Tom Stephenson

Dead men's eyes

2012-05-26T01:45:00.001-07:00

There's a hint of mischievousness in the breeze today. The warm wind has changed direction and the Peregrine is flying as slowly as it's Formula One set-up will allow, riding it and winding up the gulls by flitting around and amongst the ungainly brutes. A large crow saw it's antics and thought it looked like fun, so copied the hawk for a few minutes. I am absolutely sure that all Corvids possess a sense of humour. Everyone knows that they are intelligent, so maybe humour is an integral part of it - or vice versa. I'm not sure you can have one without the other.

Why is it that crows are so universally hated by most country people? When I ask my shooting friends why they do their best to wipe them off the face of the earth whenever they see them, they usually mention some nonsense about them pecking out the eyes of healthy lambs, or the damage they do to crops. Well, wood pigeons do a heck of a lot more damage than your average flock of omnivorous crows, but they do not inspire the same hatred in anyone other than farmers.

I think that it is all to do with an old folk memory of flocks of crows taking whatever they wanted from the corpses of battlefields, at the same time as their human counterparts stripped the dead of whatever they found valuable.

The crows would also take the eyes out of recently hanged relatives on the gallows, and that didn't endear them to the families of sheep-rustlers either. Oh, and they were (and still are) black in colour, at a time when there was near national hysteria about the imagined threat of a Moorish invasion into the English heartland.

I watched a TV documentary last night called 'Hitler's Children' (at last, another excuse to mention Hitler), which starred - if that is the right word - a selection of sons, nieces and grandchildren of infamous Nazi war-criminals, speaking of what it is like to carry the burden of guilt on behalf of relatives who are no longer around to take the blame.

The German grandson of a despicable extermination camp officer was brave enough to visit Auschwitz and wander around the charming little villa which his father was brought up in - right next to the crematorium where so many millions of Jews were reduced to ashes and spread around the locale. He remembered his father saying that his mother told him to always wash the strawberries picked in the garden, because they would be covered in human ash from the nearby chimney.

The 45 year old man met a party of Israeli schoolchildren in a building on the camp, and answered unanswerable questions from the great-grandchildren whose families had been annihilated on that very spot. He embraced a camp survivor - one of the few - himself now an old man, and both were in tears. When asked by a pretty young girl what he would do if confronted with his grandfather now, he said "I would kill him myself". It is a good thing he never had that opportunity, otherwise he would not be around now to help carry the burden.

The son of another appalling murderer has written two books about his father and his father's crimes, and tours Germany to give talks and readings to German schoolchildren about the Third Reich and all it's attendant horrors. Like the Jews, he believes that the circumstances in which such atrocities are committed lie just below the surface of any civilised society, and can rear up in many different guises, springing from mores which come to be viewed as 'acceptable' by a mob which does not keep it's eye on the ball.

He ends his talks to young people by warning that if the German economy once again falls into potential ruin, not to use immigrants as scapegoats for the financial hardships which must surely befall all members of society, as that way leads to the rise of despots and a possible 4th Reich. Let's hope the advice is taken on board before the euro collapses, sending thousands of economic migrants over the Channel and into Britain to try and earn a few pounds.

Don't blame the crows for pecking out the eyes of dead men.

I could have danced all night

2012-05-25T02:05:00.001-07:00

Now that winter has abruptly come to a halt, albeit about two months late, the Mayflies have had their first hatch, and - it being close to the river - have begun landing on our windows for their first (and last) change of clothes of the season.

I wonder why these little creatures spend the first 48 hours of their short lives shedding what looks like a perfectly good skin, then sitting around until their new ones harden up enough for them to fly off again?

Actually, I know why. They are getting into their party outfits. All the while they are squeezing themselves out of their old bodies, the guests begin to arrive and immediately start to dance. Their parties follow exactly the same pattern as ours - or at least the young ones of our species.

As soon as their make-up has dried, they launch themselves into the dance - wildly jumping up and down, sweating off pheromones and getting off with each other, trying to avoid the trout gate-crashers.

Then, no sooner has it started, the party's over and they all disappear, leaving their old outfits blowing about in the street like ghosts.

Don't go breaking my heart

2012-05-24T02:55:00.001-07:00

Funny how things turn out. Having finished the pear-tree carving, I found myself in the position of having very little hands-on work left to do, then a visit to a client to check the measurements for some non hands-on work produced a lot more potential projects, some of which are now stuffed into the pipe-line, albeit with their little arses still hanging out of one end.

Amusingly, one of these potential projects involves the replacement of an object which was stolen by a wealthy and - as yet - unidentified friend of his, during a garden party at which alcoholic refreshments were supplied. This little snippet of non-essential information has gone a long way to restore my faith in human nature.

H.I. is preparing to attend the funeral of an elderly student of hers this morning, and as she started, there was a phone call from another friend who told her the sad news of the death by suicide of yet another of her fairly elderly students.

We don't as yet know the details, but suspect that the poor woman had given up struggling with a progressive disablement and decided to opt out altogether. I really feel ambivalent about suicide - it is, after all, one's own business when it comes down to it, but I would have to be very desperate indeed to put all the people who I know love me through the misery of self-examination and loss of whatever it was that they loved me for. I always remember 'It's a Wonderful Life', when I think I am unjustifiably suffering and have such low self-esteem that I kid myself into believing that I have no effect on the world at all. Of course (you know me!) such moments of self-doubt are so fleeting that to blink would be to miss them, but you know what I mean. I put this down to optimism rather than arrogance, but maybe that in itself is a form of arrogance.

