Although this blog is the descendant of a diary I once kept for about 15 years, it differs in at least one respect in that I have so far avoided writing about people - family and friends - who might read it. Neither do I care emotionally to spill my guts. As it happens I don’t have a great much to spill emotionally, certainly a lot less than when I was writing my diary from around 1980 to 1995 and splitting up with girls (especially one in particular), but even if I did, I wouldn’t record it here for the world to drool over. The major advantage of keeping a written diary is that, with very few exceptions, no one will ever read it. Blogs, on the other hand, are public knowldge. If you don’t want something to become public, don’t put it in your bloody blog.
As for friends and family - not so much news of them, which I do occasionally record here, but comments about them which might not always be complimentary - they, too, must accept that they will have no place here. As far I know, no family have ever read my blog, except in the early days my sister, and only two friends occasionally do so, and I have nothing unpleasant or even uncomplimentary to say about either of them.
But I am about to break my rule and give an account of a very recent family matter, and the reason I have no compunction about breaking my rule is that I really don’t give a fuck who gets upset. It concerns my stepmother, and two very odd and very hurtful comments she made. As a rule and given her less than happy circumstances, I would allow them to wash off my back like water off a duck, but oddly when she made the second comment - and given our history - something snapped in me.
. . .
She hooked up with my father more than 55 years ago when she was in her mid-twenties and he was just over 40, though who hooked up with whom I can’t say and I don’t know. It would be dishonest to say that she thereby wrecked my father’s marriage as I don’t think it was in a very healthy state anyway. Nor shall I speculate further, as no one can know the dynamic of a relationship a couple - in this case my father and mother - has. But I do know from there on in there was often an uncomfortable and edgy atmosphere in the house, and Christmas breaks were never very happy going on on occasion quite awful.
My mother died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1981 at the comparatively early age of 30 - I found her dead - and in the months and years following her death, I got to know far more details of the affair and just what had been going on.
When we returned from Paris in 1972 (the year I graduated) we were back living in Henley-on-Thames, from where many commute to London where my father worked (indeed my sister did daily as she attended a French school in London). My father chose not to commute and to stay in London during the week, telling my mother he slept in one of the bedrooms at Broadcasting House the BBC kept for late night/early morning announcers. I doubt she believed him though. My stepmother, who also worked for the BBC, owned a flat in Blackheath, and my father had been shacking up with her there since 1972.
In the mid-seventies my stepmother inherited several thousand pounds from an aunt and bought herself an old granite cottage in the village of St Breward, about six miles from Bodmin. Her parents were both Irish and had moved to Cornwall in the mid-1930s where her father took over running a mental health hospital in North Cornwall. Her two sisters and brother were born in Ireland, but she was born in Bodmin. (NB Wrong, as I discovered tonight, after asking her oldest sibling. They were all born in Bodmin. The parents came over in the late 1920s and all of their children were born in Cornwall.) Apart from living with my stepmother in London, my father also used to spend weekends with her at the cottage, telling my mother he was staying with a friend while he was ‘working on his book’. There was no phone, he said, so he could not be contacted. I doubt any sane woman would accept such a story, especially as I’m sure my mother already knew of the affair.
After my mother died, my father sold the house he and my mother had built on Greys Road, on the outskirts of Henley (at Gillotts Corner if you know Henley) for around £82,000. That - a tidy sum - would be the equivalent of around £276,000 in 2018. The money was used to add to and extend my stepmother’s cottage substantially. In 1983, my father retired and my stepmother took early retirement.
. . .
I have known my stepmother since I was 15 in 1965. She, her sisters and their uncle, a GP who was not short of a penny and who owned a small holiday cottage on small island on the Thames at Henley which they all used to visit, I simply knew as my father’s friends. When my stepmother met my father and found out we lived in Henley, our he (and his family) were invited to join them there on a weekend afternoon, but we only went once or twice as I’m sure my mother suspected something was going on.
Late in 1965 we moved to Paris where my father had been posted as the BBC’s ‘Paris representative’. (It is only recently that I have been wondering why the BBC had ‘correspondents’ all over the world, but ‘representatives’ in only one or two cities, but I can’t tell you or even suggest why. Perhaps his posting had something to do with what I suspect was the second string to his bow, his obscure connection to Britain’s SIS (more here 1 and here 2). Perhaps it wasn’t, but I’m not going to speculate.)
From 1965 until 1968 I was at school in England and until 1972, when we returned from Paris, I was at university in Dundee, and such was the rather fraught and generally unhappy atmosphere at home that I rarely ever spent school breaks at home in Paris. (It didn’t help that although I generally got one reasonably well with my father, he and my older brother clashed quite regularly.) I particularly remember the first Christmas in Paris, in 1965 (I turned 16 in the November of that year). My father picked up myself and my older brother from the Gare du Nord and drove us home in a taxi. It was evening and as we drove along beside the Seine with all its lights, I distinctly remember feeling very proud of my father. I also distinctly remember that he stank of whisky.
It was late, and we went to bed almost as soon as we got in, but within minutes a terrible row broke out downstairs - the house had three floors - between my mother and father which went on for some time. My mother appeared and came upstairs to where we children were sleeping (my sister was only ten and my younger brother eight) mother, not a small women, wearing a pink baby doll night dress and weeping. I suspect she had tried to initiate ‘intimate relations’ - sex - with my father but he had wanted none of it. The rest of the Christmas break was downhill from there on.
. . .
I wasn’t reacquainted with my stepmother for 15 years until after my mother died. When she died, and, to but it bluntly, she was out of the way an no longer a barrier to my father and stepmother going public, my father set about easing me in on the fact of his affair. I discovered my younger brother had been eased in rather earlier than me.
I was invited to spend a weekend at my stepmother’s flat in Blackheath and immediately sensed that the story I had been told - that she was an old friend he had turned to when my mother died - was bullshit. There was an especially silly charade when I was given the guest room to sleep in and he made out he was sleeping on a camp bed in the living room. I offered him the guest room and said I would sleep on the camp bed. No, no, no, he said that’s fine, don’t bother.
I didn’t take to my stepmother, but didn’t dislike her, either. I was neutral. I found her pretentious, and her snobbery and airs and graces irritated me, and she had a very annoying habit of pulling me - and my young brother and, for all I know, everyone else - up short on points of etiquette. But I said nothing, probably because I am by nature quite direct and I either speak out or not at all. Although my years working shifts on the nationals in London taught me a modicum of diplomacy, I had not then learnt the little I might now have.
My mother died in January 1982, and I spent the Christmas of 1982 with my girlfriend’s mother in Harwich where she, who had split from her father, now lived. The following year my younger brother and I were invited down here to Cornwall to spend Christmas with my father and my stepmother.
. . .
From the off it was agony. Everything was phoney, no one could relax, the bonhomie abounding was so fake, it could well have been prosecuted by trading standards. Before my mother died we had always celebrated Christmas in the German way on Christmas Eve. Hoping, I suppose, somehow to recreate those Christmases, my father and stepmother emulated them. I suppose they deserve credit for trying but I wished to Christ they hadn’t.
The following morning on Christmas Day, I woke up and thought ‘I don’t want to be here’. I realised the huge upset I would cause by walking out, but I also remember thinking that this was a watershed: I could carry on trying to be honest with myself (after a fashion, I should add, because I don’t doubt I am just as capable of kidding myself as everyone else) or start playing the silly, phoney games my stepmother seemed to prefer, the ‘let’s pretend for the sake of form’ crap. I decided to leave.
