It’s all happening now: Vladimir Putin confesses he’s a Kate Bush fan, some of his soldiers lose their way, Boris and Nigel are still irrelevant, despite what they might like to think, and Rotherham police and social service demonstrate that at the end of the day they don’t give a flying fuck about much, really, least of all 1,400 children who complained of being raped

Well, where does a lad start? In no particular order: Boris Johnson (aka Korky the Kat) and Nigel Farage both announce they will be standing for Parliament at our general election next May; Britain wrestles with the question of whether or not to pal up with Mr Assad of Syria to launch a joint effort to see off the thugs who dare to call themselves Muslims aka Islamic State (or whatever they like to call themselves today); assorted seasoned Russian troops apparently get lost on the Russian/Ukrainian border and find themselves in Ukraine - didn’t they have a map? Obviously not, but at least they will have had a bottle or five of vodka; a report is released detailing the rape and torture of an appalling 1,400 young and older children in just one town - Rotherham - over ten years but they claims weren’t taken seriously, possibly because the sadists who did it were largely Asian and we don’t want to be accused of racism now, do we

To cap it all Kate Bush - look up her name in the AA guide to has-been pop stars if you can’t immediately identify her - as started a month of concerts for the first time in just over 67 years. Let’s start with Kate Bush: with the exception of just one of her many songs - Babuska - I have never liked her music, find her voice thoroughly irritating and so am obviously totally out of the loop with my fellow geriatrics. She strikes me as the Lib Dems of pop music, what with vegan recipes and vegan songs.

I’m liberal enough - with a small ‘l’ I hope you realise - to acknowledge that many do like Kate and her music, but then a great many people also think the British cuisine leads the world (purely on the basis that several well-known French chefs have made Britain their home and you can now get a half-decent meal in London if you have the money). So that, I hope, puts Kate in perspective.

A similar irrational attitude comes into play when folk talk about Boris Johnson, all tousled blond hair, Latin phrases and what is regarded as a disarming charm. He has made no bones about the fact that ‘he wants to be Prime Minister’, but the Lord help us if he ever gets a sniff of the top job. It would be pertinent to ask: what does Boris stand for (and he is one of the few politicians who get instant recognition even if you only refer to him by his christian name)?

Well, I don’t know, except the greater glory of Boris Johnson. In my book he is firmly in the Total Nine-Bob Note drawer, but there is a sufficient number of folk who seem to believe his British version of ‘aw shucks, I’m just an ordinary guy’ and the mop of tousled hair plus those incomprehensible Latin quotes he comes out with are enough reason to think he might run the country less badly than recent Labour and Conservative politicians.

As for Nigel Farage, well I’ll grant that he is popular, not least with many folk who think of themselves as Labour, and seems to articulate the feelings of many as regards the EU and what is always awfully vaguely referred to as ‘immigrants’. But despite the claims that the party he leads, UKIP - the United Kingdom Independence Party - is a ‘growing force’ in British politics, he is, as far as I can tell and going on the performance of his fellow Ukippers, about the one sane man among an otherwise worryingly wacky gang of folk who don’t have a policy to pursue between them. You might gather that he won’t be getting my vote.

As for the Russian chaps who accidentally crossed the border into Ukraine, well, just how careless can you get, especially in view of all that’s going on in eastern Ukraine? I am tempted to observe that Ukraine is a country of which we know little and of which we would like to know even less, but the situation there is dire, especially as the West’s attention is now firmly elsewhere, worrying about how many more thousands Islamic State will behead, bury alive or execute in more humane ways before the UN finally gets its act together and passes a very, very, very strong resolution telling ISIS, IS or whatever it is today: ‘Look, you can’t do this sort of thing, it really isn’t done, and if you carry on, we’ll be forced to pass another very, very, very strong resolution. So watch it!’ Under the circumstances that might sound like an unbearably facetious thing to write, but it isn’t far from the truth.

The big question being asked now - and dividing the West as only the West knows how to be divided - is to we co-operate with Syria’s president Assad to try to put an end to Islamic State. From where I sit, the answer is a very reluctant, yes, of course, but not much is going to happen soon and in the meantime those pseudo-islamic thugs will get stronger and stronger, and murder more and more folk. Maybe Kate Bush should write a song about it all.

