Detached a little

It’s a sad thing but the older you get the crustier you become and the less caring you can be about what I’ve come to label “detached death”. Detached death is when someone, not in your family or immediate circle of friends passes away. Usually it’s an ex-colleague or workmate or somebody you happened to know briefly due to an artificial or transitory social situation, most likely based around your employment. You’ve probably not seen them or heard about them for while and then along comes the news, borne by someone wearing a suitably glum face that “old Bob” or “Jenny who worked the copy machine” or “Fred the truck driver” have died.

Immediately you go into respectful reflective glum mode and talk in low and serious tones. You ponder a little on your knowledge of them, try to figure out how old they were and under what terms you last saw them. You realise that you didn’t really know much about them and great swathes of their lives are imagined badly and ignorantly by you. Maybe even as a black and white movie but what else is possible, you don’t know Jack about them. Then you feign for a while. Feigning is trying to appear upset or caring when really you’re not at all affected. That person has died; you know their family will be feeling bad, all the usual things will be happening and that’s pretty terrible for them but you know that had you never seen or heard of that person ever again you wouldn’t really care. They are of course more than a face and a name or a staff number, they’re precious human beings, but they really don’t mean anything to you. Particularly now that they don’t work here, or you don’t have deal with them or worse put up with them because they were irritating. In truth they were dead already; they died the moment they quit, or retired or moved on and of course the exact same thing will happen to you when your time comes.

Here we are shuffling along like penguins, we know and recognise the ones close by, they keep us warm, protect us, we do the same for them, we laugh and chatter and journey together, we share a common love. Penguins on an ice flow making noises. Those others though, farther out to the left or the right, just a little beyond our reach are something else; they have their peer group, their helpers and their own pace. We may nod or wink or blink towards them, they may politely return but their journey is their own. When they fall we can’t halt and turn to pick them up, there are too many others in the way and we are moving away all the time, each of us caught up in our own blinkered piece of progress. So we feign, a second’s hesitation, a thimble of respect and then we go on.

I doubt if the Queen cares about the medals or awards or knighthoods she gives out, the numbers are too big, the production line is relentless, she is a machine and they are passing cogs. Clicking and whirring and having a moment, the Queen is the champion of the feign and unfortunately as I get older and cogs and wheels continue to obit at a distance or pass me by so am I. I’m sorry for anyone who has some of my detached death going on but that sorry can’t generate a real tear, can’t put me off a ham sandwich, discolour a holiday day dream or stop me looking forward to getting home. My survival instinct is strong enough to know where and when I must spend my emotions, at what point I can empathise; the odd charity, African water shortage, natural disaster or donkey sanctuary gets through but few of them stick…

It’s not religion or charity we need, it’s perspective.

Dangerous wiring

Wiring diagrams and the random samplings of cheesy baguettes: Those stumped by the antics of their Twitter alter egos remain bemused, their sharp and pithy messages resonating around cyber-voids and causing excessive stimulation to some or is it that the are simply transmitting clues to a huge, sprawling crossword puzzle than none of us, earthbound and blinkered as we are, can actually see?

God has given us dangerous minds. They say that people who have had religious experiences early in life and then moved on (as life's rich tapestry of strange beauty and disaster unfolds), still cling on to their spiritual wreckage remaining passively obsessed with god and their abject failure to find him or even some close approximation. I'm not sure who it is who is saying these things but I wish they'd stop and allow the likes of us a little head space in which to explore other less fuzzy, less furry and less fussy modern conundrums. Modern life is quite simply a quiet conundrum, a game with shifting rules, narrow windows of opportunity, possibilities that we cannot grasp and because of this, huge potential. Imagine my pleasure therefore at discovering the Swiss, bespectacled boffins at Nescafe (a division of some bigger and uglier thing) had devised sample sized sachets of coffee, milk and sugar molecules fuzed into tiny pieces that could be activated by the simple addition of a small quantity of boiling water to form a tasty and invigorating hot beverage. It has a name but as it is so close to that of god's own (secret) name I dare not even speak it or write it down. I shall call it a supreme guilty pleasure and say no more.