I packed, went downstairs to the kitchen where my stepmother was preparing Christmas lunch and told her I was leaving. She said something along the lines of ‘I think you are very wrong’ and I left. My father and brother were out somewhere at the time and my father didn’t speak to me for several years. But to this day I know I did the right thing.
I don’t quite remember how long it took, but there came about a reconciliation of sorts with my father. But it was by no means immediate. My brother was living with me at the time in my house in the Maypole, Birmingham, and whenever my father rang him and I andwered the phone, he would not say a word except to ask for Mark. But in time, at least two years, the situation began to ease and I began to visit him and my stepmother down here in Cornwall.
By then I was living in Cardiff, working for the South Wales Echo. But I never felt at all easy with her and I didn’t much like her. Being a middle-class sort of chap, I was polite and affable, but what was especially galling - quite apart from her airs and graces, snobbery, and her habit of lecturing on matters of etiquette - was when she informed me, referring to my crime of walking out on Christmas Day, that ‘all was forgiven’. She didn’t just say it once or twice, but rather often over the years, far, far too often for my liking. I, who would either have to let rip or say nothing, always said nothing. Christ, I deserve a medal.
My father developed cancer in the early 1990s and died in 1991. My stepmother, unsurprisingly, was devastated. She had retired in 1983 at the same time as my father when she was just 46 and had looked forward to many years of a comfortable life with him. I visited her once or twice while I was living in London, when I married a local woman and myself moved down here to St Breward (although I carried on working in London for another 22 years).
While he was on his deathbed, my father asked myself and my younger brother ‘to take care of Paddy’, and I took the request seriously. My stepmother and I rubbed along OK, although we weren’t in each other’s pockets and I never felt at ease in her company, but with my father no longer around, I was conscious that she needed a bit of company. I can’t say we became bosom pals. And the ‘all is forgiven line’ was still trotted out on occasion.
Eleven years ago, two days before her 70th birthday, my stepmother suffered a very bad stroke. She was in a coma for three days and stayed in hospital for several months, first in Truro then in Bodmin. A few days after she had come out of her coma, she gave me enduring power of attorney, and I have been making sure her bills are paid on time and all the rest ever since.
After leaving hospital, she moved into a care home near the north coast and lived there for several years. She then moved into one of the two cottages she owns adjacent to hers (she had jointly bought the first with my brother, and later inherited the second from her sister when her sister died). She moved into that because at the time it was thought easier to adapt to someone who was as physically disabled as she was. Several years later she moved back into her original home, and that is where she lives now.
. . .
To some it might seem that the account above indicates it has all been at the back of my mind and that I have been chewing it all over for the past 36 years. Actually, I haven’t. So my dad had an affair? So? I haven’t had one while married, although I did a fair bit of two-timing, but none of us is kitchen-clean and I gather my parents’ marriage was most certainly not in the best of health. (In fact, my sister told me that she had been informed - by whom I can’t remember but whoever it was should have known better - that my parents had her ‘to save the marriage’. Not a nice thing to be told.) I honestly thought it was all water under the bridge, and I astonished myself when all this came rushing back to me the other morning - especially that sanctimonious and infuriating ‘all is forgiven’.
I shan’t go into details of what was said because that would be too tedious, but several months ago my stepmother pretty much accused me of trying to steal a table from her. That did sour me rather badly. Then the other morning she said something similar and something inside me snapped. And that was it.
I know myself well: I can get noisily angry but that is always just like a sudden summer storm, over almost before it has started. But when, as has happened and has happened again, I get so furious that I am in complete calm, but in a state of white fury, I make sure I watch my step and keep my mother shut. And there is no going back.
My stepmother has been affected by her strokes - she had two more a few years ago - and can do little for herself. But mentally she is all there, although she sometimes takes a little longer to respond to questions. I have no idea what is going through here mind, but it wasn’t what she said, but what she obviously believes about me. As I say something snapped.
My dilemma is that she is helpless, pretty much, and relies on me in several ways, so this state of affairs cannot carry on. But I don’t care whether or not I ever see her again. I have had it with her, completely, but I can’t abandon her. And I shall not, but . . .
I am going to try to patch things up for her sake - me, I really don’t give a fuck - but not at any price. I am certainly not going to play some phoney little game about it all being ‘a misunderstanding’, the line she took before, and I am not and shall never engage in more of that thoroughly fake middle-class politeness and phoney bonhomie which gets up my nose at the best of times. I have had it - but somehow I’ve got to find a way through. And, dear reader, at this point I am utterly clueless.
Even ‘talking about it’ with my stepmother as my ‘cousin’, her nephew (he, his wife and his mother are staying) suggests is out of the question because I would have to say things she would hurt her very badly indeed - how do you tell someone that she is a total pain in the arse and that her airs and graces and snobbery are supremely irritating and still hope to have a reasonably friendly relationship?
As I say, I am utterly clueless.
Sunday 12 August 2018
Thursday 26 July 2018
As luck would have it . . .
Given that this blog had its origins in a diary I kept for many years in the pre-digital days when the world was still in B&W, it would be odd if I didn’t mention something which doesn’t occur to everyone, but which recently happened to me: emergency eye surgery
It wasn’t, thank goodness, the result of an accident. I had a routine eye test last Friday morning - six days ago - in which the opthalmologist spotted a small tear in my retina. Can’t have he told himself, probably in Ukrainian as he was Ukrainian, and immediately got on the phone to our local major hospital, The Royal Cornwall, Treliske, in Truro, for an examination at its eye clinic that afternoon
It turned out that there were five small tears in the retina, not just one, and that the retina had already began to detach itself from the back of the eye. It was explained to me why tears can appear in the retina - inevitably, it has to do with ageing - and how these tears can lead to the retina becoming detached, but I shan’t attempt to pass it on because I’m sure to get it wrong. Oh, and once the retina gets fully detached, you go blind in that eye
I was asked to pitch up at Truro the following morning at 1o for the op. What with one thing and another - I this was an emergency eye clinic, and I should imagine there were greater emergencies to be dealt with than mine - my operation wasn’t until just before five
I had both laser treatment and some other treatment which I was told involved removing some of the fluid in the eye, then injecting a gas bubble to force the retina back against the eye (and I shan’t use any technical terms as I’ve noticed some folk who have undergone surgery are apt to do, as I’ll more than likely get them wrong). It was all done under local anaesthetic and apart from one tiny little prick I didn’t feel a thing
I returned home by train wearing an big, white bandage over my eye, and returned the following morning for a post-op check-up. That went well, and the bandage came off. Since then I have had a black bubble floating around at the bottom of my eye, getting smaller by the day, which, I’m told, is the gas that was injected. Because you are not allowed to fly with such a bubble in your eye, I had to cancel my annual trip to the music festivals of Bordeaux which would have taken place this week
I had another check-up yesterday morning and it seems everything is going well. Every time the consultant takes a look at your eye, both get drops of some kind to make the iris huge so he can have more room to look through, giving the patient the appearance of some kind of junkie on downers, and everything is very bright indeed
That’s it really. Another check-up with the senior consultant next Wednesday, and the eye should settle down within four weeks. My brother-in-law suffered a rather worse example of a detaching retina a few years ago, and he is now as right as rain, so . .
