Our House Is a Very Very Very Fine House

…and we do have a cat in the yard from time to time, though it’s not ours. Anyway, our house is now up for sale on Rightmove and Onthemarket.com, so if you know anyone looking for a house in the East Midlands, point them in our direction:

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/148000949#/?channel=RES_BUY

However I have to warn you that the house does come with an earworm: ‘Love will keep us Together’ by thingummy and wotsit has been floating round for a while and like a determined poltergeist, shows no sign of leaving. Why do we get earworms? Why do they come at some times and not others, and why can they sometimes take days or even weeks to vacate the premises? Captain and Tenille, that’s who it was. I don’t even like the bloody song – but it seems liking has nothing to do with it when it comes to earworms. It can be a song you love or one you can’t stand; it makes no difference except that you very quickly get fed up when Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep takes up residence in the auditory canal and refuses to leave. Oh god, and now I’ve reminded myself of that terrible song. But hey, misery loves company so here’s a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSNSTerj2Kc

OH thought ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ might be a good antidote but even though it’s a much better song, so far it hasn’t done the trick.

Whilst I’m on the rant, what is it with the word ‘gift’ used as a verb? If you give something it’s automatically a gift, so why the need for this ugly new addition to our language? I think we should be told. And in the spirit of replacing one earworm with another, here’s one of my favourite songs:

Happy Wednesday

Kirk out

Mission Creep

I had a really good week off – not an exciting one particularly, but restful and satisfying in various ways. I did a lot of clearing out, taking stuff to the tip and freecycling: the shed (the second shed, not the main one – do keep up) is more or less clear now. The thing was like a time capsule; I honestly don’t think my father-in-law ever threw anything away – I found ancient tools and bits of rope probably used to secure the ark as well as rusted old oil cans and gas lamps and a rather solid fly-sheet for a tent (I wasn’t aware that he ever went camping so maybe he just picked it up and kept it thinking it might come in handy.) Imagining things might come in handy is a habit I’ve had to cure myself of as it has resulted in large piles of unusable debris labelled what the hell was I thinking? Anyway after a morning’s hard labour, lots of dust and swearing and oodles of freecycling, it’s done. Daniel and I also took a load of stuff to the tip, which was very useful. I’m almost feeling as if the end is in sight.

Musically and poetically it was a good week too; on Thursday at the Moonface a number of people showed up including a guy with a didgeridoo who gave us a lesson in how to play it and a bloke who just popped in for a swift half and ended up entertaining us on the piano. Saturday saw the final singaround at the Plough which, unless it can find a buyer soon, will sadly close. Big boos (not booze) to the brewery Bass who refused to stump up to repair the kitchen so that they could serve the food which made the place viable. I wrote a poem for the occasion based on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, called Goodbye Thorpe Acre Inn; it included the lines ‘can’t catch me in my kitchen/I’m going down to the Plough’ and ‘we’re not to old to be singing the blues’ with everyone joining in on the blue-oo-oos bit.

But what was chiefly occupying my mind this morning was mission creep. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it refers to an organisation which starts out with one mission and having accomplished that (or not) goes on to encompass more and more areas. You can see this in government a lot, in fact government itself is a prime example of mission creep as we now have more government departments (and ministers to head them) than ever before. Ofsted is perhaps the best example; I’m expecting a call from ‘Ofwrite’ any day now to say that an inspection is imminent. But it’s not confined to government and the latest example to come to my attention is Nanowrimo. I have mentioned this organisation before as I’ve taken part in the ‘National Novel Writing Month’ for which the contraction stands. It’s quite useful to have a skeleton organisation which organises the month, sends out reminders and motivational slogans and provides a website where the finished novel can be uploaded (this is not read by anyone but you can download a certificate which confirms that you have participated and that your novel measures at least 50,000 words.) In the past it’s done what it said on the tin; provided a forum and a space for me to finish my novel. That’s it: I don’t require any more from Nanowrimo. But in recent years it seems to be expanding and expanding. You have pre- and post-nanowrimo exercises and something else which happens in the spring which I’ve steered well clear of; and then there are all sorts of spin-offs like sprints where people get together and write a certain number of words in a short space of time and if you’re not careful the whole thing becomes about numbers and not quality. Mission creep.

And speaking of mission creeps, I’ve got that weird woman in my head who kept praying (at least that’s what she called it) for Trump to win the last election, chanting ‘angels are coming from Africa.’ Here’s the vid, if you can bear to watch it:

So happy Monday, and don’t be a mission creep.

