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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.     |
| The Last Day Today is the last day that I can enter a post in this blog that will count towards the Bard’s Hall Contest of Blogging for June. Although I don’t have to - I said “can,” remember? It is also a matter for debate as to whether it will count towards my required ten posts. Strictly speaking, all they have to do is start reading from the post I designated as Number One and keep going until they reach Ten. Which happened quite a few posts back. It remains to be seen (or not, depending on whether they mention how far they got). You might be wondering whether this plethora of posts beyond the stated minimum is an indication of my enthusiasm for blogging within the bounds of WdC, or if it’s just a case of wanting to show willing to provide more than asked for. To be scrupulously honest, I would have to opt for the latter explanation. After an initial burst of inspiration for posts, things slowed down and it has been a struggle to think of things to post in the last week or so. Does that mean I won’t be continuing with this blog? I don’t think it does. Most likely I’ll post the occasional entry when one occurs. But I won’t be spending time in thinking up blog posts as though I have to post. I have enough pressure with all the other types of writing I want to do. And there we have it - what I used to call “a nothing post.” In other words, a post that waffles on about having nothing to say. Word Count: 269 |
| Why the Hurry? I’ll tell you why I write in such a hurry. It’s because, if I don’t finish the thing quickly, if I leave it half done, expecting to return to it another day, I’ll never say what I intended to say today. Most of the time I never get back to it anyway. But, when I do, I miss the point of what I was saying and wander away from my original intention. Which isn’t to say that the piece isn’t as good as it might have been (although usually that’s true). It won’t say what I really wanted to say and that will forever gnaw at me. A perfect instance of this happened to me over the last few days. About a week ago, I had an idea bursting in my head and began a poem to get rid of it. Halfway through, I ran into difficulty and decided to leave it for another day. I knew the danger of doing this but the thought was ebbing as I wrote and I had run out of the energy to complete the thing. Knowing that it might never be finished, I put it aside. But it nagged at me. So much so that, a couple of days ago, I went back to it, determined to finish it. And I did. But, just as I expected, it wasn’t the poem I had intended. The original was going to be scathing and controversial; this one dodged the point and became unremarkable in consequence. I was so underwhelmed by it that I decided against allowing it into the portfolio. But today I had another read of it and realised that, if it were in the portfolio, it could be a reminder to me not to leave things until later. Strike while the iron’s hot (which is an appropriate saying, considering the subject of the poem). So the thing now resides as the latest addition to my portfolio. Not only is it a reminder to me but it also keeps the flow of productivity going at a time when inspiration has ceased. And that must be an admission that writing has been a hard slog of late. Mostly, I have kept going but at a reduced rate. And now I have a reminder not to give up on things just because they become difficult. Word Count: 389 |
| The Rebel Reflects When I was young, I was going to be the world’s greatest artist. I went to university, confident in the knowledge that I could draw and paint better than anyone else. On my first day in the Fine Arts department, the whole class of us freshers was introduced to our tutor, a diminutive woman with tousled hair and tatty jeans. She led us into the next room where a great mess of chairs, planks, paint pots, cloths, and unidentifiable junk was heaped in the middle of the room. Around it were easels and each of us was assigned to one of them. “Draw that,” our tutor said, pointing at the chaos of materials before us. So we began, every one of us confident that we would have no trouble in drawing anything put in front of us. That tiny woman prowled around the circle of us, stopping at one and then another to point at an angle of a plank or the position of a pot. “That’s wrong,” she’d say. “Consider it in relation to the ladder.” We’d look again and see that she was right - our drawing was hopelessly out of kilter and all the angles were wrong. And she kept doing it, just pointing out what was wrong and making us erase what we’d done to start again. At the end of the day, we were beginning to realise that we were not artists at all. We couldn’t draw to save our lives. The next day she explained that we had to learn to see before we could draw. We were interpreting the world without really seeing it as it was. So we continued, attempting to draw the pile of junk and gradually getting closer to reality. By the end of the first week, we could all draw because we could all see. That plank that had caused us so much trouble was now at the angle it was in reality; the paint pot that moved about at will had been nailed down and stood exactly where it always had been. I learned several things from the lady in that first week. Most obviously, I knew then that I was not God’s gift to the artistic world and that I had scarcely begun to travel the road that might, one day, lead to the production of reasonably good works. But I also knew that anyone, absolutely everyone, in fact, could be taught to see and therefore to draw. We bold few, who could now draw whatever was presented before us, were nothing