I’m sure there is some possible silly joke about eyes and noses, and that when it comes to which organ has the greater capacity for afflictions needing sensitive surgery, they eyes have it, but as I can’t think of it off-hand, I shall leave it there
. . .
Incidentally, given the ongoing debate about underfunding of the UK’s National Health Service, I would like to remind those in Britain reading this that all treatment is completely free. Out of interest, I looked up the cost of the treatment I had for someone who did not have health insurance in the US. It ranged from between $4,700 to $10,000.
Bear in mind that there will be a reason why someone doesn’t have health insurance and that will usually be because they are unemployed and/or to poor to afford it. I know some US states have welfare schemes, but many don’t. And even if you have health insurance, perhaps paid for by your employer, you would still have to cough up around $200 for this, that and t’other
. . .
I like to find illustrations for my blog entries so here is one of an eye, chosen at random from the web when I googled images for ‘vitrectomy’. The great thing is that if I told you it was a close up of Mars, you would be none the wiser. In fact, for the sake of comparison (and because I an impeccably liberal heart beats in my breast which insists on fairness all round, here is also a picture of Mars. I leave it to you to decide which is which.
It wasn’t, thank goodness, the result of an accident. I had a routine eye test last Friday morning - six days ago - in which the opthalmologist spotted a small tear in my retina. Can’t have he told himself, probably in Ukrainian as he was Ukrainian, and immediately got on the phone to our local major hospital, The Royal Cornwall, Treliske, in Truro, for an examination at its eye clinic that afternoon
It turned out that there were five small tears in the retina, not just one, and that the retina had already began to detach itself from the back of the eye. It was explained to me why tears can appear in the retina - inevitably, it has to do with ageing - and how these tears can lead to the retina becoming detached, but I shan’t attempt to pass it on because I’m sure to get it wrong. Oh, and once the retina gets fully detached, you go blind in that eye
I was asked to pitch up at Truro the following morning at 1o for the op. What with one thing and another - I this was an emergency eye clinic, and I should imagine there were greater emergencies to be dealt with than mine - my operation wasn’t until just before five
I had both laser treatment and some other treatment which I was told involved removing some of the fluid in the eye, then injecting a gas bubble to force the retina back against the eye (and I shan’t use any technical terms as I’ve noticed some folk who have undergone surgery are apt to do, as I’ll more than likely get them wrong). It was all done under local anaesthetic and apart from one tiny little prick I didn’t feel a thing
I returned home by train wearing an big, white bandage over my eye, and returned the following morning for a post-op check-up. That went well, and the bandage came off. Since then I have had a black bubble floating around at the bottom of my eye, getting smaller by the day, which, I’m told, is the gas that was injected. Because you are not allowed to fly with such a bubble in your eye, I had to cancel my annual trip to the music festivals of Bordeaux which would have taken place this week
I had another check-up yesterday morning and it seems everything is going well. Every time the consultant takes a look at your eye, both get drops of some kind to make the iris huge so he can have more room to look through, giving the patient the appearance of some kind of junkie on downers, and everything is very bright indeed
That’s it really. Another check-up with the senior consultant next Wednesday, and the eye should settle down within four weeks. My brother-in-law suffered a rather worse example of a detaching retina a few years ago, and he is now as right as rain, so . .
I’m sure there is some possible silly joke about eyes and noses, and that when it comes to which organ has the greater capacity for afflictions needing sensitive surgery, they eyes have it, but as I can’t think of it off-hand, I shall leave it there
. . .
Incidentally, given the ongoing debate about underfunding of the UK’s National Health Service, I would like to remind those in Britain reading this that all treatment is completely free. Out of interest, I looked up the cost of the treatment I had for someone who did not have health insurance in the US. It ranged from between $4,700 to $10,000.
Bear in mind that there will be a reason why someone doesn’t have health insurance and that will usually be because they are unemployed and/or to poor to afford it. I know some US states have welfare schemes, but many don’t. And even if you have health insurance, perhaps paid for by your employer, you would still have to cough up around $200 for this, that and t’other
. . .
I like to find illustrations for my blog entries so here is one of an eye, chosen at random from the web when I googled images for ‘vitrectomy’. The great thing is that if I told you it was a close up of Mars, you would be none the wiser. In fact, for the sake of comparison (and because I an impeccably liberal heart beats in my breast which insists on fairness all round, here is also a picture of Mars. I leave it to you to decide which is which.
Sunday 15 July 2018
Bit by bit by bloody small bit this hopeless guitar player is becoming just a little less hopeless. Onwards and upwards (or whatever cliche you prefer, you know what I mean. Never stop trying, something it has taken me a little longer to learn than others)
NB Included in this post are some tunes which your browser should be able to play, though sometimes certain browser/OS combinations cannot. If you want to hear them but your browser is refusing to cooperate, try a different browser.
One thing I had long planned to do when I retired was to take piano lessons. But I haven’t. Instead I am taking guitar lessons. I would still like to be able to learn to read music and play the piano, but the fact is that if you spread yourself too thinly, you end up doing and achieving very little, and I had already long been playing guitar. Then there was the fact that a reasonably sized keyboard, let alone a full-sized upright piano would be hard to fit into anywhere in the cottaged down here on the edge of Bodmin Moor.
As it is my wife, a farmer’s daughter, hoards pretty much everything and is loth to get rid of anything, so space is at a premium. Then there is all the baby crap my daughter has introduced into the house - she splits her time between her and my grandchild living here, usually during the week, and at her boyfriend’s house 17 miles away at the weekends, mainly because he and his parents all work and the house would be empty during the day. (Incidentally, my heart really goes out to new mums with a young baby stuck several stories up in a high-rise tower block of flats, seeing and chatting to hardly anyone and locked into a routine of feeding and sleeping.)
If and when, of course, there would still always be time to try to get to grips with the piano, but I decided to learn to play the guitar properly. It’s not that I can’t play guitar - I can and I have been able to play for many years - it’s just that like so many other players, I got stuck in my groove, simply playing what I could play and not in the slightest bit pushing myself. So, of course, like everyone else stuck in a similar groove, you don’t really improve at all. Anyone reading this will who plays guitar will know what I mean: you do a bit of this for 20 or 30 seconds, then a bit of that, then a bit of t’other, then back to the first bit, and convince yourself you are playing guitar. Well, strictly, you are. But you’re not getting anywhere, and won’t ever.
I have been ‘playing’ pretty much since I was 14 and at boarding school. There was always a few guitars lying around to be picked up and strummed and it is as easy as pie to learn the two chords everyone learns first of all, because they are the same shape: E major and A minor. Then it is on to D major and D minor and - whizzo - before you know it you are playing a G major and then C major. The E, A and D are enough for you to bang out a passable blues, and the G, C and D will take you passably into folk and country music territory. And, of course, using just those simple chords, depending upon how much you practice, you could easily sound - and be competent.
The next step involved looking up the chords to various songs you wanted to play - in my case (52 years ago, remember) it was songs by The Beatles - and by and by discovering ‘bar’ (or ‘barre’) chords and the several variations which make music more interesting but which initially are not quite as easy to master as the simply major and minor chords - the major 7th being one of the most prominent.