After my usual trip to the pub last night, I decided to have a pizza in a little joint which does good ones, not too far from the flat which is at present a little oasis of peace, shattered by the many building projects which currently surround it as mentioned in previous posts.

I called up H.I. to tell her that I was sitting at a table there, with a freshly opened bottle of rose wine and two glasses, and she somewhat testily replied that she had only just left the same establishment, and was now at home in her pyjamas, thinking that I was coming home to cook as I always do.

Eventually she saw sense, and promised to return and be with me in around 20 minutes (somehow it takes her about an hour to get dressed in the morning, and about 30 seconds to get into pyjamas at night... strange), so I settled back and poured myself another glass of wine in the evening sun.

About half an hour later, she arrived and sat down next to me. No sooner had we ordered some food from the waitress, than two workmen who I had not previously noticed began breaking up the pavement about 15 feet away from us, using electric hammer drills and pick-axes. This lasted for the rest of the curtailed meal.

I simply cannot tell you the state of mind I was in by the time we left the restaurant, but suffice it to say that H.I. is still a little cool with me this morning.

My feminine side

2012-05-23T02:41:00.000-07:00

What was the name of that film in which a TV anchorman encourages everyone to lean out of their windows and shout something like, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"? Well, that's sort of how I felt last night.

Once the church bells (beneath the Peregrine Falcon which is beneath the golden chicken) had stopped ringing at 9.00 pm, the heavy lifting equipment dropping large quantities of metal onto concrete floors about 50 yards away took over, despite being supposed to finish by 7.00 pm, and they were still clanging away at 12.30 am when I went to bed.

It is a rather strange and unsettling time around our little part of the city right now - we are surrounded by building sites, and noise levels are destined to increase as the summer waxes on. Yesterday, I was out of town when the Bath representative ran past our compact b. a. c. a. carrying one fragment of the Olympic Flame (TM) but H.I. was at home to witness the national hysteria.

Later, at around 7.30 or so, I was looking at all your posts on the iMac, when I heard a massive crunching impact accompanied by a shout or scream down in the street, so I looked out the window expecting to see the mangled remains of a stricken pedestrian.

Instead, I saw a small black car being driven by a young woman, halted in the middle of the road with a white bicycle jammed underneath it's front end, and there were bits of black plastic strewn around the area of impact. The car was leaking some sort of fluid.

A group of youths were standing on the pavement looking at the wreckage, and laughing loudly. It took me a few moments to realise that one of the youths was the rider of the bicycle, and he was laughing louder than anyone. Maybe he was euphoric at finding himself still alive. He must have been thrown over his own handlebars when the car hit, and rolled in the road where he stood up and walked away very quickly. He was definitely on his feet by the time I looked out.

They had to reverse the car away from the bike to pull out from underneath, and despite the car being quite badly damaged, there was not a scratch to be seen on the bike - not even a flat tyre. They just don't make cars how they used to these days.

I've just read a post from a blogger who says that they are suffering from 'writer's block', and somehow they have managed to create about 5 long paragraphs explaining that they cannot think of anything to write about. That's not what I would call 'writer's block'.

In it, the blogger puts the cessation of creativity down to saving him/herself for a thesis which has to be written in the next week or two as part of a university diploma pitch. That is not the way it works in my understanding, but I did not tell him/her so, for fear of being accusative, arrogant, curmudgeonly, or all three at the same time.

There is no such thing as 'writer's block' - you either write or you don't. If you do write, you have to decide whether or not what you have written could be of any use (for entertainment or other) to anyone else, and - if you are me, for instance - the remote possibility that if even one person reading tosh like this and finding it worth the effort has any chance of becoming a reality, then you publish. Full stop.

Of course, it takes real talent and it's recognition to make any money out of it (Australian fisherwomen spring to mind) but - to use a simile - I have always enjoyed looking through ordinary people's holiday snaps just as much as looking at a good professional photographer's. If you get bored, then there is no law which says you must carry on. (I think I have just lost about 50 readers with that last line).

Also, writing is like sex (if I remember correctly) - the more you do it, the more you want to do it. The energy actually increases with expenditure - unless you write for yourself alone... In any event, you can always imagine an audience, even if it doesn't exist.

Personally, there are only so many cushion-covers that I can take in one day, and the same goes for cup-cakes, but I do not begrudge the enjoyment of millions who cannot get enough of them. I don't understand it, but I don't begrudge it. Maybe I am just out of touch with my feminine side?

Bath Society of Artists

2012-05-22T02:02:00.001-07:00

There seems to be a little flurry of Art posts right now, so here's another in the same vein. The Bath Society of Artists annual exhibition has just closed, and this is one of the 3D entrants - a portrait of our beloved Queen by one of H.I.'s devoted friends and students, an 80-something year old man called Bill.

It is about 2 X life-sized and mixed media, including dozens of faux diamonds which Bill has lovingly applied - along with paint - to commemorate the Jubilee.

You might think from this piece that Bill is of a naturally naive disposition exacerbated by age, but you would be wrong. He is a highly humorous and bright bloke who loves to paint (he is always the first to arrive at H.I.'s Summer Schools, sitting in his car and listening to the radio for about an hour before anyone else), and keeps everyone entertained with his anecdotes and observations during lunch times. And what anecdotes he has.

He used to be in the film industry - many classic T.V. adverts from the 1960s were made by him - and has worked with most of the greats, including Sophia Loren.