Kirk out

The Joy of Text

I’ve been without a phone for a week now, since the screen on my old one went completely blank. It came back to life briefly, which gave me hope that the white-out might be a blip, but it wasn’t: it’s gone now and I can’t do a thing with it. So now I have a new one, courtesy of Ratae, and I have to transfer all my data from the old phone to the new. In theory this is quite easy; all you have to do is scan the QR code on your new phone with the camera on your old phone, put the phones next to each other and let the data stream commence. But since my screen is dead I have no access to the camera and so can’t scan the QR code. I’m hoping there’s a way round this but I have a horrible feeling that there might not be, which means I’ll have to install my apps again and lose the data that I had. It’s not the end of the world; apart from the books on my reading app there’s not much that matters on my phone, but still it’s annoying. Daniel is coming over later to help me, so we’ll see.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out how to fit the chords for Goodbye Yellow Brick Rd to my parodic poem, Goodbye Thorpe Acre Inn. It’s not easy, but it’s not as complicated as I feared; just the odd B flat seventh to try and work in… I doubt I’ll sing it at the singaround, though I might try bursting into song on the ‘blue-oo-oos’ bit. Here’s a flavour of it – the chorus goes:

Chorus

So goodbye Thorpe Acre Inn

it’s time for us all to say ciao

you can’t catch me in my kitchen

I’m coming down to the Plough

down with guitars and with mandolins

down with recorders and drums,

Sadly we realise our future lies

beyond the Thorpe Acre Inn

I’ve also worked in the line ‘we’re not too old to be singing/the blue-ue-ues, ah-ah-ah’ etc, which I was quite proud of. I also like ‘you can’t catch me in the kitchen, I’m coming down to the Plough.’ Move over, Brian Bilston.

I shall try singing it in a minute and see how I get on.

Kirk out

Saturday Singaround

I had a terrific weekend. Nothing particularly momentous happened; it was just one of those weekends that flow in a relaxing way from one enjoyable activity to another; the sort of weekend I increasingly enjoy. I used to like more exciting weekends; jumping on a train on a Saturday morning after a heavy night on Friday, not knowing where we’d end up; meeting Bob for one of his mystery pub crawls in Oxford or Birmingham or ending up in London where we’d have to get the last train home or else sleep on the street. This was living on the edge and sometimes I came unstuck, but nothing too terrible ever happened and I always got home eventually. These days I’m more cautious (not to mention tired) so the weekend consisted of shopping, meeting OH for coffee and reading the Guardian, home for lunch and then to the singaround. This was terrific; a full house with about 20 different instruments; violin, bodhran (if that’s how you spell it) percussion, bass guitars, electric guitars, recorders, piano accordions and something called a ‘straight pipe’ which I never got a chance to find out more about. All this and storytelling with poetry from myself and Scruffy Pete who is a legend in his own lunchtime. As a tribute to International Women’s Day I did ‘When I am Old’, a take on Jenny Joseph’s Warning (https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/warning/) and the Victoria Wood tribute ‘Let’s Do it’. I used to call it Is Vic There because there was once a song with that title and because her friends called her Vic – but I don’t think anyone remembers the song now so the reference is lost. It was a brilliant afternoon, perhaps all the more poignant because sadly the pub is closing when the current owners leave. Another one bites the dust; pubs are closing all over Britain at an alarming rate and I don’t know what can be done about it. There’s only so much beer a person can drink… Still, at least the Moonface is doing well.

I didn’t make it to Loughborough Beer Festival in the end; it cost £10 to get in and these days I don’t drink enough beer to make it worthwhile. Besides, I can’t really afford it. On Sunday I went to Meeting as usual and received a lovely visit from The Son in the afternoon bearing chocolates and beer (always preferable to flowers, though OH did get me some daffs and a card as well.) We almost made it to watch a couple of singaround musicians at the Organ Grinder but decided to stay in as we were both knackered and because of the need to save money.