Maybe Boris knows how to sort it all out. Maybe Nigel Farage will declare that we most certainly won’t grant any of them visas when UKIP is in charge. But while the West dithers before dithering a lot more, one Vladimir Putin will quietly be beavering away thinking up more mischief.

. . .

On the question of Russia, Putin and Ukraine, what puzzles me most of all is just what exactly does Putin want? The real problem, of course, is that we judge other cultures by the standards and values of our own. That was the fatal flaw in the policy which was said to underpin the invasion of Iraq. The West - well the US and Britain - seemed to believe, arrogantly, that once we had got rid of Saddam Hussein and had shipped in several thousand ballot boxes, the grateful Iraqis would embrace democracy like a man dying of thirst will gulp down several pints of water. They did in a sense, but in another sense they were no nearer democracy. It might be more honest to say, democracy, shmerocracy, what people really want is not to be treated like shit. And being treated like shit happens all the time in even the most pristine-looking democracies. As for the Middle East, we seemed to have no conception of the Arab mind and our ignorance allied to our arrogance is doing no one any favours at all.

Well, the invasion of Iraw is water under the bridge, not to say several hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and buried because of the unbearable vanity of George Dubya and his simpering acolyte Tony Blair, but we might try to learn the lesson and try a lot harder to understand the Russian psyche. So what is it that Putin wants? What would he regard as his prize? Is it really to get back Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Russian fold? Surely he must realise that that is never going to happen and surely he must realised the risk there is of war if he pursues that objective.

It is now futile to cast blame, but if I were to do so, I would firmly blame the West - the US and the EU - in meddling in Ukrainian domestic politics, which is what seems to have sparked the whole shooting match. I’ve asked what Putin is actually after, but equally one might wonder exactly what the West and the EU hoped to achieve by their meddling. I can’t seem to discern any grand strategy, especially if, as it has seemed for these past 20 years trade and the necessary co-operation to ensure good trade was the name of the game.

As usual, of course, I am just another blogger pointlessly adding his two ha’porth worth. But as I now have an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, I do get very angry that what strikes me as criminal incompetence is making the world far less safe, and for no good reason whatsoever.

. . .

As for the appalling sexual abuse of children in Rotherham, one horrific element is that way, in the phrase used by several reports - and you can read three here, here and here - social services and the police simply turned a blind eye to what was going on. They were fully informed, but as the majority of the perpetuators were Asian, they ‘did not want to appear racist’ and so ignored it.

As the report pointed out, the 1,400 children - 1,400! - are just those who had the courage to come forward. Just how many more were there who were too scared to come forward? And, for a moment, reflect on the hopeless bewilderment of those who might have considered coming forward but who realised it would be pointless because nothing was done about it. Then reflect upon just how many more there are in other towns up and down the country. And we still like to portray ourselves as a ‘caring’ country. Get to fuck!

Read the reports and make up your own mind.

I freeze my bollocks off and hope for warmer weather elsewhere in a few weeks, while Francois apparently hasn’t done the decent thing and it might not have been his decision anyway. As for that Vlad Putin: does he really have a plan?

Given the continuing interest of some folk in the love lives of Francois Hollande and his most recent squeeze actress Julie Gayet, and the claim that he was about to pop the question on his 60th birthday last week (August 12), these three pictures would seem to prove that if he did pop it, he didn’t pop it hard enough. For Francois has most recently been pictured on holiday – alone. And Ms Gayet has also recently been pictured on holiday – but not alone. The chap in question is said to be finance management lawyer Pierre Puybasset (so he won’t be short of a centimes or two, and if there’s one thing woman like, it’s a chap with deep pockets).

Here we have Francois getting stuck into his newspaper at (so I am informed, but it isn’t obvious from the picture0 a poolside. Well, where else would you expect to find him in mid-August?

Then there are these two snaps: in the first Julie (as we must now call her) emerges from a dip in the sea with Pierre (as we must now call him).

Here, in the second, they seem to be saying goodbye, and for what it’s worth that kiss seems more a goodbye kiss between two friends than two lovers.

