T and/or V

Do you watch too much television?
Or perhaps you don't own a television?
Neither is probably good.

There was a time some might have argued that I have met may have
watched too much. (I never missed an episode of The Equalizer). But now I think I don't watch enough.
If you don't watch any, then my plea is to watch some.
It's visual, it's auditory and it's designed, redesigned and
reinvented by talented creatives. And it's delivered in bite sized
pieces that are (all too) short.
The hour you may have been charged in the 80s is now a potentially
intense 42 minutes.
But you have to choose well for the right result.

The paradox of art is that to really enjoy it you have to see it for
its separate parts.
That's why people who walk around art galleries talk about
brushstrokes, framing, perspective, essentially the devices that are
the substructure of the work. Should they be even talking about that?
Is that not the reverse of "the point"?
It is the last thing that the artist wants you to do.
A moviemaker doesn't want to see his film spliced to clips on youtube.
A writer doesn't see his whole work spliced into two-line quotes.
A magician doesn't want your comments on his sleight of hand.
The (w)holistic end result is the whole point.

But that's not the way I enjoy things. And I'm not alone.
Ask a woman if she likes a magic trick, and she may say "Yes, that's
nice. I like to be bamboozled".
A man may respond to the same experience with "No that's really
annoying". (A real man may find out why).
They've had the same experience but one party needs to understand the
process. Don't get me wrong, I'm more than glad the other people
exist.
The same people may enjoy a flower. And one may offer "Yes, isn't
God's work wonderful?". Another may say "Yes, the beauty of the
mathematical coding of the daffodil DNA is a remarkable example of
life, the universe and everything".
My preference is the latter - to find a whole new dimensional
substructure which you can abstractly develop into a new useful
personal superstructure.

Maybe you have a rich seam of endlessly new stimuli entering your life
on an hourly basis. No?
Well, if you don't, watch a little TV.
Add a glass of wine if it helps.
It's legal.
It uses all your senses (apart from the largely redundant "smell").
And it can add another layer of intensity or challenge to everything
you think you know.

The Hesitant Driver

Prostatic drivers of the world unite!!

Dressing Down

Sometimes you need to have the right gear on.

For example as a medical man, attending a collapsee in public feels a little odd. You feel a bit guilty.

Yet ask me to paint the living room and I'm quite happy to underprepare and wear old clothes that I still don't really want paint on. That never goes well. 

In fairness, I now pretty much always put on my boiler suit. I think I have mentioned this before - it went in with a red sock and now it looks like a pink romper suit. Frankly that brings my testosterone down 10% in an activity where I could really use that extra boost. At least I don't put my high heels on to do the skirting boards.

It comes down to feeling comfortable I suppose.

What footwear do you wear at the beach for example? 

That's right .....wellies. I know some freaks wear flip-flops but we call those people Australians. The correct answer was the previously mentioned wellies. How else can you have the delicate danger of allowing the water to approach the unpredictably flexible top 10% of the boot. Anything could happen!!!!!! (I don't want to ruin the excitement for you but a wet sock is the usual outcome).

And there's a strange incongruity when you mess with this predictable order.

Wear shorts on a snowy day and you are either a student, a moron or have great legs. Great blue legs.

And sleeping in your clothes is one of the guiltiest sins we have. 

Shopping in your pyjamas should be.

This lack of synchronicity doesn't feel quite right.

Basically it's like having a poo with your coat on. 

Much appreciated but a little awkward.

Quotable Me - Starters for 10

Life is food. 

If you can't afford the seven course taster menu with paired wines, just go for the tapas.

I'm White

I won my first game of chess against a computer in years this week (Admittedly I haven't played since I was a kid with well, a chess computer). It was an app. I was on a train. And I can prove it....

Still unsure of my evidence?

I may have taken half a minute per move compared to its half a second. But it's a chess computer and that's all it does.

I've just painted the fence!