Kirk out

Televisual Saponification

OH and I were talking this morning about the increasingly tendency of TV to be soapy. More and more programmes are becoming frothy; previously serious dramas like Casualty (all right, semi-serious) can now give Crossroads a run for its money while so-called ‘reality’ shows are really tiny soap operas with dull, everyday stories worked up to a frenzy of triviality, their characters dressed, coiffured and made up to look larger than life. This even seeps into history programmes; on a recent series I watched there was a presenter with massive, bright-coloured glasses that covered half her face. She must have had several pairs because she changed them in every scene. Nobody needs glasses that big, not to mention several pairs in different colours but nowadays in order to be noticed, let alone remembered, everyone has to have a gimmick, a trope; their hair must be red and standing on end or else they must have a fringe that comes down to just below their eyebrows like Claudia Winkelman (she must have that fringe cut every week just to keep it in place.) Bring back Patrick Moore! David Attenborough is one of the few exceptions to this rule as he always dresses in a shirt and casual trousers and doesn’t give a toss about gimmicks. That reminds me of a Viz. cartoon about casual trousers. I can’t find it but a bloke is buying a pair of jeans and the assistant says ‘they’re a very casual trouser, sir’ whereupon the jeans pipe up ‘I don’t care if you buy me or not.’ I used to enjoy Viz. – it’s like The Beano for adults; every character has their trope or catch-phrase and it’s much more fun than ‘reality’ TV.

This tendency towards soapiness is evident on radio too – not so much Radio 4 which I listen to most of the time but definitely Radio 2 where for example the divine Ken Bruce has been replaced by the manically Northern Vernon Kay, whose exaggerated Bolton vowels enthuse about everyone and everything. Unlike Ken Bruce’s gentle, self-deprecating humour, Kay leaps about pronouncing everything ‘awesome’ and ‘brilliant’ like the enthusiastic Fast Show character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv_662IqKto

Conversations with guests are equally unilluminating: Kay – You OK babes/mate? Guest: Yeah, I’m really good thanks Vernon, how are you mate/babes? Kay – awesome, great to have you. I’m really good thanks mate. Brilliant record/show/performance… and so on, and on, and on. Ken Bruce might not have been deeply intellectual but he did at least treat his audience like intelligent human beings. On the other hand Sarah Cox, whilst doing all the upbeat chatter, still manages to maintain a modicum of intelligence and gravitas, so I enjoy listening to her. But the only genuinely serious presenter, at least in the daytime, is Johnnie Walker whose Sounds of the Seventies on Sunday afternoon I always try to catch.

Am I sounding like a grumpy old git?  Probably.  Speaking of soapiness, this is a good article about persuading people to do what you want.  If that sounds a bit manipulative, it isn’t – there are skills here that I could do with developing and some really outlandish examples of things people managed to achieve. But I can go one better in terms of anecdotes – once a friend of mine who shall remain Ratae after the city he lives in, went to a bus station to catch a bus.  Unfortunately he just missed it and was in time to see it sailing out of the station.  Most of us would swear and curse and check the timetable for the next one.  Not Ratae – he went straight to the inspector and said ‘My bus has gone without me – can you bring it back?’  They gave him short shrift, right?  Not a bit of it.  The inspector got straight on the blower to the driver, then got Ratae on another bus which whizzed up the road until it overtook the first bus, whereupon it transferred him to it so that he could be on his way.  It probably helped that Ratae was formally dressed in a shirt, jacket and tie with (probably) a deerstalker – but no way on earth could I pull something like that off, no matter what I was wearing.  On the other hand, I have managed to persuade waiters in a restaurant to hurry up our order by mentioning that we had a starving 2-year-old and an equally hungry 90-year-old in our party – so I’m not entirely useless.  I’m off now to listen to some music; I think Al Stewart fits the bill today…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRArSWxWrII

Kirk out

Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

I had thought of a brilliant pun for the title of this post but discovered after a search that I’d used it already. Even though you probably wouldn’t remember, I don’t like recycling stuff so I won’t reuse ‘Monday Greens’ for ‘Mondegreens’. If you’re still baffled you haven’t been paying attention… but I’ll forgive you. A mondegreen is a misheard song lyric, and the internet is awash with them; Peter Kay has a very funny routine about them here:

I’ve been tortuously composing a poem on the subject of mondegreens. This is made all the harder by the fact that each of the songs I (mis)quote has its own rhythm which makes them difficult to work into the overall metre of a poem. I have to find some way of homogenising them all without making the thing dull, and this is no mean feat. In the poem I’ve put such perennial favourites as ‘There’s a bathroom on the right,’ ‘dream of hearing slave elves in the snow’ and ‘wake up in the morning so that every mouth can be fed/o-oh, my ears are alight’ as well as one or two I made up, such as ‘communication let me down/but arm left ear, arm left ear’ (Spandau Ballet). The all-time classic is of course ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy’ (Jimi Hendrix.) If you know any more, please comment below.

Speaking of which, we’re doing quite well on the comments front but a few more would be appreciated. So enjoy your POETS day…

Kirk out (I think I might stick with this – it feels more natural).