The obvious question is, of course, why did Francois go on holiday alone? Is Julie getting just a little fed up with all the attention?
The real question, of course, is: what the hell does it matter (which would make my posting these pictures here just a tad irrelevant). The world seems well on its way to Hell in a handcart in Syria, Iraq, Gaza and the Ukraine, the weather here in Old Blighty is bloody awful, Miley Cyris is pretending to be grown-up again, Manchester United still haven’t won a Premier League game in this new season (they were held to a 1-1 draw by Sunderland, although the way they have been playing it might be more accurated to describe it as United holding Sunderland to a 1-1 draw. And whether or not van Gaal, the apparent deus ex machina who is proving to be nothing of the kind is capable of Ferige-style ‘hairdryer’ tirades in the dressing room which at least ensure United kept on winning is anyone’s guess).

So why are you and I wasting our time with speculating about the love life of a fat Frenchman who by 2017 will be less than a footnote in history? Because we’re stupid, that’s why.

. . .

In own life (as you ask) the next great event is a week in the depths of Valencia county or whatever it is called with my 80-year-old potter friend, Seth Cardew. I must admit I am looking forward to those seven days because it really is a question of doing fuck-all for 24 hours every day, and there are a few books I am looking forward to reading. I don’t know whether of not he will have any students for the week I am there, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m hoping that the temperature will be at least 10c warmer than it is here, which, for mid-August, is an appalling 11c. I’m told be those who take a far keener interest in these matters than I do that we even had a ground frost in Cornwall a few nights ago. Well!

(NB Just looked at the weather forecast for the week I am there, and apart from a thunderstorm – for surely t-storm means thunderstorm – on the day I arrive, it looks like sun, sun, sun all the way with temperatures around 30c. Thank the Lord!)

And there isn’t even a government department we can complain to and claim compensation from! Talk of bloody democracy! I blame the EU! Lord, knows what it’s up to! No wonder we are getting freezing temperatures in August! Makes you bloody sick! Well, what do you expect! Look at the pig’s ear they made of Ukraine! All we want to do is station a few hundreds tanks on its eastern border and have some of our fighter jets parked discreetly in some of its military airports, but look at the fuck-up they have made of that! Makes you bloody sick.

. . .

One of the better and more persuasive observations I have heard about the whole Ukraine fuck-up (and it still is being conveniently overlooked that this new chap Peroshenko is about as legitimate as nine-bob note given how his predecessor was ousted in a coup) is that Vlad the Lad Putin has rather miscalculated: no one denies that his popularity rating is soaring in Russia, but he seems to have painted himself into a corner: the crowd want ever more of this Mother Russia triumphalist shite and so to keep them happy he is obliged to supply it.

Yet the only way out of this must be negotiations, a route he might suspect he can’t take for fear of looking weak. That, at least, is the view of two former British ambassadors to Moscow, pronounced independently. And one of them opined that Putin is at heart rather a cautious man and is not the master strategist many would think him to be (perhaps even Vladimir himself) after the easy, easy way he annexed Crimea.

Snaps, snaps, pictures, and snaps / just for a laugh, just for the craic

When I was younger and still idealistic, I developed an interest in photography. It began with trying to take pictures with whatever crap camera was around, and in those days they were crap, with folk even making do with 110mm format film, which for quality was even worse than the old box Brownie. But because the pictures most folk took in those heady days of holidays on the Spanish costas - horribly posed group shots of folk gurning as though their life depended on it just to prove what a good time they were having, or pictures of beautiful sunsets which turned into underexposed photos of nothing - were crap anyway, it really didn’t matter if the resolution was appalling.

My pictures were the same, but I was disappointed again and again and wanted to create the pictures I had intended, which I never did, and bit by bit got deeper into photography, inch by sorry inch. I was, however, a slow learner, though I did eventually teach myself developing and printing, which meant I wasn’t spending an arm and a leg getting some lab to develop my films and I could now reproduce the pictures on 10 x 8 paper.

I finally decided I wanted to ‘become a photographer’ in the dangerous time in every man’s life when they decide to throw over the traces and do what they think they were put on this earth to do. It happens when they have turned 30; I have no idea what similar existential crisis women face. Perhaps it is that they finally decide they want to have babies (if, of course, they don’t already have them.) Some think it is to ‘write my novel', others fuck off and open an antiques shop somewhere, others still decide to re-invent the wheel. So I threw over my job as a sub-editor and enrolled on a photography course at West Bromwich College. (As for ‘writing my novel’, I must pass on Peter Cook’s story. At a party of some kind he met some guy and asked him what he was doing. ‘I'm writing my novel,’ the man told him. ‘No, neither am I,’ said Peter Cook, who was nothing if not honest. Well, at least I’ve done it. It might be complete shite, but at least I’ve done it.)