Go Ronnie

I lent a firm cushion to my uncle recently, for his bad back. He returned it to me during my visit the other day. 

When it was time to leave his flat, I pushed it into my backpack and trotted out of the building. 

The World Championship Snooker Finals start today. 

They may have the most majestic but they won't have the only one cushion escape of the week.

Class! A new term.

I nearly didn't post the blog of a couple of days ago.

I looked at it and thought – there I go again. Change blah, change blah. Change this, change that, blah blah blah. I was slightly aware of disappearing up my own behind in a mist of rhetoric.

Some thoughts are not revolutionary – most in fact. They are incrementally grafted onto the shoulders of giants.

I forgave myself when I remembered that I had read recently that rhetoric was one of the staple teachings of Greek education. Along with grammar and logic, it was one of the three ancient arts of discourse.

And defined?... "to improve the capability of writers or speakers to inform, persuade or motivate particular audiences in specific situations". Put like that it's a pretty powerful concept, yet one treated so dismissively when spotted and tagged by news interviewers, for example. 

But great orators were built on this. Cicero. Churchill. Blair. 

An accusation of rhetoric is often prefixed by the word "just" implying it is a cheap trick.
But I like cheap tricks. So much so that I think we should use one by giving it a French twist and renaming it rhétorique. It seems to lend a certain credibility (or credibilité). It worked for liberté and égalité, and if it gives the sweaty French a bit of style then it can't be a bad idea.

A change of thoughts is a wise precursor to a change in action. 

Call it talking to yourself, an internal voice, the angel/devil on your shoulder, it's all the same thing. A confrontational dialogue arguing the pros and cons, with you playing both parts. Using your experiences, ethics and moral code to make a decision, hopefully the right one. Generate options - Cull - Select.

Every decision changes you. 

You embark on it as you, but you are delivered through it to become someone else.

It may take 120 days to replace every red blood cell in your body, but when it comes to change of thoughts and actions it may take but a moment.

Allow yourself to be a bit suggestible - life is improv. Say you face a decision with six options. (Let's keep it simple and assume you're having pudding).

Imagine yourself surrounded by 6 shadows of yourself. Like you, but faint and embossed (well you may have sunk a bottle of vino by pudding).

When you have made your decision you will become one of those shadows. It will take form. It will now be you. The other shadows will fade and disintegrate.

I accept that choosing between lemon meringue and tiramisu may not require all your skills of rhétorique, (you're warming to it, aren't you? Admit it!) but you get the point, I trust. 

If you're going to live in somebody's shadow, it might as well be your own.

Free for All

The Internet isn't free. Any more than ITV is free.

You can get apparently free information (or free for a time as companies build up loyalty and traffic), you can search for things and people and friends.

If you're not paying for it, take care.

If you are paying for it, take even more care.

If you do a search, the fact that you've done it is saleable. Your identity has value - it is a commodity. 

You may receive an e-mail saying "someone is searching for you, subscribe here to find out who". The Internet sells you out at both ends, the buyer and the bought.

Something is always being sold.

And if you're not paying the bill.... it's you.

Twos and Ones

Change isn't difficult, it's normal.

Change is what life is. Change is what we are designed to do. Change is easy. Change is exciting. Change is fun. 

We are change machines. 

Not the change machines that give you ten twos for your 20p for the horseracing fairground game (much though I enjoy it).

Not the change machines that turn our coppers into a supermarket receipt that we can spend on produce. 

(Please forgive the unnecessary use of the word 'produce', I don't mean to offend anybody). 

No! Silly! We are not those change machines at all.

It's inertia we should fear, lack of change, lack of growth. Because you accelerate through life. As a famous relative of mine has always said "It's all uphill when you are going down".

Acceleration may slow even to a crawl. And that's fine, it's great. It has its own rewards. Gives you time to think and appreciate and enjoy. But as soon as it stops altogether in every capacity then your body stops asking questions of itself. Your mind stops working out. It's no good. It is a full stop. Only slide remains.

