One hand, one bounce

I've just seen a video of somebody playing French cricket ( Prince Harry actually)

What an utterly joyful game. That takes me back.

Skittish fun, with minimal chance of a concussion or getting your teeth knocked out.

Anybody fancy a game?

The Human 'art

The sensitivity in the artist is the price of seeing the world and playing it back.

Assimilating and re-offering it rather than excluding it.

Normally, this sort of exposure would make your skin leathery and tough. 

But the artist surrenders their innate resistance. 

Oft unwisely.

They may try to remember that being strong and being hard are different things.

It's not work-life balance. That's far too simplistic. 

It's wading in the world without getting sucked in, up or under.

Many fade, give up or resist. They build barricades. 

We all do in the end.

Your charitable thoughts may persist but you may outsource them to a registered organisation...someone to do the caring for you. Someone who will invite you to a ball.

I am not going to beat anyone up about it as long as they start to be honest with themselves.

Resistance isn't futile. 

It's sound survival strategy.

1sT Place

There's been a lot written about tea down the years, as a compass of tradition or as a counsellor, or lifter of spirits.

It's trashy badboy brother 'coffee' has tried to compete by claiming every bogus benefit from preventing diabetes to curing cancer. All nonsense curated by those who respond to the mild stimulant.

Tea wins. 

Beacuse at the end of the day, tea is the difference between immorality and immortality.

The Pursuit of Cake

How do you like to talk?

I like all types of talky talky.

But I think I really need occasional deep conversation that I can acquit in an apparently trivial way.

Thickies, of course are going to glaze over at this point. 

Don't get me wrong. I like the thick. Mainly because they don't know who they are. Which is fait-accompli-funny. They may be lawyers, teachers, doctors....but let's face it, they are lawyers mainly. The other jobs come with little free entitlement and have to process people rather than positions. They have to be more humble, more human. Don't tell the lawyers that..because they won't understand (And it's not even all lawyers, more usually it's their friends).

Go deep. And unwise people get deep on you. People not capable of remaining trivial (and so really should not be let loose in public).

So go trivial with them. 

Don't bring up anything too challenging. 

You get more cake that way. 

Because that's the way trivia works

Little by Skittle

Life is about pushing through and pressing on.

The things you knock over should be skittles not safety blocks.

You may decide you're the sort of person who doesn't stop but you still have to know when to turn. 

Ninety...

One eighty...

Three sixty...

All different decisions.

If you drill through plaster, you should know where the cables are.

That's why the same rules don't work for everybody.

People who succeed with the 'safety on' are just lucky.

But luck is informed.

The moment of luck has been prepared for.

When you walk through life with purpose and drive, then drive carefully.

It's about being a force of nature. 

Not a weapon of mass destruction.

Odd? Get Even!

Things I like

Half price tickets

Things I don't like

2-4-1 tickets  - useless if you are 1,3,5,7 or 9 people. 

I could go on!

The Connected

I have just heard the first ice cream van come down my street in possibly a decade. 

If this is Brexit, bring it on. It cannot be coincidence.

So I was barely able to disguise my joy when one of the students went out and bought herself a 99. Particular as I saw what she was wearing.

Appropriately enough, Mind That Student was writ large on the back of his van up against some Disney characters, likely uncleared by the corporation.

I'm so glad he made a sale.

Particularly as I had just had a lolly myself. A Rocket, since you ask, that I've recently taken to purchasing and storing in my own freezer.

But the spontaneous simplicity of a 99, is something even I would struggle to replicate in my otherwise highly efficient kitchen set-up.

I was pleased he made a sale. It meant he might be back and who knows.. I may take up the opportunity.

An opportunity for him of course would be to expand into Vodka, nitrous and menthol fags, and would it kill him to throw in a free pack of poppadoms for no reason at all?

No. This is the warm familiar feeling of a retro experience.

We are the connected. Social Media, 24 hour news, hearing and feeling your own phone when it hasn't rung.