I lasted just two terms because ran out of money, but my interest continued. I had, anyway, learnt quite a lot in the two terms of a two-year course I managed, particularly on the theory side of photography, most of which, of course, I have since forgotten. I also found a job working in an advertising photographic studio for three months, and although I picked up a bit more there (and dropped one particular howler twice when I and another assistant were allowed to use the studio after hours to do the girlfriend of a friend a favour).

After being unemployed for 11 months, I found another job, again as a sub, but I carried on with photography. This was all in the days before Photoshop and digital cameras (which don’t seem that long ago to me, but are probably ancient history to you), and I used to buy B&W film by the 30m can and load my own 35mm canisters. I also used to develop my own film and, naturally, print my own pictures.

I didn’t stick to B&W because I preferred it - and still prefer B&W pictures - but it was also a damn sight cheaper. I did do a little bit of colour printing at college and your more or less have to work in the dark, although your eyes do get used to the almost complete absence of light sooner than you might believe. I can’t say I am much good, but I do know enough to spot when a photographer does know what he is doing. There again the definition of ‘good’ is so flexible that as near as dammit a conversation about what is a ‘good’ picture and what isn’t is neigh-on pointless.

Yesterday my cousin showed me some of his pictures he has posted on a blog, and I thought that as I still have several knocking around, I would do the same. So here are some, although one picture in particular has mysteriously gone missing. I shan’t give much detail or any explanation. I am hugely sceptical of those photographic exhibitions of so-so pictures which are really nothing special, but which are acommpanied by an A4 sheet of explication, explanation and I don’t know what else justifying what is otherwise a pretty ordinary picture, usually about poverty in the Gambia, Aids in Rwanda, deprivation among the Australian aboriginals (can’t for the moment think of the PC phrase, sorry), inebriation among the Inuit (know that one, won’t catch me writing Eskimo) etc.

Of the following, all were taken between 1982 and 1990. How’s that for keeping up to date?

Here are some:

In a pub in Balsall Heath, Birmingham

 

My guitar, since stolen, in my house in the Maypole, Kings Heath, Birmingham

 

My neighbour in Kings Heath with her newborn. I like this picture because it is not just a picture of a mother and her child - one and a bit - but with the baby staring straight into the lens, it is a picture of two people

 

Somewhere in France, Bordeaux area I think. I used to take a look of natural light phtotography using fast film but balancing the different elements when printing up was a real bugger

 

Somewhere in Birmingham, at night (Never!)

 

My niece (now recently married and 31) feeding the ducks in a park in Cologne. She is the one who doesn't look like a fairy-tale witch

 

Very proud, very fat motorcycle cop in New York, June 1989. I think obesity was in in that year, at least a great many of the Yanks I saw were following that trend

 

North coast of Germany

 

North coast of Germany (I think)

 

St David's Hall, Cardiff. I snapped three rolls of film - 105 exposures - and got only three even halfway decent shots. I now have a great deal of respect for the sports photographers of the early part of the 20th century who used plate cameras and had about eight plates with them

 

My cousin from Hamburg, taken when I went to stay with her

 

New York, June 1989

 

North coast of Germany

 

Although all these pictures are monochrome, they all seem to have a slight brown tinge. That, I think, is because they have been tucked away in folders for these past 20 or 25 years. Just for the craic, here are two pictures taken more recently.

BMW in London (a city in the United Kingdom)

A  door in France with a can of Heiniken

 

Mind, does this look better. I must admit I prefer it, but as I am one of a dying breed who grew up in black and white, that’s not too surprising.

Same door without the colour. It's what we call 'desaturated on those rare occasions when there is someone around we would like to impress with big - well, bigger - words

. . .

 It’s not just the Daily Mail which has the obsession with ‘being middle-class’. It is shared by the Daily Telegraph. Take a look at this in the ‘middle-class’ Telegraph (motto: No Barrel To Deep To Be Scraped). Mind, given the most recent circulation figures, one does wonder exactly who the Telegraph is aiming this story at: according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, the Telegraph is now down to a pitiful circulation of just 514,592 copies in June 2014. This is down from 950,105 in 12 years, but to put it into even better context, not so many years earlier it was selling almost 1.5 million. That’s some plummet by anyone’s standards.