The advantage of age is that you know what you genuinely want to experiment with.

If you don't fancy sub aqua diving, don't do it. You don't need to just because other people enjoy it.

If you don't like team sports, I invite you not just to avoid them at all costs. But give those airheads who do a pretty hard time. It's likely they haven't started on the human adventure you have. What good came of those kids kicking a ball around on your estate as children?? Exactly. And they are still doing it? Beggars belief. Pity them but try to help them. I find it more fun to do in a slightly supercilious way but you have to find what works for you.

Do anything you want to. Keep this side of the law (mostly). 

If I could give you one piece of advice (and you had any reason to value you my advice), I would suggest that you don't eat peanuts after midnight. But you might be able to be somebody who can reseal the packet when you're only 20% in and put a clothes peg over the end. You may have strength I lack.  

So change. Even if you don't need to, even if you're ambivalent about it. 

Do it for the sake of it. 

Do it. 

Just because you can.

Pretty Pleas

Petrol stations.... would it kill you to have a little place where I can safely rest my fuel cap?

Game Theory

Life is a game.

We all know that.

Cheats frequently prosper.

Bullies frequently prevail.

The rules are questionably enforced.

And the meat pies are overpriced.

Everywhere are fields of artificial structure, rules, process and all the problems that happen when people interact.

Life is all these things.

And more.

You can play to win, or play just to take part.

You can experiment with strategy or study tactics.

You can go with your gut, or rely on your right foot. 

Or your right hook.

And you'll change.

Whichever strategy you use now will develop, perhaps drastically.

You will learn. And you will grow.

And it's all okay.

It really is.

There's only one thing you want to guard against in this whole process...

Don't find yourself just running down the clock.

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right

I've witnessed two utter disgraces this week.

Firstly, the Kent police and crime commissioner Ann Barnes.

What a spectacular waste of space. 

She appoints a 17-year-old to help her with her job, and then hangs her out to dry in the most humiliating manner possible.

A 17-year-old is a child in the legal system of England. To persecute her so publicly for tweets from two years previously when she was 15 and 14, is child abuse.

And why? An incompetent interview process by incompetent interviewers with 164 applicants and they didn't think to check Twitter?

Why has Ann Barnes not resigned?

She says "I am going to stand by her". She didn't! Why would she?

She says with a smirk "social networking sites are a no-go area for most of us adults"  and then follows up 2 minutes later in the same interview with "I've had some tweets myself, people complaining about me in the most rude, offensive, vulgar, language and I've had to delete them"   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22061794

Kent police and crime commission Ann Barnes doesn't represent any part of the society I recognise. Every shred of humanity and unselfishness has been aged out of her and caked over with inch-deep face make-up.  And who is she? Wiki tells us she broke the rules of her own job campaigning against the introduction of the position that she went on to buy with £68,000 of self-promotion, while threatening legal action over a tweet that criticised her funding. A tweet!

She could have learned something from this but her ego will make that impossible. 

She is four times the age of a the child she hung out to dry and showed no remorse herself.

Now the girl has to face a police investigation.

A society can be judged on how it treats our children.

This is something the entire country should be ashamed of.

This is Ann Barnes.

Secondly, I've long since lost patience with psychics, pretending to contact the dead. But I've kept my objections at arms length as I've enjoyed unravelling some of their techniques while never having been to a psychic show.

But this week on Pick TV, I witnessed Psychic Sally do her stuff. 

I'd like to say she was a talented charismatic performer, and that despite my personal beliefs I kind of enjoyed it, as I did when I saw John Edward do the same thing for the American audience.

But I didn't.

It was almost unwatchable. She was a terrible performer. I've never, ever, ever seen insincerity like it. These are warm, human, real people in the audience. They can't be that stupid. They can't be. Or I've been given human beings too much credit my entire life. It derails me when I question my trust in the humanity I thought was all around.