But when you are connected you feel every tremor, you shake as everyone else's nerves jangle.

Everything is closer to real. 

Close and too real.

We may choose to expose ourselves to more fear if it's our wont, controlled or otherwise.

Or perhaps do everything we can to avoid it, cross our fingers that the world isn't really a changeable place and enjoy a bubble we have some influence over. 

And who can blame us?

LOLling ourselves into a false sense of security.

The Bastille

I sent a joke to a stranger earlier on today.

I was buying a bit of flooring on the Internet.... 'like you do'. Do you remember when people said that a lot?

The joke was of a mildly Carry-On risque flavour based on an accident which had changed my carpenter's name from Laycock to Lovecock. So as you can imagine a joke was overdue, and with a local Pride march happening within the next 24 hours, I had the perfect frame for it.

I want to live in a world where you can still make a joke without too much fear so I pretend this is that world.

I tempered it a little, by phrasing it with a little pomposity to increase the humour.

(This wasn't my first rodeo, readers)

And I was blessed with a quick reply which said "Oh ...you have made my day".

I re-read what I had sent and have to admit it was a pretty good joke.

In theory, there was nothing in that for me.

Just a little chance taken to brighten somebody's day.

But I will let you into the thought processes:

Chance of it meeting some humourless half-dead vacuum - maybe 20%.

Chance of it being taken wrongly: maybe 15%.

Chance of it being received well but nobody letting me know.. maybe 50%.

My assessment: WTR - Worth the risk

Outcome: the best possible, because it met with a kindly soul (and I may have mentioned, it was a pretty good joke)

So what was that ..a little exercise for the human spirit, a little boost of adrenaline. A smile for someone 300 miles away at the end of a long Friday in a likely-boring job, doing invoices for laminate.

But many is the joke unsaid. 

Many is the gift ungiven.

The 84 dead people who were mowed over by a Tunisian lorry driver this Nice morning won't make any more jokes.

They won't get to face my trivial decision-making process.

Yet too many of the living have surrendered that right and duty early.

We are fragile. 

We have bones like Wispa bars. Our underflesh is like mallow. Our sensory organs are some of the most fragile tissues in creation.

And it's because we are so fragile that we tell ourselves that we are strong.

Through our culture. In our movies and books. In Holbein and on Instagram.

We even rewrote the original verse of our traditional nursery rhymes - the ones that reminded us how brittle our bones were and how tasty our flesh might be to others.

"Little Johnny on the railway line, picking up stones, along came the engine, and broke poor Johnny's bones".

We need to tell ourselves that we are strong. 

Because we are not.

It's a story.

Stories aren't true but we need them to survive. They are oxygen. They are food. 

And hope.

For better days ahead.

"Oh!" said Johnny, "That's not fair." 

"Oh!" said the engine.

"I don't care"

The Real Deal

You know how people tell you to to "Keep it Real"

That's quite a limiting belief don't you think, keeping it real?

Don't you think we have enough Real?

Don't you think we have slightly more Real than is absolutely needed at the moment?

And if so, have you balanced it out with more Unreal, or are you in a negative balance? 

Are you in a downward spiral? 

In deficit?

I suppose these well-meaning hipsters must be meaning to encourage you in a little more honesty, a little more letting people know who you are.

Well, at least one of those is unnecessary and at least one is a given. 

So why do we need to keep instructing each other to "Keep it Real".

Surely to push, strive and achieve, you need to keep it slightly unreal. 

You need to ignore the edges, erase the lines and blur the edges of possibility. 

You don't just need to "Keep Real", you need to make more Real by crossing over those boundaries.

Keeping it Real is really just maintaining the status quo and the last thing we need more of is Status Quo.  

"Keep it Surreal" if you have to. At least that is considerably more interesting.

But if that's too much of a leap for you, I say "Keep it slightly Unreal".

I will even suffix a  "…, Man !"  on the end if you feel you need it.

Yes..And...

Do you think love is the strongest emotion?