Stupidly, we missed the deadline for the 'People's Vote' on the exhibits, but both independently agreed that this would be our choice for the 3D category, and a lovely little etching of a dead oak tree for the 2D. Predictably, the people's choices for the 2D were hopelessly photographic - in fact they might as well have just put up the photos which they had slavishly copied to produce the paintings.

A few years ago, the Bath Society of Artists asked H.I. to sit on the panel of judges, and spend the best part of a day selecting from hundreds of entrants, alongside better known artists like Peter Blake, etc.

Then last year, they asked her to actually submit a painting of her own for the show and she declined, saying that it wasn't really her type of thing. So they virtually begged her to put in a picture, sending a delegate around to persuade her, so she did. The panel rejected it, so the painting was never shown.

Needless to say, she will not be entering anything else to that show in the coming years...

P.O.A.

2012-05-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, here it is - the moment you have all been scratching your arses for - the finished pear-tree surround in place in the 17th century Dorset study.

Well, my bit's finished, but the builder has to build an entire new wall surrounding it, then plaster it flush to the face of my stonework, so it will appear as if built in. That will also hide the oak beam you can see either side of the frieze, and the fixings above it. He will lose about 4.5 inches of room in his study, but for what spiritual gain? Man cannot live by bread alone.

It's funny, but it looks quite small now it is up, but the frieze alone weighs a quarter of a ton, and the rest of it weighs about half a ton. It is six feet three and a half inches wide - a half an inch wider than I am tall.

I am not showing you this out of simple pride in my achievements, or because you have held my hand for a short while down the arduous path which lead to it's design and creation. Oh no, there is more to it than that.

I am hoping that one or two of you people that call yourselves interior designers will persuade your 'clients' that they need a good piece of English stonework, made by someone with an art-school training and 40 years of experience.

You can find my email address somewhere on this site.

Well don't just sit their staring, make a few phone calls! Now!

When saxaphone was it

2012-05-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Don't let this bit of music detract from my last, glorious and unmissable post

Back in the bottle - calling Saeed Barzin

2012-05-20T05:37:00.000-07:00

Now I think of it, playing a trick on Saeed was how I first got to meet him.

It was in the days when a 'party' consisted of everyone sitting around in groups on the carpet, listening to music and chatting.

My group wistfully eyed-up the joints being rolled by a young Iranian man who modelled himself on his musical hero - Gerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead - with thick and lustrous black hair, parted in the middle, and a beard to match which covered most of his pale, Persian features.

I devised a plan and ostentatiously rolled a very large joint which I lit, took a few puffs from, then stood up and handed it to the young Iranian, who smoked some of it before passing it around amongst his companions.

The ploy worked, and the next one to be rolled was passed to us. The only difference was that this one - unlike mine - actually contained some hashish.

Saeed introduced himself to me as I smoked his dope, and he complimented me on the quality of of mine, asking me where it came from. "Nowhere", I said, "There was nothing but tobacco in it."

He laughed when I explained my little ruse, and we became friends from that moment on. This was one of many little tricks I played on him, and I think it was the difference in cultures that made them so easy to execute. I don't think that it ever occurred to Iranians that such deviousness existed in Englishmen, in the same way that it would never occur to a cat that you had a mind to drop it down a well.

Saeed was one of a group of Iranians whose wealthy families had sent to England to attend university, not realising that they would spend most of their time fruitlessly pursuing girls and attending parties at which alcohol was served as a matter of course. They really had absolutely no idea about how to acquire an English girlfriend, and often sought my advice as to how to go about it.

We would go - at their insistence - to the worst nightclub in the area at the time, and sit at a table demurely sipping beer as they nervously eyed up the talent and spoke Farsi to each other in hoarse whispers. Occasionally, one of them would break off, clear his throat and say, "Thomas. You see those two girls sitting at the bar over there? Yes, the ones with the very short skirts and blonde hair. Would you please ask them over to our table to have a drink with us?"

When I asked why they did not invite them themselves, they replied by saying that if the invitation came from an Englishman like myself, it would be much more likely to be received favourably. I, in turn, would try to explain that it would be more likely to be interpreted as an invitation to a gang-bang with a bunch of desperate foreigners who had employed a native to facilitate their wicked, heathen intent.

Out of their own environment, they had set their sights as high as they thought realistically achievable, and this had the effect of making every girl they gave their attention to feel like a prostitute, but - due to the cultural differences - they were not aware of it.

If there was one thing in the world that Saeed absolutely HATED, it was the sun. During the scorchingly hot summer of 1976, I would go to his apartment to find him sitting on the floor wrapped head to foot in a blanket, with the windows closed and the curtains drawn. He had not known that he suffered from hay-fever until he arrived in Great Britain during the hottest summer since records began, with the highest pollen-count to match.

He told me of the many times he had been standing in the dusty street of a village outside Tehran, when - without warning - a column of fire about the same size as a man would suddenly appear spinning up the street in a tornado, causing everyone to run indoors for fear of their lives. These animate fire-balls were, he explained, called 'djins' and is where we get our pantomime 'genies' from.

A city-born lad with a country-style education, Saeed was extremely susceptible to folk-lore and the unexplained, and it wasn't long before his quest for the mystical got him into a few difficulties from which he may never have recovered.

He took up meditation, which provided me with more opportunities to take the piss. It was never my intention to be deliberately cruel to him, I just wanted him to see the reality of the situation he was getting drawn into before it was too late.