I’ve Got Soup. Why Haven’t You Got Soup?

A select few among you will recognise this quote and respond accordingly. Appropriate comments below please. Yes, I made a pan of tomato soup yesterday; it’s my staple food for lunch in the winter. You take an onion, fry it tenderly, add a substantial squeeze of tomato puree, stir, add some cans of chopped tomatoes, swish the cans around with water and add that too, season with chilli powder. Bring to the boil and simmer until cooked (sometimes I add a small chopped potato for thickness so that takes longer). Then whizz it up with your soup whizzer (I’ve got one of these hand-held devices and I wouldn’t be without it) and bingo! soup for an entire week. Incidentally I’ve thought of a great name for a Dickensian character who is utterly transparent. Can you guess what it might be?

Anyway, on to the main course of this blog, which is my weekend. I’m getting ahead of myself with blog posts: I wrote Monday’s on Friday and I keep wondering whether I should bite the bullet and post two in a day or carry on scheduling them for tomorrow. Be that as it may, the weekend was great! On Saturday the singaround was terrific with lots of different instruments and a huge variety of songs and instrumentals. There was a guy with a whole case of harmonicas and a woman with a piano-accordion; there were guitars and bass guitars and ukuleles and mandolins and banjos and drums and recorders and – well, everything. After that four of us biffed off immediately to Leicester where we found a terrific restaurant on Humberstone Gate. I don’t think it’s been open long; I had a pizza on sourdough which was one of the best I’ve ever had and not too expensive. The service was great and we got free olives while we were waiting.

https://unicobar.co.uk/contact.html

We were in Leicester to go to a talk at the Secular Hall by an Israeli peace activist. I’ll probably talk more about this in another post but for now I think that’s it. Now, shall I publish this immediately or schedule for tomorrow? Don’t forget to comment if you know where the title comes from – or even if you don’t.

Roger and out. (I’m trying a new sign-off, suggested by a reader)

I Have Non-Dom Status

Just kidding, I don’t – and for the record, I think they should definitely do away with it. Non-dom status is an abomination… No, what I have is the ability to write with my non-dominant hand. Have you ever tried it? It’s quite enlightening. Handedness is supposedly connected to which side of your brain is dominant, which in my case makes perfect sense as I’m left-handed. The left hand is associated with right-brain activity which has to do with imagination and creativity. So far, so simple. But I am increasingly realising that my handedness is not simple. I’m not left-handed in other ways; I use my cutlery the same way round that most people do, I play tennis right-handedly (and very badly) and I generally pick things up with my right hand. But not always: some objects such as mugs feel more comfortable in my left hand. Have you ever paid attention to which hand you use to pick things up? It’s very interesting. It’s also interesting to use the other hand from time to time and see how that feels. There’s a sense of rightness or wrongness about it. I was lucky enough to be born in more enlightened times when southpaws weren’t forced to write with their right hand like poor old George VI, so I’ve never had an issue with it. Nobody comments on it or even seems to notice.

But a few months ago I was introduced to a technique – I guess you could call it a meditation technique, or maybe it’s a bit like automatic writing which I’ve never tried, and not because my mother thought it would ‘let the Devil in.’ You take a sheet of paper and fold it in two. On the left you write questions with your dominant hand, and on the right you answer them with your non-dominant hand. It takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it but once you do, you can feel a different part of your brain opening up. I can ask a question and have no idea of the answer, but the moment I put the pen into my other hand, I can feel it coming. I use this technique now whenever I feel stuck with a problem, and it really helps – although sometimes my right hand can be annoyingly enigmatic, a bit like a Magic 8-ball. Remember those?

Ross asks the Magic 8 ball about his love-life

Prophets of all sorts can be very enigmatic, I’ve found. It’s a bit like our friend Chris Conway’s song where he travels to ask the mystic on Betelgeuse 3 (Chris does a lot of filk*) and when he gets there the mystic tells him to ‘zonky-ponky’. But sometimes these enigmatic answers are there to throw you back on yourself and make you realise that you have the answer all along.

https://chrisconway.org/

So that’s that. Very philosophical today, huh? I was going to write some TV reviews for stuff I’ve watched over Christmas, but I’ll save those for another day.

Kirk out 

*Filk = folk music on a Sci-fi theme. Check it out – it’s great fun.

By HAND??

