cobwebs and grime, but it was worth it to clean the place up.

Whilst stripping out the old stuff I kept coming across little scraps of discarded paper, a fragmentary record of the lives of those who have lived here before. I liked the unintentionally hilarious cover of the 1960 DIY magazine I found, (shown above), with a firm-jawed chap sawing away, his wife in the background putting up partition walls whilst tottering about in stiletto heels and a pencil skirt.

There was a child's vaccination record from around 1960, recording vaccinations for whooping cough, polio and the like. There were pages from of a correspondence course in "Scientific Salesmanship" from the early 1960's (associated correspondence suggests that this course may have resulted in somebody landing a £1,000-a-year sales job with company car, although this may have just been a puff piece by the people running the correspondence course, rather than an actual letter). There were unsent Christmas cards, a recipe magazine, a bloodthirsty child's comic-strip magazine called Warlord, with a Tiger tank advancing menacingly from the cover, more DIY magazines and some pages furtively torn from a copy of The Perfumed Garden.

Philip Larkin thought that "what will survive of us is love." Maybe. Or maybe, only rustling scraps of ephemera will survive, feeble scraps of what we once were:

Come let us now consider the generations of man,
Compound of dust and clay, strengthless,
Tentative, passing away as leaves in autumn
Pass, shadows, wingless, forlorn,
Phantoms, deathbound, a dream.

Aristophanes

Weed crazy

Walking and driving around this weekend, I've noticed that dandelions are everywhere, spreading like ... well, weeds. I've also been struck by how cheerful the grass verges around town look in the sunshine, lush and dotted with sprays of brilliant yellow dandelions and white dasies. They may be weeds, but, for a brief period they can be as much of a treat to the eye as may blossom. Dandelions have one other rather wonderful incarnation - the sight of a meadow at twilight dotted with the ghostly globes of dandelion clocks, a few seeds drifing on the hint of a breeze and catching the slanting rays of the setting sun, can be quite magical.

Having said that, the dandelions currently attempting to put down tenacious roots down in our garden will be exterminated without mercy, as soon as we get round to it.

Little blue pills

At last, what the world's been waiting for - the concentrated essence of Robert Peston in a bottle, as stumbled across in the Black Triangle blog....

A very good night

I've not blogged for a little while - there's been loadsa stuff going on which has taken up what little spare attention I've got and may continue to do so in the near future, so posts may be quite sparse and /or truncated for a while.

Meanwhile, in the big, wide world, some significant things have been going on. Although I'm naturally a bit suspicious of smooth presentation which may hide a lack of substance, I was coming round to the idea that Barack Obama's rhetoric had a bit more substance behind it than I'd given him credit for as we came up to election day. When he won, I was swept up in the general tide of optimism and goodwill. Now the dust has settled, I still think it was an excellent result. Maybe I'll be disillusioned, but I hope not.

I think one good reasons to be cheerful about the President-elect is the fact that he can string a sentence together and doesn't appear to be embarrassed by the fact. I share Orwell's view that there is a link between clarity of thought and clarity of expression - I agree wholeheartedly with this New Yorker article that the night of the victory speech was "a very good night for the English language."

Combine that with the powerful image of a black person* finally accepting the top job in a country founded by people who believed that all men were created equal, but still kept slaves and where the civil rights movement is a comparatively recent memory and it was also a very good night for America.

Finally, consider the fact that this guy has lived abroad, knows the wider world and knows that non-Americans, too can just be regular folks trying to get on with their lives and that adds up to a very good night for the world.

* mixed race, if you want to be pedantic, but don't tell me he's not black enough to know that all folks haven't been treated equal, however they were created.

Clueless

I see they're thinking of resurrecting I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue. Not sure about that idea - I think that Clue without Humphrey Lyttelton would be like Irish coffee without the whiskey. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong but unless we witness of the second coming of Humph, I think it'd be better to lay Clue to rest and move aside for something new.

Less sorely missed than Humph by a factor of several zillion is the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il who failed to show up at North Korea's 60th birthday bash. Nobody knows what's become of him. What a pity -and it looked like such a swinging party, too. And there was I, just thinking about him at the end of my last post. Spooky.

Beware the Robin's curse...

Tutor and tutorial

Goodness me, but I'm tired. Passed Cardington again last night on the way to see the flying proms at Shuttleworth, a flying display with light classical music, courtesy of the Guildford Symphony Orchestra and fireworks to finish. Enjoyed it, but it would have been even better without the high winds and driving rain, which kept a lot of the planes on the ground and all of the audience wet and shivering. Still, Dunkirk spirit and all that.