One day, he met me at a cafe, and I looked at him for a while then said, "You have just been meditating, haven't you? I have a vision of you sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pink blanket around your shoulders".

Astounded, he told me that this was true, and asked me how I had acquired my powers of perception, so I pulled a piece of pink fluff from the shoulder of his shirt and showed it to him. The meditation bit was easy, as this was how he spent most of his spare time at home in those days. Even faced with this banal proof of ordinariness, he refused to be disabused, and came to see me as a sort of guru or master from which he could learn a great deal about the spiritual world.

The more I explained to him that I was nothing of the sort, the more convinced he was that I was just giving him another test of faith, and his mental health started to deteriorate as a result. He would come round to my flat and start talking of 'Divine Light', the bunch of pseudo mystics that had jumped on him at a weak moment, and he did this so regularly and often that I had to tell him to stop talking about it in my presence. So he would just sit there, silently staring at the floor and not talking about anything.

After about 2 weeks of this, I just had enough and told him to stop coming around at all, unless we could hold an ordinary conversation as we did in the old days. So he stopped visiting altogether.

A few weeks later, I ran into him on the street, and he was holding a pathetically small bag containing his worldly possessions, and looking like a broken man. He told me that he was going back to his family in Tehran, and was just about to board the train which would take him to Heathrow airport, so we said our goodbyes.

About two days after he arrived back in Iran, the revolution took place, and the Shah was toppled in favour of the Ayatollah Khomeini. This was the start of all the executions which were the purge of the revolutionary guard.

Saeed's father had been doctor to the Queen - the Shah's wife - so no matter who won the short battle that preceded the revolution, he or his family could not win.

I really hope that Saeed survived - everything.

Seeing is believing

2012-05-19T03:58:00.001-07:00

Another post in what had become my 'Phantom' series - Part the First. Maybe it's the beginning of a slow run-up to October 31st, when such stories become the meat and drink of the blogosphere, as the Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness kicks in, finishing sometime around the Twelfth Night.

I have already told this tale, but - as every fire-side kid knows - the stories get better through repetition.

Most people think that ghosts only go abroad at night, but that is because they are not noticeable as such in bright sunshine. In fact, they prefer to wander the streets using broad daylight as a cloak of invisibility, remaining incognito as they visit their old haunts of earthly existence. We all know that, when carrying out daylight robbery, it is much better to wear a DayGlo safety jacket with matching hardhat, than a self-concsious attempt at blending in. By being so vividly visible, most people don't give you a second glance.

Also, most people think that ghosts glow in the dark, but that is only a trick of the light. How else does your brain explain the way you see them in darkness so complete, that you cannot detect your hand in front of your face?

Yes, I know that the brain is capable of firing off signals which produce the same effect as millions of photons hitting the back of your retina, but how does it arrange them so perfectly, as to produce the exact likeness of someone you have never met? That's the great thing about science - it's full of paradox.

We, as humans, tend to use light as the absolute touchstone of reality - the template against which the existence of things is measured as either true or false. In fact, our brains work a lot faster than the speed of light, and our innate intuition operates a lot faster than even that. Infinitely fast, in fact. You can take a trip round the universe in the blink of an eye, when it takes mere light thousands of years to travel to your eyeball from an object which - in the scale of astronomical things - right in your back yard.

There are a group of scientists who have come to believe that the photons that emanate from stars millions of miles away, would not have started their journey of several thousand years if they did not 'know' that someone would be there to greet them with their eyes - someone who was not even born when they set out. Don't ask me how it works, it's all a bit Schrodinger for me to get my little head around on a saturday morning. I do know, however, that if you set up two sensors side by side and fire an equal amount of photons at them from a short distance away, the particles seem to opt for one sensor over another, even as they fly in absolutely straight lines. Not only do they seem to make a 'decision' about which way to veer toward the preferred sensor, but they make it impossibly quickly. Faster than the speed of light, in fact.

Anyway, I was working in my old workshop on a hot and sunny saturday about 20 years ago, and I was making a lot of noise and dust by using an air-hammer and chisel on a large lump of stone, when I became aware of a presence at the entrance to my workshop.

I used to work saturdays in those days, because - being in the middle of town - many people would visit the yard for recreational purposes, and I would usually receive an order for a fire-surround or piece of stone sculpture by hanging around and meeting them.

So to see an elderly couple standing at the threshold and quietly smiling at me was not an unusual event. What was unusual about it was that the couple were my parents, both of whom had been dead for quite some time.

I turned the tool off and put it down, all the while looking at the old man and woman, who just stood smiling wordlessly at me. I took off my paper dust-mask, expecting to find my own smile beneath it, but my mouth - though closed - remained expressionless.

We stood staring at each other for - I suppose - just a few seconds before they turned away and walked out of sight. Not a word spoken. I didn't bother to go after them, they would not have been there when I caught up in any event. Most likely I would have found two living strangers in their place.

Phantom house in Cornwall

2012-05-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

The house where these pictures were taken, overlooking St. Ives in Cornwall - where H.I., me and many others have spent so many days and nights - no longer exists. It has been completely demolished.

Luckily, the view still exists, but this demolishes itself, second by second, to rebuild new versions of the same old scene, in the same way the house will be reincarnated in due course.

Phantom dogs on a dark night

2012-05-18T02:46:00.001-07:00

The big pear carving job went off yesterday, after a strenuous 2 hours getting it into the back of a van. If he drops it - too likely for comfort - that will be me bankrupt at a time of life when it would be difficult for me to recover. Not to worry.