Yet even religiously learning the chords to a song was hardly ever satisfying, particularly as I had an older brother around who was gifted in ways I could only dream of. When he played guitar, he sounded like someone playing guitar. When I did, I didn’t. (My brother also had a natural gift for drawing and a very good brain, so good that he could excel at whatever he turned his mind to. Sadly, all too often he couldn’t be bothered putting in the effort and also sadly he had some flaw in him which meant that - as I now know, but didn’t then - he was already demonstrating obsessive behaviour from an early age, and by the time he was 12 when we were living in Berlin, my parents took him to a child psychologist.
Over time, it simply got worse and worse and worse, so that from his early twenties on and until he died a few years ago at that age of 67, he was in and out of mental care, lived in doss houses and generally didn’t have a very happy life. The medication he had been taking for many years eventually brought on dyskinesia, which distressed him even more. RIP Ian.)
So there it was: I was ‘playing’ guitar after a fashion whenever I found one knocking around - there was a battered old acoustic in the flat I shared in 23, Castle St, Dundee, with Eric Clyne, Dave Pilkington and Nigel Selwyn which could never be properly tuned and which was so cheap and cheerful it was murder to play. But I never had a guitar of my own until I was living in Milan in 1973.
I can’t think why I finally decided to buy one, but get one I did (at a guitar shop near Milan’s central station if I remember), a bright orange ‘Spanish guitar’ style item which sounded awful but was within my modest price
range. The first thing I did was to remove the nylon strings and instal metal strings, which everyone who knows about guitars and his dog will tell you is a complete no-no: the guitar’s neck is simply not strong enough over time to survive the tension of metal as opposed to nylon strings and will warp. Well, mine didn’t.
Possibly the neck did warp, but I didn’t notice, and my playing still being of a rudimentary standard it’s a moot point whether I would even have noticed. Eventually, while living in Birmingham in the mid-1980s I also bought an electric guitar, a Les Paul-style shape, and a small amp. My playing, though, didn’t improve because I was still in the groove of playing this, that and t’other for 30 seconds or so and not pushing myself.
I moved to Cardiff in 1986, into a ground-floor flat in Richards Terrace off the Newport Road, and while I was in Germany visiting my sister (and not having checked before leaving whether or not the back door was locked), I was burgled and both guitars were stolen. I can’t remember when I next bought a guitar, a Fender Strat copy, but I was still living in Cardiff and it was there I took my first lessons. They were, however, a complete waste of time as I simply didn’t go the scale exercises my tutor set for me.
. . .
This is all getting a little long-winded and to be frank beside the point. So here’s a tune, Witchcraft played by Jimmy Bruno, and the kind of music I should like to play and at a standard - a bloody great standard - I should like to reach. I doubt I ever shall, of course, but there is no harm in trying and seeing just how far I can get.
Witchcraft - Jimmy Bruno
I have indeed made progress, for two reasons: first I am now regularly practising various exercises and also because I have a very good tutor, Paul Berrington in Padstow, who, though, has one tiny fault - he teaches too fast and by the end of my weekly hour my head seems about to explode with all the stuff he has told me. At first I was a tad despondent, though I didn’t tell him, and wondered whether I would ever get my head around any of it (it was the music theory I was interested in as much as becoming more dextrous).
But by and by some if it began to accumulate and in that odd way these things have, the more you understood, the more you were able to understand, and the more you understood, the more you were able to ask pertinent questions. Furthermore, all the - for my baffling - mystique of many jazz chords became far less baffling as I got to know more and more music theory. So, for example, if looking up the chords to a song I came across Bbm7b5 (B flat minor seventh, flat fifth, all I could do was to memorise ‘where the fingers went on the fretboard’ - and there are several shapes/inversions for every chord - and trust I would remember. I never did.
Now, such chords hold no fear for me, or rather less. It’s not that I understand music theory, more that I can now see how I might understand music theory and if that sounds a little too Irish for some, please bear in mind that your average Irishman or woman is more than a tad brighter than the rest of us.
Knowing the theory will not necessarily make you a better player. But practising the scales and particularly arpeggios does wonders for finger dexterity, muscle memory and finally - the Holy Grail - of playing instinctively what you want to play without thinking about it at all.
I have to be off now, so here are a few more tracks by guitarists I like. If I could become even a tenth as good I would be reasonably happy, though I suspect if I were to become a tenth as good, I would then try to become even better.
. . .
Here’s another favourite tune of mine, Lullaby Of The Leaves. I have five versions on iTunes, two guitar version, two horn versions and one by Art Tatum. This one is by guitarist Grant Green.
Lullaby Of The Leaves - Grant Green
Then there’s the guitarist John Scofield, who played with Miles Davis in his younger years.
Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get - John Scofield
And if that’s a tad to middle-of-the road for you, try this:
The Nag - John Scofield
One thing I had long planned to do when I retired was to take piano lessons. But I haven’t. Instead I am taking guitar lessons. I would still like to be able to learn to read music and play the piano, but the fact is that if you spread yourself too thinly, you end up doing and achieving very little, and I had already long been playing guitar. Then there was the fact that a reasonably sized keyboard, let alone a full-sized upright piano would be hard to fit into anywhere in the cottaged down here on the edge of Bodmin Moor.
As it is my wife, a farmer’s daughter, hoards pretty much everything and is loth to get rid of anything, so space is at a premium. Then there is all the baby crap my daughter has introduced into the house - she splits her time between her and my grandchild living here, usually during the week, and at her boyfriend’s house 17 miles away at the weekends, mainly because he and his parents all work and the house would be empty during the day. (Incidentally, my heart really goes out to new mums with a young baby stuck several stories up in a high-rise tower block of flats, seeing and chatting to hardly anyone and locked into a routine of feeding and sleeping.)
If and when, of course, there would still always be time to try to get to grips with the piano, but I decided to learn to play the guitar properly. It’s not that I can’t play guitar - I can and I have been able to play for many years - it’s just that like so many other players, I got stuck in my groove, simply playing what I could play and not in the slightest bit pushing myself. So, of course, like everyone else stuck in a similar groove, you don’t really improve at all. Anyone reading this will who plays guitar will know what I mean: you do a bit of this for 20 or 30 seconds, then a bit of that, then a bit of t’other, then back to the first bit, and convince yourself you are playing guitar. Well, strictly, you are. But you’re not getting anywhere, and won’t ever.
I have been ‘playing’ pretty much since I was 14 and at boarding school. There was always a few guitars lying around to be picked up and strummed and it is as easy as pie to learn the two chords everyone learns first of all, because they are the same shape: E major and A minor. Then it is on to D major and D minor and - whizzo - before you know it you are playing a G major and then C major. The E, A and D are enough for you to bang out a passable blues, and the G, C and D will take you passably into folk and country music territory. And, of course, using just those simple chords, depending upon how much you practice, you could easily sound - and be competent.
The next step involved looking up the chords to various songs you wanted to play - in my case (52 years ago, remember) it was songs by The Beatles - and by and by discovering ‘bar’ (or ‘barre’) chords and the several variations which make music more interesting but which initially are not quite as easy to master as the simply major and minor chords - the major 7th being one of the most prominent.