It’s not ‘what’ any more, but ‘how’

I am one of those poor saps who is remarkably slow on the uptake. That’s an honest admission. But however slow on the uptake I am, I find it immensely useful. not to say remarkably helpful, to listen to folk - the conventional term used is ‘experts’ - who know what they are talking about and from whom I might pick up this and that.

A few months ago I watched an interesting three part-series on TV called High Art Of The Low Countries in which a chap - an expert (he said in that faux dog-in-the-manger way he has adopted to feign humility while trying to disguise abject ignorance - I am the very original cultural scavenger) - called Andrew Graham-Dixon trotted through the art of what several centuries ago were known as the Low Countries. These days we know them as Belgium and Holland (aka The Netherlands i.e. the Low Countries).

He began in the 15 century, but I, for the purposes of this entry, shall draw your attention to just one painter a Dutchman called Piet Mondrian, who was born in 1872 and who died 72 years later in 1944.

If, as I contentiously suggest, there is a spectrum of the arts ranging from pure sound - music - at the one end through to pure line, shape and colour - painting - a the other, and if, travelling from the one - contentious extreme to the other - we pass from music, to poetry, writing, theatre, cinema and then onto the graphic, plastic arts - sculpture and ‘pure art’ - I am more inclined to music and words (their sound, meaning and ‘import’) rather than painting. I like going to exhibitions of this, that and t’other, and do so quite often (so to speak), but I feel closer to sound than I do to line, shape and colour. So that is why I enjoy listening, invariably on TV, to people like Graham-Dixon who know a lot more about it than I do and can illuminate it for me.

For the purposes of this entry, though, I shall concentrate on just one thing: the artistic progression, or if you like the development, of an artist, in this case Piet Mondrian. Below are five paintings by him, in reverse order - I believe - of creation.

Mondrian, a Dutchman, was originally (so Graham-Dixon tells me, I should not like to give the impression I know more than I do) a rather conventional painter, but took off on his own unique trajectory after visiting an exhibition of work by his fellow Dutchman van Gogh.

I have reproduced the five works in reverse order to try to make a point. Here is the first:

What, you might ask yourself is so ‘special’ about this? Before I watched the TV progamme by Graham-Dixon, I had seen it (or more probably works like it) before and thought ‘hmm, nice enough, but not in my book outstanding in as far as it looks like any number of works produced by any number of art students’, though consider that when it and its kind were first presented it would have looked rather more unusual. I cannot, in all honesty, stress - and admittedly to my very untutored eye - how ordinary this looks compared with, say, any number of pieces of what one might call ‘corporate art’, pictures bought by the yard by firms for the foyer of their headquarters to persuade you that simply making money is not - honest injun! - all they are interested in, despite your gut feeling.

Nevertheless . . .

What I didn’t know, and what Graham-Dixon informed me, was that it was a development from this:

You can see how it might have developed from one to the next. Mondrian, we were told, spent the war on the coast of Holland and noticed a number of wooden posts which had at one point supported a, now non-existent, pier. That is what is was trying to show. But even that was a development from this:

which was itself a development from this:

And that was a development from this painting, inspired - quite obviously - by van Gogh’s work.

So what has all this got to do with the title of this entry, It’s Not What Any More, But How?

It’s actually quiet straightforward: just how many more times do we have to be told that horrible parents can fuck up their children? That man’s inhumanity to man is beyond comprehension? That there’s nowt as queer as folk? That the lot of those at the bottom of the pile is shit times ten?

What Mondrian is doing above is replicating an aspect of the world in different ways. And as for writing, to put it ostensibly very obscurely but actually very directly: it’s not the joke, it’s the way you tell it.

So my contention is that ‘the story’ is now quite possibly a thing of the past. In fact, it always was: it’s the ‘how’ we tell the different stories, the ‘how’ we manipulate language, it is perhaps, pace the very first Mondrian image reproduced here, the language itself, its use and the manipulation thereof which must now take centre stage given, as I suggest, there’s really not that much new under the sun. And ironically, it has always been that way, not just for the past 20 or 40 years, but almost forever.

The problem is, of course, that all of us are so familiar with language and its myriad usages that it is too immediate. We cannot, or can rarely, stand back and try to view a particular usage in what might be a new way. Paint is different: apart from painters none of us is familiar with paint. So when we are confronted with paint being used in a new, novel way, we are quite possibly alert to that new usage.