That's the trouble with me, I don't worry enough. That job was the last hands-on job that I have for the foreseeable future, but I'm not worried. Something always turns up, and if the worst comes to the worst, I can always get myself a job on a cruise-liner, partnering rich, elderly widows in a tango. I suppose I should learn to tango as soon as possible. Solo tango - a new dance which involves leaning backwards at impossible angles if you are a woman, and forwards if you are a man...

Anyway, what was I going on about? Oh yes, tramps.

Before I hitched up with H.I. and took on the rest of her family, I thought it quite likely that I would spend my finals years as a charcoal-burner or something, living in a hut in a wood all winter, and strolling between country pubs all summer. I still quite like the idea - well the last bit anyway.

One of my many friends pulled up in the street the other day, parking an absolutely enormous box-lorry which he had converted into a camper. It used to be a mobile library - sometime in the late 1960s, by the look of it. He gave me a tour of the inside, proudly showing off the smallest wood-burning stove I have ever seen. Then he asked if I wanted to buy the whole outfit, and I was very tempted until he quoted the price: £12,000. He's having a laugh, isn't he?

Well, maybe he isn't. Living without a roof over your head is becoming increasingly impossible in Britain these days, partly due to the expense of it. It is ironic really, as most roofless people choose that way of simple life to save money, apart from anything else. At the top end, a well-appointed camper-van can set you back £100,000 before running and parking expenses, and at the bottom end, it can cost you £20 per night to pitch a one-man tent.

I spent a month or two living in a tent which was set up in a dense wood adjacent to Cro's and my friend Simon, many years ago, on the Hampshire border with Surrey. I bought the tent new, pitched it deep in the wood, painted it with camouflage and placed foliage around it so that it could not be seen until you tripped over the guy-ropes - which is what I did every night.

I practised a few location techniques in the daylight before I moved in, and this involved counting some telegraph poles which ran along the track next to the wood, turning into the wood at the third pole, walking in with my hands outstretched until I hit a certain tree, turning a certain angle and walking for about 50 yards until I hit another tree, changing my angle and walking in another 50 yards until I tripped over the guy-ropes of the tent, and then I was home. This was all done for real in the dark, of course.

The woods - ancient enough to be mentioned in the Domesday Book - were full of great clumps of densely growing hazel, and one night I took a slightly wrong turn and found myself somehow trapped in the very middle of one of these clumps, unable to get out.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but despite struggling for about 20 minutes, all I did was get myself more entwined with the upright branches of the clump, and - it being pitch-dark - I could not see where to place my leg to lift the other out, so I was well and truly stuck.

I was so hopelessly stuck that I decided that the best thing to do was make myself as comfortable as possible, then try and get some sleep until the daylight came and I could see what I was doing. Just as I had settled down and resigned myself to a night in the tree, I heard the sound of something very large crashing through the undergrowth toward me...

My heart froze as the thing got closer, and before long I was aware of two extremely large dogs panting into my face as I sat helplessly entangled in the undergrowth.

I waited to be attacked, but the attack never came. Instead, the dogs waited patiently as I made another attempt to get free, and somehow their presence made this possible when previously it had not been. I stretched my hand out and felt the coarse, hairy fur of both dogs, but I could not see them at all in the darkness of the wood. They were about the same size and texture as Irish Wolf-Hounds - absolutely huge - and I had never been aware of any dogs in the neighbourhood until that night.

I disentangled myself from the tree, and the dogs trotted off into the darkness expecting me to follow, which I did. If they got ahead of me and I lost them, they came back to fetch me, then continued into the wood with me close behind.

In this way, they lead me right up to the zip of my camouflaged tent. I patted them in thanks, and they went off back into the wood, never to be seen again.

When I recanted this story to Simon the next day, he told me that there was an ancient local legend of two hounds that haunted this particular little forest, and suggested that these must have been the beasts that came to help me.

Now, I know that Simon likes to tell a tall tale, but it did have the ring of truth to it at the time. I enquired if anyone in the area owned a pair of dogs like them, but found none.

Supertramp

2012-05-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Good toon

M.I.L.T.F.

2012-05-17T01:17:00.002-07:00

I had to show you the birthday card chosen for me by H.I. It is from a series of greetings cards taken from 'Punch' magazine, and I have to say that 'Punch' is not normally renowned for it's humorous cartoons, so this one is a bit of a rarity. I like everything about it - especially the nicely observed bears, of both varieties. I wonder how Pooh ended up in North America.

My other favourite card of this year (I always save a couple) was given to me by my 18 year-old grand daughter, and is a photograph of two cute kittens, both saying, "We're not paying!". Beneath it is the caption, TIGHT PUSSIES. (Just in case you don't know, 'tight' here in the UK means miserly with money.)

When my girl showed this to a friend and told her who it was destined for, the other looked horrified and said, "Are you SURE that would be appropriate?!" She just answered, "Oh yes, very appropriate. You don't know him".

When I asked her mother why it was that all but H.I.'s (her mother) card were of a sexually suggestive nature - for they were - she said, "That's because you're a dirty old man".

Why is that it is always me who gets the blame?

Quiz 99

2012-05-16T01:56:00.001-07:00

What is it?

5 points for the first correct answer, and what do points mean?

(1 point for a correct answer to that)

Fear of shopping

2012-05-15T11:48:00.001-07:00

I don't know, maybe I am working too hard. H.I. hardly ever cooks, so for the last couple of days I have been buying ready-made meals at our local supermarket because - somehow - my joy in preparing a meal for us both has diminished a little over the past few weeks, and I am too exhausted to pull out all the stops and make something nice.