One of the planes which did manage to make it into the air was the venerable Avro Tutor, as featured in this YouTube vid (it's currently wearing the rather snazzy silver colour scheme with red and white sunbursts on the wings, rather than the yellow shown in the hanger shots).

Whilst there, I was asked about the origin of the roundels worn by British military aircraft. It would have taken too long to explain in the cold and wet, but it is an interesting story. Strangely enough, the origins of the symbol can be traced back to the French revolution - this Wikipedia article on the cockade sheds some light on the prehistory of military aircraft markings, whilst this interesting blog entry brings the story up to date.

Straighten up and fly right...

Had a blast lat night at the Jools Holland concert. Before I went, the daily grind had me feeling stale and more cheesed off than a truckload of ripe stilton, but Jools, his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and guests, including the mighty Ruby Turner were a much-needed tonic. The liveliest of live music; big, hearty, gorgeous, foot stomping, joyful tunes delivered with aplomb and panache.

There was a chill wind blowing in the park, soon forgotten when bouncing about amid a mass of smiling people. I'd forgotten just how good a great live concert can be. Sometimes we can live our lives on autopilot, running along the same familiar groove day in and day out, getting increasingly miserable and frustrated. At that point it takes a shock to the system to jolt us out of our rut. Well, if you gotta be shocked, there are worse shocks than a hefty slice of captivating rhythm.

If you don't occasionally get shocked out of your robotic routine then you can lose sight of the world around you, like the people who follow satellite navigation systems without reference to the world outside. I particularly relished the story of the Syrian trucker charged with delivering a vehicle transporter load of luxury cars to Gibraltar, but ended up at Gibraltar point near Skegness, Lincolnshire, as a result of not questioning where his sat nav was taking him. Poor guy obviously needed taking out of himself. Something like this might have done the trick.

99

Oops! Last night's hastily-corrected post is the result of a senior moment and some premature excitement when, after a busy day, I must have thought we were already in 2009. Still, a 99th anniversary will still be cause for celebration. And what better to celebrate it with than that icon of the British summer, the 99, AKA a vanilla ice cream in a cone with a flaky chocolate bar stuck in the top. It's redolent of childhood summers by the sea and, though there are many things which frankly taste better, I love the jaunty angle of the flake bar sticking out of the top and boundless spirit of optimism that says, "if we just stick a flake bar in the top of this blob of ice cream, it'll turn it into something really special and rather sophisticated."

It's the same spirit of quiet optimism and determination to press on that you see in people taking a seaside stroll at a faded seaside resort like Skegness, in the teeth of a stiff wind and lashing rain, hoping that the weather will brighten up soon, but determined to make the best of the day, whatever the elements throw at them.

The 99 - simple, innocent, what you see is what you get. Fantastic. Appropriately enough, and not many people know this, the 99 was originally invented by the pioneering aviation boffin Barnes Wallace. Well it would be appropriate, if I hadn't just made that last bit up. Chocs away, chaps!

Breakfast junkie

I've always been a lark - early to rise and early to bed. Being middle aged with a young child has intensified this pattern, as junior's awake and wanting attention early in the morning and I'm quite ready for bed before 10pm. So I don't really have much use for those energy drinks which are supposed to keep young people going through an all-nighter. A few years ago , in a bachelor pub sesh, I forsook my usual tipple to try the vodka and Red Bull mixture that was popular then and, for all I know of current trends, still is. Didn't like the taste, but the effect of the alcohol, sugar and caffeine combo wasn't unpleasant at first. I'd rather get the hit from an Irish coffee, though. The downside was that I was up and buzzing at a very anti-social time in the early morning. I remember getting up to wash the car at about 4.00am.

I do still get a similar hit, but without the alcohol and at a time which doesn't completely mess up my body clock. At a weekend, I get my caffeine fix with added sugar rush from a breakfast of strong coffee and pancakes with maple syrup. I might add other things (blueberries, etc) but those are the basic ingredients. I don't normally have much of a sweet tooth, but I'll make an exception for maple syrup, especially when complemented by the dark bitterness of filter coffee. What a fantastic combo. Apart from the taste experience being infinitely better, more complex and subtle than an energy drink out of a can, you've got the wonderful smell of freshly brewed coffee and the ritual of making pancakes and coffee - as a junkies everywhere will tell you, the preparation rituals are an integral part of the drug experience. I need to ration myself - too much of this sort of thing takes the edge off it - but on a pancake and coffee morning, the day feels lighter, brighter, more exciting and interesting. And the effects have worn off long before I should be tucked up in bed, asleep.

So let's hear it for that unknown Ethiopian long ago who first discovered what you could do with an unpromising-looking bean and for all those Canadians out there, patiently tapping the mighty sugar maples for their precious sap - thanks, guys for a breakfast so good it makes you want to sing, sing sing!