Yet even religiously learning the chords to a song was hardly ever satisfying, particularly as I had an older brother around who was gifted in ways I could only dream of. When he played guitar, he sounded like someone playing guitar. When I did, I didn’t. (My brother also had a natural gift for drawing and a very good brain, so good that he could excel at whatever he turned his mind to. Sadly, all too often he couldn’t be bothered putting in the effort and also sadly he had some flaw in him which meant that - as I now know, but didn’t then - he was already demonstrating obsessive behaviour from an early age, and by the time he was 12 when we were living in Berlin, my parents took him to a child psychologist.
Over time, it simply got worse and worse and worse, so that from his early twenties on and until he died a few years ago at that age of 67, he was in and out of mental care, lived in doss houses and generally didn’t have a very happy life. The medication he had been taking for many years eventually brought on dyskinesia, which distressed him even more. RIP Ian.)
So there it was: I was ‘playing’ guitar after a fashion whenever I found one knocking around - there was a battered old acoustic in the flat I shared in 23, Castle St, Dundee, with Eric Clyne, Dave Pilkington and Nigel Selwyn which could never be properly tuned and which was so cheap and cheerful it was murder to play. But I never had a guitar of my own until I was living in Milan in 1973.
I can’t think why I finally decided to buy one, but get one I did (at a guitar shop near Milan’s central station if I remember), a bright orange ‘Spanish guitar’ style item which sounded awful but was within my modest price
Possibly the neck did warp, but I didn’t notice, and my playing still being of a rudimentary standard it’s a moot point whether I would even have noticed. Eventually, while living in Birmingham in the mid-1980s I also bought an electric guitar, a Les Paul-style shape, and a small amp. My playing, though, didn’t improve because I was still in the groove of playing this, that and t’other for 30 seconds or so and not pushing myself.
I moved to Cardiff in 1986, into a ground-floor flat in Richards Terrace off the Newport Road, and while I was in Germany visiting my sister (and not having checked before leaving whether or not the back door was locked), I was burgled and both guitars were stolen. I can’t remember when I next bought a guitar, a Fender Strat copy, but I was still living in Cardiff and it was there I took my first lessons. They were, however, a complete waste of time as I simply didn’t go the scale exercises my tutor set for me.
. . .
This is all getting a little long-winded and to be frank beside the point. So here’s a tune, Witchcraft played by Jimmy Bruno, and the kind of music I should like to play and at a standard - a bloody great standard - I should like to reach. I doubt I ever shall, of course, but there is no harm in trying and seeing just how far I can get.
Witchcraft - Jimmy Bruno
I have indeed made progress, for two reasons: first I am now regularly practising various exercises and also because I have a very good tutor, Paul Berrington in Padstow, who, though, has one tiny fault - he teaches too fast and by the end of my weekly hour my head seems about to explode with all the stuff he has told me. At first I was a tad despondent, though I didn’t tell him, and wondered whether I would ever get my head around any of it (it was the music theory I was interested in as much as becoming more dextrous).
But by and by some if it began to accumulate and in that odd way these things have, the more you understood, the more you were able to understand, and the more you understood, the more you were able to ask pertinent questions. Furthermore, all the - for my baffling - mystique of many jazz chords became far less baffling as I got to know more and more music theory. So, for example, if looking up the chords to a song I came across Bbm7b5 (B flat minor seventh, flat fifth, all I could do was to memorise ‘where the fingers went on the fretboard’ - and there are several shapes/inversions for every chord - and trust I would remember. I never did.
Now, such chords hold no fear for me, or rather less. It’s not that I understand music theory, more that I can now see how I might understand music theory and if that sounds a little too Irish for some, please bear in mind that your average Irishman or woman is more than a tad brighter than the rest of us.
Knowing the theory will not necessarily make you a better player. But practising the scales and particularly arpeggios does wonders for finger dexterity, muscle memory and finally - the Holy Grail - of playing instinctively what you want to play without thinking about it at all.
I have to be off now, so here are a few more tracks by guitarists I like. If I could become even a tenth as good I would be reasonably happy, though I suspect if I were to become a tenth as good, I would then try to become even better.
. . .
Here’s another favourite tune of mine, Lullaby Of The Leaves. I have five versions on iTunes, two guitar version, two horn versions and one by Art Tatum. This one is by guitarist Grant Green.
Lullaby Of The Leaves - Grant Green
Then there’s the guitarist John Scofield, who played with Miles Davis in his younger years.
Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get - John Scofield
And if that’s a tad to middle-of-the road for you, try this:
The Nag - John Scofield
Saturday 30 June 2018
Was he or was he not? Who knows? Who cares? Well, not me particularly, but it is interesting. Then there’s the matter on which I shall say nothing, nothing at all...
In a previous entry, I promised to conclude a - rather long-winded - account about why I think it more likely that my father, who I had so far thought was a BBC journalist helping out with MI6 now and again, was actually a full-time spook. Not that it matters and he died almost 30 years ago, but a number of things an aunt told me on a trip to Germany in May cast a rather different light upon what I knew.
Briefly, my father served in the Army Intelligence Corps during World War II, and then worked for the British Military Government in Germany for a few years, probably until a few months before I was born in 1949.
By the time I was born, he had joined the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park, Caversham near Reading, which, he told me, entailed the BBC monitoring radio (and, I suppose, later TV) stations from around the world. I
often wondered why the BBC should bother doing that and when, as a young lad, I asked him, he told me that the BBC could thus hear about news they might otherwise have missed and could put it in it’s own bulletins.
I’ve since discovered it, or possibly just part of it, was a division of the CIA known by the somewhat innocuous name Open Source Enterprise. In 1959, he was appointed as the BBC’s representative in Berlin (note, there was also a BBC correspondent who, for some of the four years we lived in Berlin was Charles Wheeler. Wheeler a more liberal-minded chap and my father rather further to the right apparently did not get on very well).
In Berlin, he was part of the BBC’s German Service, a department which existed for 60 years from 1939. It was in Berlin that he, by his own account and in response various questions I put to him in the last few years of his life, ‘helped out the security services’. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it might account for Charles Wheeler’s antipathy. Wheeler was a hack to his core and most certainly would not have agreed with a journalist working hand-in-glove with his country’s government, if only for the very practical reason that it would cast doubt on his integrity as an honest journalist, and even though that integrity might be wholly unsullied, even the possibility that a journalist was not entirely independent could be damaging.
Incidentally, and as I have pointed out in the blog before, when I talk here of a ‘journalist’, I do mean the professional man or woman who reports on news and sometime provides analysis as opposed to the guy or gal thinking up puns for captions to pictures of vegetables that look like celebrities - or celebrities that look like politicians if you like. This second kind of hack might be beavering away on Tunnels & Tunnelling, a very useful publication which now has an online presence for those with a keen interests in, well tunnels and tunnelling.
The first kind of journalist is one the public - ‘civilians’ - imagines you are when they discover you ‘are a journalist’ and assume you spend your days hob-nobbing with politicians and high-end businessmen and are generally ‘in the know’. In fact, the other sort, those who staff Trout & Salmon, for example, are equally justified in calling themselves journalists. It’s just their work is not quite as apparently sexy as that of the first kind. Me, I’ve never called myself ‘a journalist’, I always said I worked for newspapers. Nothing hard news about me, dear friends.
. . .