Recently though, as I stare blankly at all the meals on offer on the shelves, I have been waiting for inspiration as to what to choose, and it usually comes in one form or another - who knows from where.

Tonight, however, it became a little too personal for my taste, and completely distracted me from my shopping. It's a good job I'm not paranoid.

N.F.N.F.

2012-05-15T01:52:00.001-07:00

I've just heard an interview with the famous American opera singer, Jessye Norman, who has come to the UK to give performances of popular songs of the non-operatic kind.

Somehow, I just hate to hear trained, world-class classical singers belting out covers of middle-of-the-road tunes - it's a bit like putting a race-horse between the shafts of a hay cart and watching it struggle down a farm track.

My German friends tell me that they heard Ms Norman in a version of Wagner or whatever, and her accent was absolutely perfect, despite the fact that she does not actually understand the language. She has such control over her own voice, that she has instant mastery over any language, dealing with it as she does - as pure sound.

So to hear her giving a poor and insincere rendition of, say, an Aretha Franklin or Liza Minnelli number just makes me cringe. And why do classical singers feel the need to put extended vibrato on the end of each and every line, when the original called for one clear and sustained note? It's not as if they cannot hit any note they want at will, and usually in about 2 more octaves than anyone else. The end result is pretty much the same as if you had gone into a sheltered home for the elderly and asked a 95 year-old woman to sing 'Oh Danny Boy' in quarter-time.

I suppose these singers make quite a lot of money from sell-out concerts of 'popular' music, and they have reached such heights in their careers that to do so does not detract from their credibility, but I don't think that is any excuse.

It is a shame that - like race-horses - classical singers are not put out to stud when they have peaked at their chosen profession, rather than being put out to grass or worse. I have a great image of Willard White being lead around various fee-paying music schools and being left alone in a private room with young and promising female students, just to see if another Jessye Norman can be raised and trained. N.F.N.F. I bet Willard wouldn't mind the idea either.

I wonder if the same would work for extremely gifted, handsome and talented (if somewhat elderly) stone-carvers?

NHS cutbacks hit hard on the back pocket

2012-05-14T14:07:00.004-07:00

The final frontier

2012-05-14T02:55:00.002-07:00

For I don't know how long, a pigeon has been trapped in the sealed-off fireplace behind our cooker in the kitchen, and occasionally flutters about as we can hear from the louvred vent half way up the wall. It will take a week or two to die, and short of demolishing the wall, there is nothing we can do about it except pray for it's swift demise in as peaceful way as possible.

This has happened a couple of times in the past 35 or so years. A dumb bird will sit on top of the chimney pot, look down it and wonder if it would make a good nesting place, so hops down to take a look. That is the last hop it ever makes, and it finds itself sitting on top of at least three other corpses of birds which have made the same mistake. I think it is a very slow Darwinian process, so maybe some good comes out of it.

In the past, when the pigeon finally dies, a nasty smell comes from the vent which lasts for a few days, then everything goes back to normal. I did think of getting a bottle of Co2 and filling the chimney with it. This would perform two functions - asphyxiating the bird and ending the process quicker, and ridding the space of oxygen so that it does not stink the place out afterwards.

It's a shame it is always the kitchen fireplace they choose for their suicide.

Quiz and a jolly wheeze

2012-05-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

What was this piece of kit used for? 5 points for a correct answer.

While you are pondering that (unless you already have a set like it, and use it on a regular basis), I'll tell you about a simple idea I had the other day which - if I went through with it - would make me world famous in a matter of minutes, without having to go to the trouble of shooting hundreds of innocent school-children.

On May 22nd, the Olympic flame will pass through our fair city, borne aloft by a proud runner who will pass extremely close to our compact but adorable city apartment. I know this, because they have put up signs saying as much, and warning that the roads will be closed for the duration.

All I need to do is visit the local toy shop and buy one of those enormous and enormously powerful water-pistols - well, water-rifles actually - called 'Super-Soakers', fill it up, lean out of the window at the right time, then douse the flame completely out as soon as it gets within range. Simple but effective, and nobody gets hurt.

Well, almost nobody. If I am not instantly shot by a police sniper, then they would probably kick our door down, rush upstairs, taser me before bundling me into the back of a van, pummel me into a bloody mess before decanting me into a police cell for 'resisting arrest', keep me languishing at Her Majesty's Pleasure under the Terrorism Act before hauling me up before a judge at Bristol Crown Court, then either sentence me to 15 year's hard labour in Dartmoor or sending me off indefinitely to Guantanamo Bay in an orange jump-suit.

I've just talked myself out of the idea, but I may have considered it if I had no family and a terminal disease which only gave me a few weeks to live - a bit like Jack Ruby.

Thinking ahead, I wonder what they would do under such circumstances - I mean the circumstances which produced the dousing of the flame, not my punishment/s.

Would they have to go back to Mount Olympus and start the whole proceedings all over again? Would it mean dragging a few Greek housewives out of their kitchens and getting them to dress up in white, pleated skirts and adopt ridiculous and uncomfortable positions in the heat whilst someone messes about with a concave mirror until the tinder fires up again, and they start the long run back to London, hoping that nobody will try to pull the same stunt amidst the heightened security which takes into consideration the possibility of practical jokes, and not just terrorist attacks?