The Ticket

It was the raffle prize of a lifetime, a seat at the top table at the Grand Vizier's Garden Party. She could hardly believe her luck. It was of course the social event of the year, all of the cream of society would be there, the weather would be perfect (it always was) and the whole event was the most marvellous spectacle and experience. She nursed the ticket in her open hand and mused a little more over her good fortune. What should she wear? Who would she be sitting next to? She thought of some the wonderful anecdotes she'd heard about previous winners, how their lives had changed, how their fortunes had improved, VIPs they'd met, some had even married or travelled to other planets and even strange countries as a result. (I should point out that interplanetary travel was considered relatively normal for most people but a local passage from country to country had become a lot more difficult and unusual these days, this was mostly due to diplomatic rather than technical travel issues).

She put the ticket back into the metallic blue envelope and locked it up in her fire and ant proof safety deposit boxes. (You had to be very careful about ants, there were many tribes of highly intelligent ants operating in the area and being ants they were inclined to acts of burglary or simply just carrying things away, you had to take sensible precautions. The good news was that a small bowl of sugar could be left out and that would distract the ants, in fact if they ate enough of it they became drunk and were then relatively easy to apprehend and capture them). The last thing she wanted was the ants to carry away her prize and then try to sell it all across the Inter-ant Net System to whoever or just hold it to ransom. She pushed the box keys and entered her security digits. “Phew, the ticket is now as safe and ant proof as I can make it.”

She made herself a hot banana chocolate and allowed herself a deep, smug, happy and satisfied smile. She flicked over the catalogue pages and thought a little more about her dress.

Bright blue somewhere

So I was caught up in the moment, a memory, a glimpse into the workings of the mind. The lazy mind that, as far as we see fails to retain so much. Of course that's not true , we are all cameras, we load up a mega pixel record the world that goes deep into the library. It's the playback that is the problem, that and locating the images. The grey, ever bumbling information that becomes cross wired and tired out and too lazy to recount itself in any comprehensible way. The mind leaves us with jumbles and tasters, distortions and non-default versions prone to decay and exaggeration, wildly sometimes.

My version of my world and my experiences is crazily unreliable, untrustworthy, stared at through a milk bottle bottom and then scrapped in the dirt, but it is all I have. The good news is I can beef up the pleasant and dull and discolour the nasty. All by myself I can rewrite that tiny pin prick of human history I inhabit and dance, every forgetful on the head of the pin that caused the pin hole I walk across. Here am I, whoever I am, whoever you were, wherever that was. You'll have to take my word for it though.

How good it was

Front cover.

Back cover

I'd forgotten how good this album is, the first I ever bought. Hard to imagine that I was listening to this whilst my parents watched the Black and White Minstrels on the BBC. Things have changed.

Blue bird of happiness

Then there was the day, that special day, one in which everything rhymed. I looked out of the window and I saw a blue bird. It was just as you had said it would be but not to me. Between the grasses and branches, between the sky and earth, dancing on an easy wing. Gripping the finest perch, letting go in a millisecond then alighting, so gently. An unfamiliar sun was moving around a foreign sky, all to a pattern and formula, the very correct details that somebody else had worked out. I watched it for what seemed like hours but the study was over in minutes, perhaps less, all played out in elastic time. The image however has stayed in my mind, like a tattoo or some beautiful ordeal or torture I can never quite forget. That deep and lazy blue, the divine colours blending in form and feathers and a tiny, pounding heartbeat, there inside. Heartbeat, wingbeat, strange pulses and the lightness of the golden moment.

It was also on that same day, I saw you, the far side of the quadrangle, walking away, looking back, then moving on. You had your own choices of colour, chosen and worn and on display. You didn’t quite see the blue bird, you were elsewhere, in thought, meeting yourself headed in another direction, perhaps. My thoughts stopped and then raged and then engaged and formed up in a time stamp. A black and blue mark that was never to heal. How careless of this fragile mind of mine, the only one I shall ever know, to see and hear these things so briefly, for such a small amount of time, only then to blindly and so easily let them go.

A certain sense

A certain sense of not quite belonging, not home not away,

A part and piece, an entity but incomplete,

A certain sense, a vague feeling,

Stuck on the edge, struck out,

Without quite knowing what it's all about,

Because nobody really knows,

Nobody really knows anything.

Do they?

Madonna McGowan

Madonna McGowan

Madonna McGowan

Gone up to the town

Her nails are bright purple

Her thoughts go in circles

Her temperament brittle

She might scream, she might spittle

Name has nothing in the middle

Like a Polo mint

She spent time in a hospital

Some institution or special school

She mixed with offenders

She offended the mixers

Nail varnish remover her elixir

Of choice and necessity

She read your tattoo

You read her ones too

All crimes, mean, nasty, petty

But she's forming a plan

Looking out for a man

To nail varnish the town

Madonna McGowan

Her of the daisies, in town.