special. The fact that none of us had failed to complete the week with flying colours was proof of that. And I knew that we owed our tutor an enormous debt of gratitude for her patience in cajoling us from our hopelessly skewed vision of reality. For some time, I have been a little surprised at the number of instructive and educational forums in WdC on the subject of writing. No doubt these are all necessary and many of us benefit a great deal from attending such things. Just as I did so long ago as a Fine Arts student. Yet I would add a caveat. What I did not mention about the Fine Arts Department was the painting side of things. It was shortly after that first week that we were called upon to decide which way we were going to go, painting or sculpture. And I decided, surprising even myself, to opt for sculpture. The reason was that, by that time, I had the time to inspect the work of the second and third year students and had noticed a disturbing trend. By the time they were in their third year, every student was painting stuff exactly like the work of the painting tutor. And I did not want to end up as a clone, no matter how good the tutor was. The tiny sculpture division received another recruit. Someone once said that rules are made to be broken. This is always quoted when an excuse for breaking the rules is needed. But it’s true as long as we actually know and can work within the rules. Once we can do that, it’s a good idea to break the rules when the work is made better as a result. It’s how the rules are made. Writers break the bounds and, in time, the new ground they break becomes tamed and accepted territory with its own rules and regulations. If you want to be a great writer, know those rules and then cross the border into the wild, wild frontier where all that matters is getting the message across better than anyone else. Winston Churchill was told that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, to which he replied, “This is something up with which I will not put.” And, if I want to start a sentence with the word “and,” I will. Word Count: 820 |
| Discovered Worlds What can you do when the entrance to another world really is in the back of a wardrobe? I mean, the parallels are obvious and people are bound to assume you’re being derivative. Do you have to go to the length of inventing a fictitious portal to the other world? But why should you have to lie? If it’s the truth, it’s the truth. And imagine if you invent something and then someone points out that what you’ve proposed is impossible for some reason you hadn’t thought of. It’s too late then to grin sheepishly, admit that wasn’t what really happened and then expect them to believe the wardrobe story. You can see how that book really has us painted into a corner. From now on we’re only going to discover worlds that aren’t reached through a wardrobe. Which is going to be what we Brits call a bit of a bugger if we do discover one in that way. Are we just going to let that one go in the hope that we’ll stumble into yet another world tomorrow? That could be a real letdown if we never do. We could spend a lifetime biting our tongues because the only new world we’d discovered happened to be through the back of a wardrobe. The reason I bring up this subject is because I recently fell into a new world through the back of a wardrobe. And that was just the beginning of my problem. Once I’d entered, it became apparent that I’d landed in a very marshy area where the people lived in tents. And then, oh cursed inconvenience, the inhabitants turn out to be so similar to marshwiggles that everyone will assume that I copied them. It was too much to overcome. I turned around and left the discovered world without even greeting my first marshwiggle. Clearly, I’m going to have to give up looking in wardrobes.  Word Count: 319 |
| Summery Thoughts Summer has arrived and, with it, the looming horror of the annual medical check up. This used to be a winter thing and I could have the added delight of struggling through snow and ice to appear at the stated place and appointed time. Eventually, I realised that it would be easier to get it done in the summer and my doctor worked it out accordingly. This year, however, covid19 has come to my rescue and I will have the inspection by video link only. That should ease the humiliation a little. There is still the matter of the preceding blood test but that has been a minor irritant since I learned that it’s best to keep the eyes tight shut during the procedure. And then there’s the added entertainment of guessing at the size of the bruise that results. At least I know now that it makes no difference whether the needle hurts or not - sometimes the painless ones give the biggest bruises. It’s all part of the developing freak show that is old age. There was a time when I treated doctors in the same way I do mechanics. They are there to be used when something goes wrong and are otherwise ignored. Somehow, a few years ago, I was persuaded to begin this crazy round of annual humiliations and there seems no way of stopping it now. There is some satisfaction in that each inspection seems to provide much the same result year after year. The one blip in that happened between medicals so my doctor never had the satisfaction of seeing me on my back, at the mercy of a surgeon replacing a few pipes to keep my old ticker going. In fact, now that the plumbing work has been done, my numbers get better, not worse. But there’s no escape. Every summer my enjoyment of the warmer weather is spoiled by the knowledge that the dread appointment creeps closer. It’s not that my doctor is anything other than a really decent fellow and a pleasure to talk with. It’s the prodding, disrobing, peering into orifices and other investigations too awful to mention that get me down. And I suppose I have to admit that there is a niggling awareness that, sooner or later, he’s going to find something that will present me with some hard decisions. That, after all, is the ever-present sword of Damocles hanging over the aged. Still, the relief afterwards makes for a great summer! Word Count: 413 |