I seem to remember an event in Bath (Commonwealth Games?) when they got a retired athlete to actually throw the flame up into the massive bowl to ignite the gas-jet, and the fool missed it by miles. Miraculously, the giant flame still burst into life though. I - and the rest of the world - suspected cheating involving one of those high-voltage clicky things which we use to fire up our cookers every night.

They once asked an Olympic organiser who was responsible for the Eternal Flame, what would happen if it were to go out. The official said that it would NOT got out, so they asked again, saying 'Yes, but what would you do if it did?' His voice - when he replied again - made it clear that this would be the last time he was going to answer this hypothetical question when he said, "Listen to me. The flame is NOT going to go out. Alright?"

How do you do?

2012-05-12T04:26:00.002-07:00

Day one of year 62, and the sun is actually shining.

I lay in bed this morning, listening to the radio whilst trying to pluck up the courage to get out, and I heard a vicar saying that he was recently stopped in the street by a middle-aged woman who confided in him that - normally a cheerful soul - the weather was really beginning to get her down. The weather has been so relentlessly horrid for so long now, that strangers are actually resorting to priests for solace.

Of course, the weather has always been the primary topic of conversation for the English, but usually it is employed as a neutral subject which excuses everyone from talking about something which might actually be meaningful. It is the height of boorishness to reply truthfully to the question, "How are you?" in this country, and a handbook was written for G.I.'s who found themselves posted to the U.K. in the 1940s, telling them so. In one way, it is heartening that - in a world made smaller by the day - the vastness of the atmosphere and our inability to control it still typifies the constant uncertainty of being alive - or at least being alive in England.

I am specifically talking about England, because I have the strong feeling that the rest of the U.K. just puts up with wetness without comment - think of the dour Scotsman trudging through the Glen in a kilt but no umbrella. Have you ever seen a Highlander with an umbrella? I think not. The Welsh moan about everything anyway, so the weather seems to hold no particular importance over anything else, even though they get more of their fair share of it, and the Irish seem to view rain as a blessing - as if the Emerald Isle was a parched desert for all but one month of the year.

I wish I could remember the name of a Sci-Fi film I saw years ago, or even find a clip of it on You Tube. I know that I have mentioned it here before, but there has never been a better time to watch it again as the last few weeks. The basic story is as follows:

A group of astronauts are forced to crash-land on a planet which is completely covered in dense, jungle vegetation, and the entire world is trapped in a perpetual rain-storm which has probably been chucking it down for thousands - if not millions - of years. That's it.

It must have been incredibly cheap to make, because the 4 or 5 actors spend the entire two hours standing on a set which is no bigger than about fifteen feet square, surrounded by enormous cheese plants which completely obscure the boundaries of the location and the lower half of their bodies, giving the impression that the jungle stretches to infinity, and a copious sprinkler system has been set up over their heads which throws down a constant barrage of water which hits the leaves of the cheese plants so loudly, that they have to shout their lines above the noise of it - for two hours.

By the time the film ends, the viewer is left completely exhausted. When you consider how much footage was shot and discarded during editing, you begin to understand that the poor actors must have spent a hell of a lot longer than two hours screaming themselves hoarse whilst soaked to the skin in cold water. Days - probably weeks - of this torture on set, to produce what has to be one of the most uncomfortable movies to have ever been produced. No wonder it has sunk without a trace.

You get the impression that the portrayal of fraying tempers and rising tension between the characters has it's basis in reality, and there is absolutely no need to employ method-acting techniques in this film.

Well anyway, the picture sums up the effect that the weather of the last few weeks has had on the inhabitants of this little part of our planet.

1001

2012-05-11T00:48:00.001-07:00

Today is a bit of a series of milestones which have - due to some planetary alignments somewhere over Glastonbury - all fallen on the same day.

This is my 1000th post; today I will complete the pear-tree carving that I have been boring you about for some of those posts; and... it's my birthday!

I cannot believe that I have been scribbling this stuff a thousand times - it's a bit like monkeys, typewriters and Tolstoy really - if I had only just re-arranged all those words in a slightly different order, I could have made something as long as 'War and Peace', but a little better written. I'll have to try harder. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - if only I only wrote that all the time, I would not have to give special attention when cleaning certain letters on the keyboard of this machine.

The completion of the pears means that I cannot spend as long as usual on a post this morning, which is a shame really. I thought today was all about ME, but I have other commitments. Here's to the next 1000.

Thanks again to whoever I ripped the above image off from. I am trying to illicit an abstract sense of affection from all 91 of you - again.

999 - 666

2012-05-10T01:30:00.000-07:00

You know how, sometimes, absolutely everything becomes utter shit, and not the normal 99% that is usually is? Well last night was one of those moments for me.

I was going to try to list the things which either went wrong, or started out wrong right from the beginning, but there are so many that - in the light of a new morning - I now realise that they number so many that all must have been some sort of projection be me onto my external surroundings. The only other explanation would involve an egocentric belief that God had - in a bored moment - singled me out for a bit of light entertainment in the same way that you tickle a girl's nose with a blade of grass as she lies in a sunny meadow, trying to relax.

Try as I did, telling myself that the rain wasn't falling on my head only, and that there were plenty of other people being vexed by far greater things last night had no effect at all, so I just went to bed.

I can't say that everything is alright this morning, but I have a little more energy to cope with it (I'm beginning to sound like some camp theatrical type now, flaring my nostrils and carrying on with the show...), because - after all - it is the pettiness of it all which really got to me.