Although perhaps it clarifies something. I don't think I've ever managed to talk somebody who believes in psychic phenomena round to the truth. Their delusions are too strong and they are too close minded.  I have changed people's minds on just about everything else. I could do it but I would need more than one session to take that on. 

But the pure deceit of her performance,  the unadulterated exploitation, lies and her personal cruelty just made me very, very sad. 

We all need to redouble our efforts against this cancer of fake hope. 

I don't think in my life I've ever witnessed anything so totally and purely wrong.

Cold War

At my Improv class on Wednesday nights - one of the ways they make us bond (!), and "get the energy up in the room" (double!), is to yell out body parts which the victims (participants) (us) have to gamely physically approximate to each other.

Going nose to nose with somebody who has a cold is pretty hard to beat as a way of getting one yourself. So that has been a little improvisational gift to me on two of these classes. 
A couple of minutes pass while we bump various random parts of anatomy together, dancing to the trick of the caller, while pretending that it's only the laughter that is infectious.
And of course you have to be a good sport about it. Going masked up like a Chinaman is not "in the spirit of the class".

(Let's assume for the sake of the next sentence that catching a cold is one of the most unfortunate events in history. Stay with me!)
And if there's one thing worse than catching a cold, it's knowing the exact moment that you caught it.
It's heavy information no one should be asked to bear. 

Quotable Not Me

Life is simple,
We complicate it.

Who Wants to Be Me?

I often get told I'm a lot like Superman.

(OK, not often but... well OK then, not ever. Just planting a seed. Don't make a meal of it! Jese...)

The common feature I would concede that we share, is not only an ability to carry off a high profile underpant. But also in telling the truth. More specifically ....the inability to tell a lie.

You'll note I don't label that an ability, or even a quality. I genuinely do not consider it so.

That's largely why I can mention it here, unabashed.

Don't get me wrong... I could learn the ability

I could practice it. I'm sure I could get good.

I just haven't. I don't want to.

And I'm not going to.

I do not consider truthfulness a strength in this day and age. 

Ask (almost) any salesman. Ask (almost) any guru. Ask any woman!

It's best phrased as a weakness for the truth.

Weakness.

But maybe I can claw a bit of it back...and convince you of my treachery.

I don't lie.... to humans.

I'm quite happy to lie to the Internet. (In fact, it is one of my major life projects. By the time I retire, I'm hoping to be a Mars astronaut and Tahitian hula dancer called Norman).

And I also think that I'm happy to lie to animals.

I have been known to tickle the occasional parrot under the chin and ask "Who's a pretty boy, then?" when I know it isn't him. Or her. I know it's phrased as a question but still there's implicit deceit.

Does that make me a bad person?

Cheeky!

I'll give you the moon.

I'll give you the world.

Phraseologyism

Americans... 

When telling us your age you don't need to add on the words "years old", every single time you say it.

I think we know where you're "coming from" so we will take that as read.

Palatable Truths

There must be people who don't like the taste of mint...where do they buy their toothpaste?

Quotable Me 7

If you're dropped in the ocean, you have to be prepared to drink yourself free.

All Change

It's good to see the weather picking up a bit and the sun coming out.

I've been wearing hotpants all winter.

But let me tell you, they are not as toasty as they are cracked up to be.

I'll be getting mine from Milletts next year.

The Games People Play

Last night, I was playing an Improv game with a like-minded group of fellow bellends.

The idea was for the participants to step forward one at a time into the centre of the room and state they were an object.
"I am a flower"
Another person steps up and does the same thing.
"I am a vase"
Etc etc...
Until there's enough people to declare with one voice (if they are all on the same page by the end), the picture that they have built up.
"WE ARE A LIVING ROOM" (for example).

So, off we go.
Person number 1 walks up.
I am a chair.
Volunteer number 2...
I am a table.
Person number 3
I am a fork (thrilling isn't it?)
Number 4
I am a knife.

I am a spoon.

I decided to chip in....
I'm a can of Kestrel Superstrength.