I mentioned in the entry I link to above a guy called August Löning, a distant relative and strong anti-Nazi by virtue of the fact that he was a supporter of Der Stahlhelm, a rival far-right group which was mainly distinguished from the National Socialists by the fact that it wanted to ‘bring back the Kaiser’ and the Nazis didn’t. Onkel August as I, part of the ‘extended family’ - and boy can Germans extend families, although I must admit I rather like it - called him was a founder member of the German CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) and served as a member of the stare parliament of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). But Onkel August was also part of a secret government in waiting set up by - well, partly by the British security services - which was destined to take over in the event of a Soviet invasion. That, at least, is what my father informed me.
Several years ago, Irmgard, one of August Löning’s daughters told me that a few times every year throughout the 1950s a mysterious Englishman would visit her father in Lathen, the village about 12 miles from the Dutch border in which he lived, and when he arrived, they secreted themselves somewhere quietly and everyone else was told not to disturb them. Irmgard said she couldn’t remember his name. But on my recent trip to Germany her younger sister Helma, who I had lunch with, could remember who it was: my father.
Was she sure? I asked her. Because her sister Irmgard, I told her, who knew my father just as well as she did, would certainly have remembered it was my father. She was certain, Helma said. My father visited her father - August Löning - regularly throughout the 1950s. And then, she added, as we ate, there was ‘the radio transmitter in das Alte Wehrhaus’.
August Löning had owned das Alte Wehrhaus (the old weir house) on the river Ems since a new weir had been built further down the river. We spent many holidays there when we lived in Berlin, and it was also where a radio transmitter was kept. There’s obviously nothing particularly unusual about having a radio transmiter as part of plans to be ready to put in place a provisional German government if the Soviets ever invaded West Germany (as it was then), but it did take me a little by surprise when Helma told me. She said her brother Heinrich had been trained to use if as and when.
The question I am asking myself is why would a member BBC monitoring service, by his own admission, help to set up a provisional German government and, furthermore, make regular visits to see August Löning throughout the 1950s? But if he were a serving member of the security services, it would make a lot more sense.
That possibility also made me ponder on something else which has in the past struck me as odd. My father, who once later in life described himself as a ‘right-wing radical’ when I asked him what his politics were, also once told me he had campaigned for the then Liberal Party during the general election of either 1950 or 1951.
Now, anyone meeting my father would never have put him down as a liberal, but it is always possible that he, then 27/28. was a tad more idealistic at the time and, well, thought Britain could do with a Liberal Party government and it was worth campaigning to get one elected. It has since dawned on me that the security services might also very much like to have an inside man among the Liberals, given the number of Communist sympathisers out and about and the steadily deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union. But that is just surmise.
So there you have it. I can still not say with any certainty what my father was - a BBC man who ‘helped out’ or a spook with a BBC cover. To be frank it doesn’t matter either way, but when Helma insisted it had been my father who had arrived regularly throughout the 1950s, I did get to thinking again.
A few years ago I discussed some of this with my sister, and we decided to ask MI6 straight out. So almost four years ago, on November 1, 2014, I wrote them a letter explaining who I was and who my father was, and asking whether my father had been a member of their staff. I didn’t get a reply for several months, but then I did get a response from MI6. It was bland in the extreme.
It purported to be from a suburban street somewhere in South London and was extremely short. I know it was from MI6 because I had addressed my letter - I got the address from the MI6 website - to ‘General Inquiry, MI6, PO Box 1300, London SE1 1BD’. I think I still have it somewhere though I can’t say where as when I put stuff away
for ‘safekeeping’, I invariably forget where it is (but at least it is still safe). I can only remember the gist of the very short reply, but it was along the lines of ‘such matters are never discussed’ and it advised me to get in touch with The National Archives in Kew, South-West London, to see if they had any info on my dear old dad. Nowhere in the letter was there any mention of the ‘security services’, ‘MI6’ or ‘MI5’.
Oh, and here’s tip: if anyone in Britain (or in your own country) volunteers the information that they are working or once worked for the security services, you know one thing for certain: they are not or did not, and are just total bullshitters. Spooks don’t talk or brag. It’s not in their nature, and an ability to keep quiet is one of the traits which makes them attractive as potential agents. For the record, I am not and have never been a member of the security services.
Former colleagues might not that I am far to outspoken, indiscrete (or indiscreet - subs please check, as I can’t be arsed), noisy and tactless to be considered spook material. But then I would have thought that having a reputation as a loudmouth might well be excellent cover. If it worked for the Scarlett Pimpernel . . .
. . .
There is another matter I should dearly like to write about, but wisdom - yes, wisdom - advises against it. As I confessed to a friend a week or two ago, rather shamefacedly I must admit, I might not be much wiser than I was, but I have learned to listen to small voice inside me that occasionally counsels ‘nah, wouldn’t do that, or at least not yet’. So, zilch, dear friends, zilch on the matter.
Briefly, my father served in the Army Intelligence Corps during World War II, and then worked for the British Military Government in Germany for a few years, probably until a few months before I was born in 1949.
By the time I was born, he had joined the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park, Caversham near Reading, which, he told me, entailed the BBC monitoring radio (and, I suppose, later TV) stations from around the world. I
I’ve since discovered it, or possibly just part of it, was a division of the CIA known by the somewhat innocuous name Open Source Enterprise. In 1959, he was appointed as the BBC’s representative in Berlin (note, there was also a BBC correspondent who, for some of the four years we lived in Berlin was Charles Wheeler. Wheeler a more liberal-minded chap and my father rather further to the right apparently did not get on very well).
In Berlin, he was part of the BBC’s German Service, a department which existed for 60 years from 1939. It was in Berlin that he, by his own account and in response various questions I put to him in the last few years of his life, ‘helped out the security services’. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it might account for Charles Wheeler’s antipathy. Wheeler was a hack to his core and most certainly would not have agreed with a journalist working hand-in-glove with his country’s government, if only for the very practical reason that it would cast doubt on his integrity as an honest journalist, and even though that integrity might be wholly unsullied, even the possibility that a journalist was not entirely independent could be damaging.
Incidentally, and as I have pointed out in the blog before, when I talk here of a ‘journalist’, I do mean the professional man or woman who reports on news and sometime provides analysis as opposed to the guy or gal thinking up puns for captions to pictures of vegetables that look like celebrities - or celebrities that look like politicians if you like. This second kind of hack might be beavering away on Tunnels & Tunnelling, a very useful publication which now has an online presence for those with a keen interests in, well tunnels and tunnelling.
The first kind of journalist is one the public - ‘civilians’ - imagines you are when they discover you ‘are a journalist’ and assume you spend your days hob-nobbing with politicians and high-end businessmen and are generally ‘in the know’. In fact, the other sort, those who staff Trout & Salmon, for example, are equally justified in calling themselves journalists. It’s just their work is not quite as apparently sexy as that of the first kind. Me, I’ve never called myself ‘a journalist’, I always said I worked for newspapers. Nothing hard news about me, dear friends.
. . .
I mentioned in the entry I link to above a guy called August Löning, a distant relative and strong anti-Nazi by virtue of the fact that he was a supporter of Der Stahlhelm, a rival far-right group which was mainly distinguished from the National Socialists by the fact that it wanted to ‘bring back the Kaiser’ and the Nazis didn’t. Onkel August as I, part of the ‘extended family’ - and boy can Germans extend families, although I must admit I rather like it - called him was a founder member of the German CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) and served as a member of the stare parliament of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). But Onkel August was also part of a secret government in waiting set up by - well, partly by the British security services - which was destined to take over in the event of a Soviet invasion. That, at least, is what my father informed me.