But I now sense I am on very shaky ground. So perhaps I should come to an end here and not risk making an even bigger tit of myself by blathering on yet again. As always, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. And I also sense that the few ports I have been drinking while writing this entry might well mean it needs another entry to clarify it all a tad.

Busy, busy, busy? And I bet you thought you had really achieved something this week. So why not sit down and reflect instead? And for the hell of it, a bonus musical track right at the end to help you get rid of all that activity (except, perhaps, the one sort we all know and love)

Quite some time ago, and I don’t know why, I seemed to come to understand a certain and rather important distinction; it was the essential difference between ‘action’ and ‘activity’. And all too often activity is taken for action. Indeed, all too often activity, in our private as well as in public life, is presented as action.

To give an example from the public sphere: most governments, when presented with a problem, resort to a useful ploy. They set up a committee to investigate it. Doing so is useful in two distinct ways: it gives the impression of action, that the problem is being taken seriously and that the government has now set about tackling it; and it does the complete opposite, it manages to sideline the problem and, in a sense, gets rid of it.
The problem is by no means solved, but if called to account, the government can honestly claim that it is tackling it: ‘Look,’ it can in say with apparent honesty and admirable candour, ‘we, of course, are well aware there is a problem and are certainly resolved to do something about it and so we have set up a committee to investigate what can be done, which will, in due course, report’. Until that report is ready, of course, other, perhaps far more pressing problems will present themselves, and the particular problem in hand will more or less be forgotten, relegated somewhere where mention of it and the lack of a government solution to it is out of harm’s way. Job done: a great deal of activity but precious little action.

That is in the public sphere.

But we - or at least I, though I suggest that given that even though I make up just one nine-billionth of the world’s population but am essentially no different to the

other 8.9999 billion folk with whom I share this world, my ‘I’ might well stand for the more universal ‘we’ - also resort to engaging in serious and frenetic, although ultimately self-deceiving, activity which we persuade ourselves means we are actually ‘doing something’. It is not something which has recently occurred to me, but it again occurred to me 20 or 30 minutes ago. Let me explain.

The house is empty. My daughter and son have taken themselves off to toil at their part-time jobs at the Red Lion in St Kew Highway, she serving behind bar (and doing so officially now, as she turned 18 two weeks ago) and waitressing; he, still 15, relegated to washing dishes (although he proudly tells me he has been bumped up to helping ‘prep’ food which as far as I can tell involves taking the steaks out of the fridge and grinding pepper all over them, before they are cooked).

My wife has also taken off, to help a friend engaged in providing one of the stages in a ‘safari’ of some kind, where folk move from household to household for the different courses of a meal - ‘starters’ here, ‘mains’ there, and finally ‘dessert’ somewhere else. Pertinently, as is, unfortunately her wont, she simply walked out the door without bothering to give a farewell, and although that is pretty much what has been her habit these past 18 years, it still, to this day, quietly upsets me. But I shan’t go into that here, if ever, except to record that her wordless departure pitched me into a somewhat reflective mood.

So I took myself out into the garden, to finish off a bottle of cheap Rioja and enjoy a cigar or two. (NB I am not some rich bugger: as I pointed out in a previous entry, if we cigar smokers here in Britain buy our smokes online from Holland or Germany, they come down in price substantially. My La Paz Wilde Cigarros - which I can recommend as being a mild, but satisfying smoke, would cost £11 for just five if I bought them here in Britain. But purchased online from abroad they come down to a far more realistic, not to say far less wallet-denting €28 for 50. And as the cost of postage is the same whether you buy 50 or 100 - or, for that matter 1,000 - I have taken to buying 100 each time.)

Until now, when sitting outside for a drink and a smoke while the weather allows me to do so, I have taken with me a laptop on which I set about surfing the net busily - ‘activity’ again - looking at this news website, eBay, Digital Spy, The Economist, check my emails in case someone has emailed me in the past five minutes since I last checked, taking a look at Facebook, look at eBay again, do everything, in fact, to keep busy. But tonight I didn’t.

Tonight all I had with me was little Russell, the Jack Russell our household has recently acquired who busied himself gnawing incessantly at a ‘bone’ of cow hide. And there I sat trying very hard to think of nothing. But thinking of nothing - often rather more grandiloquently and in admittedly other circumstances, described as ‘meditating’ - is by no means easy.

