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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Question of the Day Again Interesting question on QOTD today - how do you rate yourself as a good listener? I was reading through the answers when I began to notice something. The answers quickly became predictable, with almost 100% accuracy. To check on this, I did a little counting and this is what I found. There were 14 answers when I began my investigation. Of these, six were male and the rest (8) were female. My impression had been that the answers were governed entirely by gender and this proved generally true. Of those who answered that yes, they considered themselves good listeners, five were female. Three females were ready to listen with a few provisos. The six males were less consistent. Three of them gave flippant answers, apparently admitting to poor listening skills, and only three claimed to be good listeners, one with reservations on BS. The temptation to make a joke rather than answer the question seriously showed that three males (myself included) preferred being considered funny, rather than admitting to anything as personal as listening skills. Kudos to the guys who owned up to being listeners. It’s a tiny sample statistically speaking, but I think we can glean from it that males and females are different. This should not be news to us as writers, although I’m sure we all have differing answers as to why this is so. Somehow I find that very comforting. Word count: 233 |
| Choices Today, through Question of the Day, Lilith of House Martell  asked about smelling the flowers, both literally and figuratively. The first was easily dealt with as I had in fact smelled some flowers quite recently. It wasn’t my fault that they turned out to be plastic.When it came to figuratively, however, I found that I had too many instances to mention. I realised that my days are full of stopping to smell the roses, whether they be the pattern of light created by a sunbeam through the branches of the tree outside the window to the floor of the corridor, the differing creatures to be found in abstract patterning of bathroom tiles, a cool breeze on my skin as I pass a partially open door to the outside, or a hundred other sudden glimpses of the infinite in the least and most humble moments of life. The very admonition to “stop and smell the roses” is intended to awaken us to these moments in the general hurly burly of modern existence, to tell us that there’s still time during our busy days to enjoy moments of insight and pleasure such as these. And yet it seems to me that I’ve spent my life enjoying such moments. Indeed, it may be that I have spent more time in enjoying the world than in pursuing the adult pastimes of having a career and “getting ahead.” I am forever the child caught dreaming on the view outside the schoolroom’s windows. When I wrote my answer to QOTD this morning, I thought everyone was like me, that I was merely expressing the experience of us all when I gave those few examples of distraction in the tiny dramas of life. Thinking about it afterwards, however, I realise that there must be many who are not seduced by the cascade of beautiful moments that constitute life. There would be no need of that wise saying about flowers were we all in the habit of smelling them anyway. No, it seems that many of us don’t have time for such diversions. These would be those who become rich or are too invested in the rat race or, by ill luck, forced to spend all their days in arduous labour merely to survive. Good advice to those able to listen, we might think, and yet is it not a choice that we all make, to remain as a child in our perception of such simple yet beautiful things, or to knuckle down to the hard business of making a living? Easy enough for the rich man to answer with his ability to buy as many roses as he might wish, so who is the winner now? I suppose it all depends on which race we decide to enter. Word count: 460 |
| What Now? I watched an episode today of The Cleaner (British TV comedy about a crime scene cleaner but not important to this post). It centered on the differences between life in the 1980s and the present, which reminded me of an old theory of mine. Everyone knows that scientific progress is accelerating all the time so that there is more change in our lives than ever before. There was a time in my life when computers were near-mythical constructions that took up whole rooms in office blocks and phones were anything but mobile and were limited to phone calls only. I was alive when the first practical television services came into being. My parents saw the movies get voices and their parents had the first experiences of moving picture shows. And before that, the generations saw little change apart from gas lighting becoming electrical and the invention of planes and the car. A couple of generations previous saw steam power begin the process of change. Other than that, there was very little that changed for hundreds of years. The industrial revolution started an accelerating pace of invention and change that transformed our lives in ways that our ancestors could not even dream of. And this continued until we became accustomed to change and the demands to adapt that it forced on us. Until the computer, that is. The computer was the last invention that seriously altered the way we live. We fool ourselves into thinking that things are still developing because we improve and tinker with the great inventions of the past, imagining that things like the internet, social media, driverless cars, GPS and robots on Mars are new inventions. But they’re not. They are merely refinements of ideas that were born over fifty years ago. The internet was not possible until the computer had been invented, mankind walked on the moon in the sixties. To develop a thing is not the same as having the initial idea. To continue the pace of development, we would need to have a very important and culture-changing invention very soon. And I don’t see that happening. To me, it seems that we’re entering a period of decreasing change, of refining what we have and coming to terms with the changes that previous inventions have made. So my theory is that it’s over. This grand advance into the future that we call progress is grinding to a halt as we run out of the fuel that is imagination. Not only do we find it impossible to think of some new breakthrough that will change civilisation beyond recognition, I see little evidence of a desire to venture beyond our present limits. Which may be a good thing. It is certainly time for a rest, a chance to sit back and ponder just how much of the change we have wrought is really needed. We cannot uninvent anything, of course, but it might be advisable to consider some of the changes we have made that were not beneficial to any of us. Not that it concerns me greatly these days. With a bit of luck, I’ll be long gone by the time progress turns out to be a monster that is out of control. Word count: 536 |
| If You Think You’re Mad… I once consulted a psychiatrist because I felt I was not entirely sane. After some discussion, I admitted that I was not interested in changing because it might affect certain things about me that I wanted to keep. For instance, I had a certain ability in the visual arts arena that depended pretty much on my view of things. The same could be said of writing, of course. He told me that I was sane and to go away. Word count: 79 |
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Quite good is quite a good compliment 
As someone who just reviewed an item in your port, I can't help but wonder, Did I pick an item that you'd throw out? 