Dali

Salvidor Dali

Sneakin' down the alley

Heading for the ballet

In the Auditorium

Hieronymus Bosch

Under the cosh

Never at a loss

In the Planetarium:

There are many artists out there, most are not quite parasites

Many deserve their human rights

More so than others might allow, for art is such a sacred cow,

To the educated, emancipated masses,

Who want it done away with,

Daily Mail style, while all the while just

Moan about the licence fee

So we give it away, for free.

Paul McCartney's Lamborghini

On the street or on the TV

On the beach in her bikini

Like a woman likes the meaning

All the boys are heavy breathing.

In the pages, on the screen

Everywhere you've ever been

Tyre marks black across the road

All the places that you want to go.

Wire wheels and shiny machinery

Paul McCartney's Lamborghini.

Couch v Sofa

"Great, that stuck up bitch won't ever notice a twenty missing from her handbag, nor that mascara either."

"This is fecking useless, a horrible tinny sound that won't impress Simon or the other judges."

"Ok, I'm fed up with you SKY, so maybe I can't recall my PIN number, you lot must have it on file somewhere, I'm payin' £40 a month for this."

Not a couch but a sofa, a return to the settee: Doe eyed and supremely satisfied with their lot in life they sprawl barefoot in carefree ecstasy never worried about the interest free bow-wave that crashes before them. Sofa women enjoy the warmth and comfort of having nothing to worry about or be responsible for as they relax into sofa induced trances in their perfect staged lounges across the world of advertisements. There are no spills, crumbs or pet hairs here in the sofa dimension. Couches are king, places to dream dreams, stroke cheap guitars, rummage in a neighbours handbag while she makes the coffee, talk to the sofa help line on the phone – it's all like a perfect world stuck in 1955 (which we all know happened to be the perfect year) and nothing needs be paid for until after the divorce is finalised.

Terrorist's blues

whatever's done is done

lost to change, out stare the sun

embrace the blindness yet to come

safe in some knowledge, ripped and torn

that those in power couldn't care less

for the truth, honesty or openness

so you just hurt and take another hit

with no way of expressing it

the poor, the foolish and the brave

watch the concrete poured on every grave

recall the faces but the names are gone

step into shadows everyone

clear as blood, too thin to run

whatever's done's already done

whatever's done is done

Radiation rose

In Bank of Scotland blue, in radiation red

In General Motors blue , in radiation gold

In Levi Straus blue, in radiation glow

In Barclays Bank blue, in radiation rose.

Somewhere

We were left to look for our own forms of wisdom, to find it where we could, to seek it out, to nurture it and so make it clear and believable. We had the dream that we would be understood and that, ultimately understanding would prevail and we would prosper as we passed through. As a young man I took that road, not realising where it would ultimately lead nor did I appreciate the ardour of the journey or the full depth of the disappointment that I would feel as I neared it’s end. To travel so far for so long but never arriving was not something I was prepared for. I had comforted myself with the knowledge that friends walked with me, we were a troop, a cabal, a team searching but one by one they strayed or fell away until I too finally was lost and all but consumed. The road’s end now beckons, neither a cliff edge nor a dark cave, not a blinding light or a peaceful refuge, floating on some serene ocean many miles deep. No, there will be none of that, that is not my fate for I see now I never had a destination nor a direction, I followed and illusion and is into an illusion that I have travelled. There is no way back. Somewhere in the distance I hear a cat’s meow.

(Some scholars, such as Michael V. Fox, have suggested that Ecclesiastes is influenced by philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism. “The boldest, most radical notion in the book is...the belief that the individual can and should proceed toward truth by means of his own powers of perception and reasoning; and that he can in this way discover truths previously unknown…This is the approach of philosophy, and its appearance Ecclesiastes probably reflects a Jewish awareness of this type of thinking among foreign intellectuals…He does not look to revelation or tradition for guidance. He believes that he can discover what is good to do in life by acquiring wisdom and using it to examine and contemplate the world. This is the stance of Greek philosophy…Koheleth’s focus on individual experience, in particular the perception of pleasure, bears a significant resemblance to Hellenistic popular philosophy, whose central purpose was to find the way to individual happiness by the use of the powers of reason. The Epicureans sought happiness through pleasure and freedom from fear. The Stoics thought to find it in the shedding of desires and passions…In 1:4-7 Koheleth mentions that the four elements compromise the totality of the physical word – a notion common to Greek philosophers especially Stoics…These general similarities…support the hypothesis that the author was aware of some concerns and attitudes of philosophical thinking current in the Hellenistic age.")