| Jethro Tull and the Great God Literacy Suddenly everyone wants to know what I have been reading, am reading and am going to read. I dodged the question yesterday by pointing at a book that I re-read to assist in completing a WdC Challenge and another that I am going to re-read for an upcoming Challenge. But the truth is really that I read everything. Every day we are presented with myriads of short exhortations, advertisements and snippets of writing on the things around us. Can you resist reading them? I certainly can’t. The reading urge seizes on the most mundane piece of text, even when we know what it’s going to say, and begins to read. It is a compulsion that accompanies the ability to read. As soon as we can read with a little fluency, our eyes know what to do with text and our minds take the controls to make us read, like it or not. I was going to wax lyrical on the stolen hours sat on the great white throne, reading anything we can reach, but I’ll spare you that. Just the mention of it should make you realise that I’m right. We read and read and read, even if we’ve never read a book in our lives. It is like oxygen to the ability to read and very few of us retain the ability to breathe in the vacuum of illiteracy. And that is a heck of a thought (no, I don’t swear when it’s not necessary - I told you I’m a dinosaur). If I may mangle Ian Anderson a little, “Our wise men don’t know how it feels to be illiterate.” That’s the thing about literacy, you see. Once we’ve got it, we can’t imagine not having it. And it would take quite a clout on the head to get rid of it. Even that would only work in one case in a hundred, I’d guess. It’s a question that exposes the infinite gamble that is life - “What are you reading this weekend?” Word Count: 333 |
| Formal Thoughts It seems to me that there are almost as many poetic forms as there are poets. Just today I came across a little poem with an explanation of the form afterwards that was three times as long as the poem itself. Far be it from me to criticise form poetry (which is why I did not review the poem) but I have to admit that I cannot see the point. To me, form poetry seems a way to enter a race having handicapped oneself by tying your shoe laces together. That may be an interesting exercise if your name is Usain Bolt but, to us mere mortals, it must be an unnecessary stumbling block. I suppose it is commendable that so many of us are prepared to aim as high as William Shakespeare and the like. But these days, I am content if I can even get within sight of such as Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Maybe I’ll change my handle to b.e. holden. Word Count: 170 |
| Ancestors Andrea has been working on a submission to the Roots & Wings Contest and we were talking about our respective ancestry as a result. She has done a lot of digging around in her family’s past, discovering all sorts of interesting relationships to important people in history, whereas my researches have been intermittent and easily discouraged. I can go as far back as my grandfathers and grandmothers but all is a bit dim and murky beyond that. Andrea managed to push things back a generation or two in half an hour’s research but it was all pretty uninteresting, to be honest. It seems I come from solid, hard-working but unexciting people who never made even a slight dent in the history of the world. This actually suits my rather romantic view of myself as a descendant of thoroughly Anglo Saxon working class people with roots going back to the settlement of Angles, Saxons and Jutes in England. So posh people can claim that their ancestors came over with William the Conqueror, but I can say in return that mine came with Hengist and Horsa. Certainly, my family has been intimately concerned with the industries of Coventry for generations. I worked for several years in a car factory when I returned to England from Africa and my uncle was working in the Jaguar factory at the time. My paternal and maternal grandfathers were both employed in the car industry and their fathers were probably involved in a bicycle factory before progressing to cars. And, before that, the likelihood is that my forefathers worked in the clock- and watch-making industry. It is easy to trace the long thread of mechanical production that made Coventry a thriving and wealthy city through the centuries. The business of working with metals to produce inventive and useful machines has been a speciality of the city’s people for so long that it is now in the blood; it is entirely sensible that the Midlands and Coventry in particular became the centre of Britain’s car industry in the 20th Century. The dearth of prominent and important people in my ancestry is entirely to be expected, therefore. My people were busy making useful things instead of wasting their time in meddling with history. Phrases like “the salt of the earth” tend to spring to mind. So I don’t have anyone to write about for Roots & Wings’ contest for inspiring ancestors. And I’m happy with that. I don’t have anyone to live up to or someone’s shadow to blunder about in, but I do have a natural mechanical ability that has served me well at times through the years. Their names may be unknown to me but I am aware of those who went before and built ordinary lives while being a part of the success of their city. Which is all to ignore my father. If there is an exception