Perhaps you think jealousy is? That's a different topic…(and  a short story in waiting…)

What about caring?… oh sorry…am I boring you…?

CARING…you do know what that is, don't you? You have given this some thought? Oh God, please tell me that you have.

Sorry, I should explain. I mean caring for other people.. 

People other than you.

OTHERS!

So who do you care about? 

Your social network? 

Your family? 

Your first-degree relatives?

Because I will put this to you. 

Anybody in your life that you think you care about…. if you don't know whether or not they are alive or dead…. then you do NOT care about them.

You're busy, self-centred ambition makes that impossible.

Maybe you'll go to their funeral…but it's not really them that is dead, is it?

And if LOVE is supposed to be something elevated ABOVE care, then you have a real problem. Because when you can't recognise care, then any concept of love becomes a simple numbers game, a contractual negotiation on top of some basic fundamental, grey, dirty, concrete, underpinnings of minimum-wage "care".

Well, I'm going to tell you something.

Care isn't an underpinning. It isn't minimum-wage, (even when it is).

It isn't cheap….it's rich.

It may cost nothing, or next to nothing….but it's done by heroes which means… for the avoidance of doubt …. not every member of the human race.

It's rare. It's beautiful. But it's more tacky Old Kent Road than spritzy Mayfair.

It may fall to echelons of society that are considered lower, (and I'm not claiming they are all the correct souls  for it…because some some of them need equalizing)... 

But it's not easy to find a Captain of personal industry when there is no reward.

It doesn't come with cocktail parties. 

It doesn't come with dinners. 

It doesn't come with awards, or thanks or LBDs. 

It likely comes with spit and shit and abuse.

How much of that would you think someone as repulsive as Michael Mansfield would tolerate on his cravat? 

5 seconds? 

10?

50 hours a week?

When care is considered basic…when it can even be prefixed with the word "basic", how offensive is that?

How would you prepare your private company's "tender" to provide "basic" care?

Are there even two  words more oxymoronic than 'basic' and 'care'.

Tell me.

I'm asking.

Care isn't a foundation. Or at least an expectation of one isn't foundation alone. 

It may be fundamental, but it's not trivial and it's not automatic.

Care is a battle.

It's a right.

It's a duty and it's a privilege.

But it doesn't come from an ITV2 advert from Irwin Mitchell.

It doesn't come from a pension plan from Michael Parkinson.

These are greedy morons who don't understand what care is.

Care may be a carefully placed decoration on top of a cake, as much as it is a basic right to £7 an hour.

It is a touch, a thought. It is an e-mail. 

It is a phone call, a Christmas card with a personal message rather than a signature or Best Wishes in a single inverted comma. 

Why bother sending a card to somebody once a year? For pity's sake….. open your eyes.

Those that really care may…may… care enough to forego, reframe or observe any selfish modern interpretation of love as one of modern hypocrisy and convenience.

And if you've glazed over or don't recognise what I'm talking about, then you can't care. 

So don't tell me you can love.

Because between me and the happy rich divorce lawyers, only one of those is getting paid to believe you.

That's OK, it's not me you have to convince. And I have no ego about this… I know I'm irrelevant. 

But you don't.

You may not recognise a truth when it's said. Or written.

Caring is an emotion that is so much more strong.

Maybe you have the capacity to do it for your own children but maybe even that is a strain!

Lord…. 1, 2 or 3 persons out of 8 billion. 

That's poor.

There are some who do it for everybody who brushes through their life. 

Every time they have an opportunity.

Every time they can offer a kind word.

Every time they can bake a cake.

I reckon there may be used to be more of them than there are now.

I will let you decide when then was, because a country has decided that our over-twittered bloated souls haven't yet died.

They have another chance to bring all our lives in line, to pull us all together.

That 'then' is here again.

That care is back.  But only if you want. 

That's democracy.

Call this a rant if it makes you feel better. 

Consider it meaningless.

Forget it.  

Live your life. 

Feel better.

And make tomorrow the same as today. 

Or don't.