Sphere

This sphere believes we’re doing well

This sphere considers there’s no hell

This sphere knows life in every cell

This sphere believes we’re doing well

Jewels

Sleeping in tiny jewels

Across the place where the universe was

A hand was reaching, fingers crosses

We watched with awe but felt no fear

For love’s sweet shelter is always near

Always near, always near,

Some where close around about here

In the corner where wisdom rules

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Under the red sun in a rusty sky

We point to crosses and cross over bye and bye

We stretch the boundary you and I

It’s not enough to say you tried.

It’s not enough to say you died

Nothing is ever enough.

So the longest story goes

We walked across the oldest stones

Steady as thunder and sand blast

Where ever the five winds blew us

We held our breath to address the past

In the corner where wisdom rules

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Bathsheba

Bathsheba had a lover

She loved him eye to eye

She fed him bread and hogs head pie

And they danced on through the night

Bathsheba made a promise

Before the moon and sun

With trickled blood she praised the Lord

But the damage had been done

Bathsheba stole the answer

She took it to her heart

There’s slim and thin who don’t get in

The church is torn apart

Bathsheba had a lover

The lover slept all night

She called the Lord but he ignored

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

"Why does the Lord stay quiet?"

She called the Lord but he ignored

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

Bathsheba’s gone to Heaven

Or so the good book said

Bathsheba’s name is still alive

But the lover is long dead

The lover is long dead

Under the knife

Looking at you and your artificial self.

You will go under the knife.

Your brow is a tortured lie, your lips a mess,

You will go under the knife.

I try to study another photograph to make some sense,

There only is, the sense of self defence,

No reliable point of reference,

As you go under,

Inevitably under,

Fighting back but you're under the knife.

...half biscuit

There are questions in the corner of my mind that lurk

Like how do the road gritters ever get to work?

Answer me that and you could win a lifetime of a cruise

But hold the phone, here’s Judy Tzuke to take us to the news.

So Tanita Tikaram remains obsessed with tragic Judee Sill

Said “Jesus was a cross-maker who’s making crosses still”

And Linda Ronstadt covered it and so did young Beth Orton

There may be better versions but most of them are now forgotten.

On a moon-lit night when nothing’s right I think of Warren Zevon

The werewolf riff we can’t forgive and a caravan in Devon

The Hollies didn’t make it right nor Dexy’s Midnight Runners

But I used to have a Telecaster not unlike Joe Strummers’.

Life

A life in Brief:

My parents were

Esoteric fabulously rich working class from the extreme North East of the UK via the Soviet Union with a Swedish bloodline.

The house I grew up in

Small with woodchip on the wall, you know the rest.

When I was a child I wanted to be

Marilyn Monroe

If I could change one thing about myself

I would have preferred to have larger feet as they would have given me a stable platform and kept me rooted and grounded during lifetime times of trials and exasperation.

You wouldn’t know it but I’m very good at

Masturbation

You wouldn’t know but I’m no good at

Planning and organising elaborate Prussian style award ceremony banquets and sober deer shooting weekends. Then doing the washing up.

At night I dream of

The blackness at the end of time or fluffy clouds, ponies and golden harps.

What I see when I look in the mirror

Most times I see a mirror.

I wish I’d never worn

Out my knee cartilage

My favourite item of clothing

My Christmas Hari Krishna begging robes

I drive

A custom Tuk-tuk around the windswept streets of Glasgow handing out warm soup to the homeless.

My house is

Not my home.

A book that changed me

“Grease and all that greasy stuff didn‘t help my complexion much “ by Olivia Newton-John.

My greatest regret

Born too late to participate fully in the Renaissance and the French Revolution.

The last time I cried

I stubbed my toe on the bed leg at 3AM in the dark.

My five-year plan

To be President of either the USA or the UAR.

What’s the point?

All religion is a noble but pointless and absurd pursuit pursued by the unenlightened, encouraged by the idiotic.

My life in five words

”Once there was a way…”