This morning I was all set to write this post when a little message popped up. This computer needs updating, it said, and gave me two boxes to tick: Update now or update later. ‘Oh, I’ll do it now,’ I thought, ‘it won’t take long.’ Fool! I just never learn. Two hours later it was still cogitating on round about 60% – I must say the wheels of update grind exceeding slow. But it did end eventually and here we are, all shiny and problem-free and ready to amaze the universe with our thoughts. LOL.

It’s been a busy time lately; I’ve been to a Quaker meditation session, a bluegrass music event and a rather too eventful Quaker Meeting; in between I took advantage of OH’s absence to begin clearing out a damp and cobwebby cupboard in the bedroom. This entailed moving lots of furniture before I could even open the doors, then closing eyes, nose and mouth while spraying cleaner and flapping a duster into all the corners. It reminded me of Harry, Ron and Hermione clearing out the Doxys in 10, Grimmauld Place:

https://www.hp-lexicon.org/creature/fairies/doxy/

Most of the stuff in there needed junking, recycling or freecycling and I’m still in the process of doing the latter. I only managed one part of the cupboard but it was very satisfying to have done it.

Apart from that I’ve been spending my days handwriting my poems. Not all of them, you understand, just certain selected ones which I’ve been transcribing into a special notebook with a fountain pen. I must say it’s been a very salutary experience; writing in this way really slows you down and makes you think about every word. It’s almost meditative, and a good antidote to a zeitgeist where the faster you can transcribe things, the better.

In other news, the car is in the garage after it developed a clonking noise which most people seem to think is a fault with the suspension. I was going to leave it until a winter fuel payment arrives, but since we are due to give a lift to a mother and baby, I thought I’d better not take any chances. I walked home and as I came within sight of the house I thought, Oh god, where’s the car?

Every time…

And that’s us up to date.

Kirk out

I’ve Had Some Sort of Weekend

I’ve had some sort of weekend, I guess; Saturday was busy with Quaker Meditation group in the morning, then coffee with a friend and thence to the Saturday Singaround, a totally brilliant group of musicians, singers (and one poet) who spend their afternoons drinking beer and jamming. Sadly the beer at the Plough isn’t very well kept, though I usually brave a half of Bass (not a patch on what it used to be since they stopped using the union system

https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/IdBjsaZjWz/)

but I don’t go for the beer; I go for the craic. Which is terrific; last Saturday we had the usual spread of guitars both acoustic and electric, a double bass, a ukulele and me strutting my stuff. Sadly the recorder and violin which make it such a varied mix were absent, but the craic was well and truly there. Two guys did a version of Stairway to Heaven – the whole thing! – which was really impressive and there were lots of other blasts from our shared past as well as new stuff from folky band Willow Tree Revival. I did my Victoria Wood poem ‘Is Vic There?’ (by request) and continued in my mission to introduce the group to Hilaire Belloc. So that was all good.

Sunday was quieter so after Meeting I got stuck in to some cooking; I’d been to Forage, a wonderful emporium of fruit and veg on the market place, and bought an onion squash and a butternut squash. Butternut squashes are absolute perfection in themselves but all squashes are better if you roast them first, so that’s what I did along with a carrot (it was a very orange meal, lovely and autumnal) and added onions, tomato and spices to make a delicious curry. Served with fried rice it was perfect; all that was missing was a crisp white wine but you can’t have everything.

We managed to get rid of the exercise bike that had been lurking in the study. It’s a massive and very heavy piece of kit – which wouldn’t matter if it had worked for us, but it didn’t. It has big flat pedals and cross-trainer handles, and try as I might, I could never get into cycling with it. The pedals always seemed to be in the wrong place, or they went round at a funny angle; I don’t know what it was, but in the end the only option was to send it back whence it came and freecycle it. We had great fun getting it downstairs due to OH’s habit of charging at such jobs like a bull at a gate, with the result that we got it well and truly stuck. It seemed for a while that one of us was destined to live permanently upstairs and the other downstairs as it was completely blocking the stairwell; however, I had the bright idea of taking the handles off and once that was done it went down like a lamb. It was picked up on Saturday and now I can have my keyboard in its place all ready for me to stagger the world with my renderings of Bach and Mike Oldfield.

OH is now reading the Naomi Klein book – there’s an interesting chapter on the crossover between alternative therapies (the world of ‘wellness’) and alt-right conspiracy theories. The book has settled a lot of things in my mind; I’m really glad I was able to read it.

I see the weather has calmed down somewhat and we are actually supposed to have sunny spells today. To be fair, we had some sun yesterday too – but from tomorrow it’s forecast to rain again for the foreseeable future. Hey ho. Happy Monday.

Kirk out