To the credit of the next fellow to step up...
I am the Salvation Army.

The next fellow didn't quite get the point but tried..
I am a Tesco Metro.

I don't think we quite got to the point where a clear picture had built-up at this point so the teacher piped up and analysed our performance instead.

With a bit more time and focus, we might have well rewarded ourselves with a chorus of.
"WE ARE AN INTERVENTION"
But it never quite happened like that.

I think I was supposed to be a pepperpot.

Rule One

Why do the supermarkets write on some of their tastier foods 'Perfect for Sharing'?
It makes no sense.
In my experience, if you don't bother, you get twice as much.

The Art of the Modern Quote

Why are all quotes, post-ancient or Churchillian?
Or attributed to the Joyce Grenfells or Queen Elizabeth the First?
Moral sentiments nowadays are less connected with beheadings and World War.
Quotes should lean towards the times.

My hope or reading of modern times (for what it's worth) in 2013 (sorry if you are reading this in a hundred years time) is that community and kindness are on a comeback trail.
(I know it's not reflected by ITV2, but we can't rely on them to be a moral compass).
I sense (external) or feel (internal) a leaning towards this stuttering new stage of evolution.
You might see it in a wave of regret from a rich person or a touching display from the older generation who may have labelled it as normal behaviour rather than as an extra quality.
It is not that we are inherently a nice species. (Obviously, we are not). It's just that it is a necessary inevitability. We simply won't survive without it. It wasn't so long ago that many of our relatives gave their lives for us. But it's also not so long ago that people put children up chimneys. It's not lost on me that our chimneys have never been dirtier!

I want to believe that there is a growing recommendation for this named quality nevertheless. In small doses admittedly. After all, all this nonsense shouldn't block the true meaning of life - drugs, fags, booze, TV, domestic violence, and the freedom to do anything you like to anybody in the name of a random god of your choice - should it?
The best people of course reach such genteel conclusions before age or circumstance force them like a bad card sleight. In the case of the rich, it should be when they have collected enough money but not left it so late that they had to have its emptiness forced down their stupid throats, Duncan Bannatyne. It is not generous to give away a million pounds when you're a billionaire.

Kindness is only one rung to the full package - integrity.
If  you believe in this momentum and the belief (or just the momentum) gathers speed - and it is far from clear that it will - then it will need to suck up everything in its path like a huge piece of rolling Blu-tack, before daring to stake a claim as being the full package. After all, integrity may soon be a bygone word of which an entire generation has never heard. (What say you future Internet archivist/historian of the 22nd century?).

These qualities certainly cannot be applied generally to the public perception of doctors, lawyers, police, nurses, politicians, business men or teachers. And no one would deny me adding men of the cloth or TV presenters on to that list.
Are these qualities a historical footnote or a quaintness that future historians might appreciate as they metal-detect fields for our fake Gucci buckles?  (Did I say 'fields' - how naive!)
They are not even shared across continents.
Some would even argue that they are peculiarly British.

But the point was to talk about quotes...

I will give you a little quote. I've already given you one yesterday but I don't mind spoiling you at Easter. (Don't tell your father!)
This one touches on the familiar idea of living your dream. It is primarily relevant to the context of the television format known as The Voice. But a flexible mind can tease out a broader strand of meaning.

"Take advantage of the fact that our backs are turned.
Sneak up on us".
will.i.am.
The Voice, April 2013

This is a perfectly serviceable quote that might just as easily have been accredited to Sun Tzu (the great Chinese hip-hop producer).
Who decides the quote is quotable? (I know. It was me)
Who decides that a modern sentence is worthy of repeat? (Me again)
Even that it should achieve classic status. (You're embarrassing me!)

Who elects the quotable?
Perhaps in the past it was the Oxford English Dictionary but now ultimately it has to be the people.
The people decide. That's all there is.
People quote everybody everyday. It's called gossip.
You just need to identify the nugget.

I feel another project coming on .....