Several years ago, Irmgard, one of August Löning’s daughters told me that a few times every year throughout the 1950s a mysterious Englishman would visit her father in Lathen, the village about 12 miles from the Dutch border in which he lived, and when he arrived, they secreted themselves somewhere quietly and everyone else was told not to disturb them. Irmgard said she couldn’t remember his name. But on my recent trip to Germany her younger sister Helma, who I had lunch with, could remember who it was: my father.
Was she sure? I asked her. Because her sister Irmgard, I told her, who knew my father just as well as she did, would certainly have remembered it was my father. She was certain, Helma said. My father visited her father - August Löning - regularly throughout the 1950s. And then, she added, as we ate, there was ‘the radio transmitter in das Alte Wehrhaus’.
August Löning had owned das Alte Wehrhaus (the old weir house) on the river Ems since a new weir had been built further down the river. We spent many holidays there when we lived in Berlin, and it was also where a radio transmitter was kept. There’s obviously nothing particularly unusual about having a radio transmiter as part of plans to be ready to put in place a provisional German government if the Soviets ever invaded West Germany (as it was then), but it did take me a little by surprise when Helma told me. She said her brother Heinrich had been trained to use if as and when.
The question I am asking myself is why would a member BBC monitoring service, by his own admission, help to set up a provisional German government and, furthermore, make regular visits to see August Löning throughout the 1950s? But if he were a serving member of the security services, it would make a lot more sense.
That possibility also made me ponder on something else which has in the past struck me as odd. My father, who once later in life described himself as a ‘right-wing radical’ when I asked him what his politics were, also once told me he had campaigned for the then Liberal Party during the general election of either 1950 or 1951.
Now, anyone meeting my father would never have put him down as a liberal, but it is always possible that he, then 27/28. was a tad more idealistic at the time and, well, thought Britain could do with a Liberal Party government and it was worth campaigning to get one elected. It has since dawned on me that the security services might also very much like to have an inside man among the Liberals, given the number of Communist sympathisers out and about and the steadily deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union. But that is just surmise.
So there you have it. I can still not say with any certainty what my father was - a BBC man who ‘helped out’ or a spook with a BBC cover. To be frank it doesn’t matter either way, but when Helma insisted it had been my father who had arrived regularly throughout the 1950s, I did get to thinking again.
A few years ago I discussed some of this with my sister, and we decided to ask MI6 straight out. So almost four years ago, on November 1, 2014, I wrote them a letter explaining who I was and who my father was, and asking whether my father had been a member of their staff. I didn’t get a reply for several months, but then I did get a response from MI6. It was bland in the extreme.
It purported to be from a suburban street somewhere in South London and was extremely short. I know it was from MI6 because I had addressed my letter - I got the address from the MI6 website - to ‘General Inquiry, MI6, PO Box 1300, London SE1 1BD’. I think I still have it somewhere though I can’t say where as when I put stuff away
for ‘safekeeping’, I invariably forget where it is (but at least it is still safe). I can only remember the gist of the very short reply, but it was along the lines of ‘such matters are never discussed’ and it advised me to get in touch with The National Archives in Kew, South-West London, to see if they had any info on my dear old dad. Nowhere in the letter was there any mention of the ‘security services’, ‘MI6’ or ‘MI5’.
Oh, and here’s tip: if anyone in Britain (or in your own country) volunteers the information that they are working or once worked for the security services, you know one thing for certain: they are not or did not, and are just total bullshitters. Spooks don’t talk or brag. It’s not in their nature, and an ability to keep quiet is one of the traits which makes them attractive as potential agents. For the record, I am not and have never been a member of the security services.
Former colleagues might not that I am far to outspoken, indiscrete (or indiscreet - subs please check, as I can’t be arsed), noisy and tactless to be considered spook material. But then I would have thought that having a reputation as a loudmouth might well be excellent cover. If it worked for the Scarlett Pimpernel . . .
. . .
There is another matter I should dearly like to write about, but wisdom - yes, wisdom - advises against it. As I confessed to a friend a week or two ago, rather shamefacedly I must admit, I might not be much wiser than I was, but I have learned to listen to small voice inside me that occasionally counsels ‘nah, wouldn’t do that, or at least not yet’. So, zilch, dear friends, zilch on the matter.
Monday 11 June 2018
So THAT’S what displacement activity is! Well! I must ring all my friends and tell them, though I can’t do it quite yet as I really, really must get on with sorting out that hairbrush. And then there’s the bloody bog roll roller – sticking again. So I might not manage to ring around to later today or maybe tomorrow
Well, it’s been ten weeks since my new life started and I’m slowly getting used to it, although it hasn’t quite gone to plan. But that is no bad thing as surely being intent on sticking to a plan, however noble that plan, is arguably the antithesis of relaxing, and boy do I intend to relax. It’s just that my idea of relaxing is not simply cracking open a bottle of Rioja on the stroke of noon and settling in to watch flat-racing on the gogglebox
Writing was the essence of that plan, and that part of it I have adhered to, though not quite to the timetable I had mentally set for myself. And nor have I yet begun my next project properly, though I have done some work on it.
An application I have been using and found to be very useful is Scapple, though there are others like it and it is available for both Macs and Windows, so a file can be saved to, say, Google Drive or Microsoft’s One Drive, and then work on pretty much anywhere on a desktop of laptop if you have the app installed and access to the internet (to download the file, obviously, then upload it again with any changes you have made ready for you next session.
The idea is not original, merely one which has been transferred to the digital realm: you jot down – I suppose that should be ‘jot’ down a series of ideas and thoughts on what you want to write, I suppose you are brainstorming yourself, and then connect them in any way you choose. It is useful, if only because it can give you a slightly better overview of what you have in mind and helps you marshal your thoughts better. Here is a screenshot of it, with work I have already done. It is just a jpeg of a screenshot and I hope to God you can’t read any of the notes:
A few weeks ago, I was at my sister’s in Germany for my niece/goddaughter’s wedding, and when I came back I didn’t quite feel the same as I had when I went out. I was conscious again of having projects and feeling obliged to do something. Well, I did and do, but that slightly irritated me.
My original plan to be out of bed at dawn, down in my shed (picture at the bottom now that I have a new table and have rearranged the furniture a little to make it more amenable and be tipping away on my keyboard as though there were not tomorrow. Incidentally, I can’t think why I had the desk where it was before, and anyway, I no longer have that desk, but shan’t go into why not as it has caused something of a slight rift between me and my stepmother who more or less implied I was trying to con her out of it if not steal it outright. That hurt, although her friend and neighbour Jill suggests she might slowly be getting a little dementia. Who knows, but that is by the by).
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but I am, at least, putting in about four hours, even if it means I am going to bed a little later than I expected. My last post here touched upon the slightly mysterious suspicion that my father was not, as he had always assured me, a BBC man who just occasionally helped out MI6, but that it might, just might, have been the other way around. The last post was the first part, and I promised a second, but that will have to wait, as I have something else on the go.
. . .