So there I sat, failing to think, but my mind whirling around like a toy windmill on a windy day. And that is another example of ‘activity masquerading as action’. No action was, of course, needed. There was no need for ‘activity’ to masquerade as any ‘action’. There was nothing I had to do, no action of any kind was necessary. I was, after all, obliged to do absolutely nothing whatsoever except every so often take another sip from my tumbler of wine and, a little more often, take another drag on my cigar. Yet there was still a great deal of completely unnecessary activity.

My mind, as most certainly does yours, would not keep still but flitted here, there and everywhere and settled nowhere, considering this, pondering that, but moving on incessantly and busily, forgetting the last ‘thought’ as the next arrived to crowd it out, rather as a pompous bore continually interrupts conversation so that eventually nothing is discussed though a great deal has been said. So that’s how I came, on again, to reflect on how so easily we deceive ourselves and convince ourselves that if we are eternally busy, busy, busy, even if that business consists only of shapeless, inconsequential and ultimately utterly shallow thinking’, we are somehow usefully engaged.

. . .

I did have something to think about, though, and it was something I have been trying to think about or several days, and it wasn’t the pitiful, barren state of my marriage. With my retirement coming up ever sooner, I have fully resolved finally to put my money where my mouth has been these past 50 years: to put in the sheer effort, the thought and the hard work involved in ‘writing’.

It is no consolation that, quietly and very privately, I have been castigating myself - for the past 50 years - for being just another wannabe. (That’s another, related, facet of ‘activity masquerading as action’: we fully believe that a full confession, readily and pitifully made, grants a full absolution. So when I - and, of course, you in your own way - prostate myself and weep, weep, weep that ‘I am not worthy’, we think that does the trick and that we are not longer guilty. Job done. Well, as the great man said, ‘up to a point, Lord Copper’.) I want to prove, if to no one else, that I am more than just that, just another bloody wannabe. (There is the story of Peter Cook meeting some chap or other at a cocktail party and asking him what he did. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ Cooke was informed’. ‘No, neither am I,’ said Cook, who spotted cant a mile off.)

I can, I thank the Lord, reflect that I have in the past done just that, put in the effort, thought and hard work, and if I did it once, I can do so again. It’s just that when I did so before - and was not married and didn’t have a family - I did so for six or seven hours at a time, and I can’t be doing with 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there.

You have to be brutal with yourself, which, of course, means with others, too. I also know, given that I find writing which is for me just the same as chatting inconsequentially, that the ‘thought’ is not just the hardest part of ‘writing’ but the essential part of ‘writing’. I don’t find it at all difficult to put words to paper (so to speak). But those words - or rather the mass of them which constitute whatever is being constituted - and the thought they reflect - and much, much more - need to be shaped and ordered. That’s the bit I’ve got to learn.

I have recently started a short story (which might well become a rather longer ‘short story’) and I know exactly what I want to do with it. But it needs a great deal of thought. And I am not yet in the habit of thinking. I have banged on before about my novel (the third of three, but the first two were less than crap, though I am proud of the third in which, even though I say so myself, I achieved exactly what I set out to achieve), and it irks me - but just a little because it is futile to be irked for too long and far more sensible just to take it on the chin and move on - that no one, but no one - of the 12/15 people who have read it, has cottoned on to what I was trying to do.

It’s not as though what I was trying to do was ‘difficult’. From where I sit it was, in fact, insanely simple, though admittedly really not what might have been expected. The trouble is that what I am now planning, the story I have just started and which I am trying to ‘think about’, will be equally oblique. Basically because that’s where the fun is. In a sense, what you get is most certainly not what you see. (Yes, I know I have reversed the phrase, but it sums up very well what I tried, and still want, to do).

The irony is, of course, that blathering on here is a prime example of ‘activity being a substitute for action’. But I can live with that. As I recorded in the last post, I find I sharpen my ideas more in discussion and debate and in getting words down on paper than in any numbers of hours spent cogitating.

Two links: the first is to Amazon where you can buy, for a comparative pittance, my blood novel (Lord, this is embarrassing).

Then there is an earlier post about ‘writing’.

. . .

And now - sorry but it doesn’t play in the Opera browser - for the bonus musical track for young lovers of all ages (great shagging music):

 

Party Wit Me - Brownstone

And if you are after some of those cigar at less than rip-off prices, try here or here.