There again, can you describe the weather-system which is about 3000 miles across and screaming around in circles above our heads right now as 'petty'? Maybe not, but it only took one drip of rain to fall down the back of my glamorous assistant's neck the other day, to make him slam down his tools, get into his car and fuck off home without a word to me. No explanation was necessary.

There was no escape available on the radio last night either. Everything was either all about politics and finance, desperate medical advice, or 1960s drama which I have already heard about 6 times since they were first recorded.

I stayed up until the 10.00 o'clock news, and the most entertaining thing was the sound of Barak Obama trying to force words out of his mouth which had been stuffed into it by his press advisors only an hour or two before.

In a protracted, tortured and utterly insincere fashion, he finally managed to say through gritted teeth that - after consulting his family - that he... personally... had come to the... err... understanding that... err... gay marriage was sort of OK. There! That wasn't so bad was it?!

Being a Democrat's Democrat, he was not allowed to say that he had - through prayer - consulted God over the matter, so he had to go to his beautiful wife and two pretty teenage daughters instead. He is the President of the fucking United Sates of America isn't he? He can think what he likes about gay marriage can't he? Obviously not. Well, not if he wants to win the next election he can't.

I suppose that his wife and daughters also reminded him that many gay people fought many wars alongside their straight comrades, in order to keep The Land Of The Free, free, as well. Easy to forget, what with all the pressures of work, eh? Gays can kill people just as well as straights, remember. They kill each other on a daily basis, after all.

Part of Mr President's workload right now is pushing through a bill which makes it illegal for bosses to demand the password of their employee's Facebook accounts, so they can read whatever they like about their staff without becoming a 'friend'.

Yes, you heard correctly. In The Land Of The Free, it is currently legal for any employer to demand access to any private emails or social network accounts, on pain of dismissal for a refusal to provide the information - in all but ONE State.

In Grouchy's State, he tells us that it is legal to marry your own cousin, just so long as he/she is not gay.

I have no strong feelings about gay marriage whatsoever. There again, I have no strong feelings about straight marriage either. If someone wants to get married to someone else, then that is their business. Why should your tax-relief in relation to marriage status be affected by the shape of your genitals anyway? It would all work out the same in the end, especially since there is reputed to be a shortage of women in the western world right now - well, good-looking ones anyway!

I suppose that I am just not Christian enough, but I am not running for office, so it doesn't really matter.

Grab a pew

2012-05-09T01:27:00.001-07:00

The Theatre Royal at Twilight - and memories of Beryl Reid screaming at my legs as she saw them coming down a ladder outside her dressing room when I worked there some years ago.

The entrance is a Victorian addition, but the original Georgian core sits tightly behind it, hemmed in by a pub on one side, and Beau Nash's fabulous town house on the other.

The town house has a stunning early 18th century interior which has - so far - not been destroyed by the awful chain-restaurant, 'Strada', though they have done their best to obliterate it with stupid mirrors and ugly lamps.

This place used to be the famous restaurant, 'Popjoys', titled after Nash's live-in lover of the same name. Somehow I was always too broke to eat there when it existed, and now I regret not having done so.

Nash was the self-styled Master of Ceremonies at Georgian Bath - a duty for which he was not paid a penny. He accumulated a fortune by gambling, then lost it when the government of the day introduced laws which prohibited the game at which he excelled the most. He died in poverty, having once been so powerful in the city that he could physically tear inappropriate clothing from the upper bodies of princesses before they entered his establishment - and get away with it.

Up until the late 17th century, it was fashionable for young gentlemen to carry swords and daggers around in public - hence the term, 'young blades' - and so many killings took place that a law was passed restricting the length of swords to 28 inches - as if that would help! When Beau Nash ran fashionable Bath, he banned swords altogether, and the problem was just about solved. It did not stop duelling at a pre-ordained, later time though, and the last fatal duel in Britain took place in Bath, in the early 19th century. The winner fled to Ireland.

Nash was a Welshman, and one of his greatest feats was to keep the Christian preacher, John Wesley out of Bath. Quite simply, Wesley was bad for business in a town which relied on gambling and prostitution for it's income. The Chapel people had to wait another hundred years before they could build all the depressing little hovels which they called churches in and around the place.

I would guess that the highest concentration of Methodist and Wesley Chapels in Britain was centred in Wales - just over the Severn Estuary from Bath. Ironically, many pubs and restaurants here are fitted out with pews and other woodwork which has been stripped from the Welsh chapels and sold to interior designers as the furniture for all those iniquitous establishments.

'Not a dry seat in the house', as the old theatrical saying goes.

Variation on an old story

2012-05-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

A View

2012-05-07T03:06:00.000-07:00

This must be the best view from a pub in - or just out - of Bath. Four of us had lunch there yesterday, having heard that it had changed hands. The view has always been good, but the food has always been terrible for about 40 years to my knowledge, but there has been change for the better.

To the lower left of centre, you can just make out the first place I lived in when I arrived to this area. It is a large manor which was built on the foundations of a medieval convent, as mentioned in a previous post.

The far distant hills are the Marlborough Downs, about 25 miles away. The wind that blew hard enough to bring down the Horse Chestnut tree on the right, came directly over them at about 60 MPH, and the 100-ish year old thing wasn't rooted deep enough to survive. It's flowers and leaves are wilting, and the kids have had their last game of conkers with it's fruit.

The picture (a bad one, using a grubby phone lense) was taken during a rare break in the rain, but today it's back to normal. I've just heard a weather forecast that predicts this cold wind and rain to last until sometime into June.

Somewhere in the middle distance lies my workshop - to which I am reluctantly going to do some work.