I read a novel, which had been one of my set texts at college, and which is regarded as ‘a masterpiece’ and the writer ‘a genius’. So when I read it and increasingly thought ‘what’s all the fuss about, this isn’t all that brilliant’, I was a little bemused and embarrassed even. I mean who was I to judge that a man regarded as one of the world’s great writers was maybe not all he was cracked up to be, at least going by the novel I was reading.
In fact, I was so bemused and embarrassed by my apostasy, but on the other hand so sure that that was really what I felt, that as soon as I had finished the novel, I began reading it again. But even on two readings I can honestly say I am not at all convinced.
So that is the ‘something else I have on the go’ and I am doing quite a bit of work on it. I shall post it all here when it is finished. And once finished, I really shall get down to the main thing.
The other thing which I have finally been able to do is get into learning to play the guitar a damn sight better than I have so far. And even though I say so myself, the lessons – with a Paul Berrington in Padstow – are paying off. Some might feel what we do – scales, modes, arpeggios and musical theory – is all a bit dry, but I’m having none of it. For one thing my playing is because more flexible, or rather my fingers are becoming more flexible and my playing, by and by, more fluent. It really is early days yet as far as being as good as I want to be, but I feel I’m slowly getting there.
Other things on the horizon are another swift trip Bratislava to be measured for my new tooth which will be combined the night before I fly out – just for the say, by the way – with a drink and perhaps a meal with an old friend.
I have, though, discovered what ‘displacement activity’ is. I thought I knew, although I have never before used the word, and when I came to settle in to write this entry, it occurred to me. So I looked it up and it is spot on for what I want to describe.
Quite simply my day runs like this: I wake up, often quite early, turn over and and sometimes manage to go to sleep again. I finally get up between 9.30 and 10 and then, in theory there is nothing to hold me back. But it is then when I discover all kinds of things to do except shift across here to my shed and get stuck in. At 10.30 there’s coffee to be made, online newspapers to be read, perhaps I might go into town to buy something, then there’s time to be passed deciding what to buy when I go into town (today it was a guitar stand – Paul would be proud as using one means thereis far less chance of you guitar crashing over and getting damaged).
Then, at some point there is my stepmother to be visited down the lane – a duty I am increasingly putting off as after that incident with the table I am not all that keen on seeing her. And then, of course, it it lunchtime, and although I don’t eat lunch, I do tend to drink another pot of coffee. Finally, I might shift over to where I am sitting now and start. And the very odd thing is once I start, I wonder what all the fuss was about. But now I know: displacement activity.
But all in all, it’s rather pleasant. I would urged everyone to retire, whatever age you are. The only downside is that sooner or later retirement ends in death. But then so does life itself, so it ain’t that serious.
Pip, pip.
Writing was the essence of that plan, and that part of it I have adhered to, though not quite to the timetable I had mentally set for myself. And nor have I yet begun my next project properly, though I have done some work on it.
An application I have been using and found to be very useful is Scapple, though there are others like it and it is available for both Macs and Windows, so a file can be saved to, say, Google Drive or Microsoft’s One Drive, and then work on pretty much anywhere on a desktop of laptop if you have the app installed and access to the internet (to download the file, obviously, then upload it again with any changes you have made ready for you next session.
The idea is not original, merely one which has been transferred to the digital realm: you jot down – I suppose that should be ‘jot’ down a series of ideas and thoughts on what you want to write, I suppose you are brainstorming yourself, and then connect them in any way you choose. It is useful, if only because it can give you a slightly better overview of what you have in mind and helps you marshal your thoughts better. Here is a screenshot of it, with work I have already done. It is just a jpeg of a screenshot and I hope to God you can’t read any of the notes:
A few weeks ago, I was at my sister’s in Germany for my niece/goddaughter’s wedding, and when I came back I didn’t quite feel the same as I had when I went out. I was conscious again of having projects and feeling obliged to do something. Well, I did and do, but that slightly irritated me.
My original plan to be out of bed at dawn, down in my shed (picture at the bottom now that I have a new table and have rearranged the furniture a little to make it more amenable and be tipping away on my keyboard as though there were not tomorrow. Incidentally, I can’t think why I had the desk where it was before, and anyway, I no longer have that desk, but shan’t go into why not as it has caused something of a slight rift between me and my stepmother who more or less implied I was trying to con her out of it if not steal it outright. That hurt, although her friend and neighbour Jill suggests she might slowly be getting a little dementia. Who knows, but that is by the by).
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but I am, at least, putting in about four hours, even if it means I am going to bed a little later than I expected. My last post here touched upon the slightly mysterious suspicion that my father was not, as he had always assured me, a BBC man who just occasionally helped out MI6, but that it might, just might, have been the other way around. The last post was the first part, and I promised a second, but that will have to wait, as I have something else on the go.
. . .
I read a novel, which had been one of my set texts at college, and which is regarded as ‘a masterpiece’ and the writer ‘a genius’. So when I read it and increasingly thought ‘what’s all the fuss about, this isn’t all that brilliant’, I was a little bemused and embarrassed even. I mean who was I to judge that a man regarded as one of the world’s great writers was maybe not all he was cracked up to be, at least going by the novel I was reading.
In fact, I was so bemused and embarrassed by my apostasy, but on the other hand so sure that that was really what I felt, that as soon as I had finished the novel, I began reading it again. But even on two readings I can honestly say I am not at all convinced.
So that is the ‘something else I have on the go’ and I am doing quite a bit of work on it. I shall post it all here when it is finished. And once finished, I really shall get down to the main thing.
The other thing which I have finally been able to do is get into learning to play the guitar a damn sight better than I have so far. And even though I say so myself, the lessons – with a Paul Berrington in Padstow – are paying off. Some might feel what we do – scales, modes, arpeggios and musical theory – is all a bit dry, but I’m having none of it. For one thing my playing is because more flexible, or rather my fingers are becoming more flexible and my playing, by and by, more fluent. It really is early days yet as far as being as good as I want to be, but I feel I’m slowly getting there.
Other things on the horizon are another swift trip Bratislava to be measured for my new tooth which will be combined the night before I fly out – just for the say, by the way – with a drink and perhaps a meal with an old friend.
I have, though, discovered what ‘displacement activity’ is. I thought I knew, although I have never before used the word, and when I came to settle in to write this entry, it occurred to me. So I looked it up and it is spot on for what I want to describe.
Quite simply my day runs like this: I wake up, often quite early, turn over and and sometimes manage to go to sleep again. I finally get up between 9.30 and 10 and then, in theory there is nothing to hold me back. But it is then when I discover all kinds of things to do except shift across here to my shed and get stuck in. At 10.30 there’s coffee to be made, online newspapers to be read, perhaps I might go into town to buy something, then there’s time to be passed deciding what to buy when I go into town (today it was a guitar stand – Paul would be proud as using one means thereis far less chance of you guitar crashing over and getting damaged).
Then, at some point there is my stepmother to be visited down the lane – a duty I am increasingly putting off as after that incident with the table I am not all that keen on seeing her. And then, of course, it it lunchtime, and although I don’t eat lunch, I do tend to drink another pot of coffee. Finally, I might shift over to where I am sitting now and start. And the very odd thing is once I start, I wonder what all the fuss was about. But now I know: displacement activity.
But all in all, it’s rather pleasant. I would urged everyone to retire, whatever age you are. The only downside is that sooner or later retirement ends in death. But then so does life itself, so it ain’t that serious.
Pip, pip.
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