to the general tendency towards staying in the same place that seems the hallmark of my family, my father is just that. He was the only one to leave Coventry for adventures in lands as far away as India and Southern Africa, he managed to escape the factory to become a pharmacist (although he confessed to me late in life that it was never an ambition of his - my grandfather could afford to send only one of his sons to university and, as the elder, my father was chosen). The problem then becomes that my father was anything but forthcoming about his life story. Ask a question and you would more often be met with a sarcastic sentence or two, rather than a meaningful story. Many times I asked him what he’d done in the war and his answer was always either that he’d sent trucks up and down the Himalayas or a description of the mighty 50-seater privy he’d had built for his regiment (he did claim it as the largest in the world but I fail to see how this could be verified). In Africa, I know (because I was there by then) that he was the managing director of a pharmaceutical firm in Cape Town for eleven years and was then promoted to run the company’s Central African branch. Retirement from that job produced boredom and he bought a couple of pharmacies to keep him out of mischief for a few years. And, when I returned to England, it wasn’t long before he followed me there, to spend his last few years working part time as a locum for pharmacists and walking his beloved Staffordshire Bull Terrier. It’s hard to make such a sound but unexciting story into a blockbuster tale of adventure. And, in a way, it would miss the point to do so. The strength of my father was that he supported his family throughout his life, that he did what was necessary to ensure that my mother and his children had a good life, and that he managed it all without a single complaint. On only the one occasion did he ever mention to me that, had things been different, he might have gone a different way entirely. He was what is known as a good man. Word Count: 863 |
| A Brief Thought on Richard the Thirds Jaeyne of the Free Fab Five  has sparked a minor linguistic debate in the Newsfeed today with her post on the past tense of “forego.” This brought to mind my own little piece on language (although from a very different angle) that I wrote a while back. I dug around in the archives, found it and threw it into my portfolio. It’s a silly little thing but it might give you a smile. And, in the last sentence, there’s a bonus joke for the Brits among us.
I suppose I should explain about the title of this post. It’s actually a bit of Cockney rhyming This little video by Ronnie Barker explains it best, although, for my purposes, the word is "words" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RwyPDPlFA8 You’ll probably miss some of the references (I know I did) but the important ones get through. Enjoy! Word Count: 147 |
| The Glories of Old Age Today I had cause to write the following sentiment: This writing business brings us face to face with many of the hard facts of life. One of those facts is death, of course (ooh, cheerful thought for a Sunday morning) but, more importantly for writers perhaps, there arises a growing acquaintance with the aches and pains, illnesses and degeneration of our once-youthful bodies, and a resultant more careful approach to what life remains to us. For myself, the evidence of my experience of these hard facts is that I write more frequently of old age. It has taken me some time to realise this, probably because I have had no aversion to growing older, finding it a useful and interesting area of study from a very early age. As my experience of the condition increases, it seems natural to record my thoughts and observations on the matter and only lately has it occurred to me that others might think this a rather morbid obsession. In my defence, I would have to say that it’s a subject that almost all of us have to deal with (the exceptions being those whom the gods love, if the traditional adage is correct). My generation ushered in the worship of youth but that is no reason why it should not also advance our understanding and interest in the process of growing old. What better chance for observation of an ongoing experiment is there than the opportunity to study ourselves? From the inside we can see and understand all sorts of things that the detached observer would miss. I had only just turned thirty when I noticed that scratches and minor wounds were taking longer to heal. This had never been pointed out to me before and I had missed any mention of it in the textbooks. Yet, now that I’m ancient, it seems so glaringly obvious, with scabs hanging on grimly for what seems like months and bruises fading with no urgency at all. As we slow down to avoid all the hazards of our world, everything in and around us decelerates as well. Except time, of course. All of us recognise how time speeds up as we get older, so obvious is its acceleration. Eventually the years fly by and we find it increasingly difficult to keep up, still aware of the awkwardness of starting each year with the number twenty rather than nineteen, wondering if there really was a decade called the nineties or whether it had been cancelled for lack of interest. It’s a different world from the one we inhabited in our teens and twenties. Of course we think life was so much better in those days; in some ways it was. But there are other ways in which this strange present in which we are now forced to live is better, if only we would forget our longing for hale and hearty bodies that function without pain. Just as an instance, I wouldn’t be writing these words on a computer back in the sixties - I’d still be bashing away at the keys of my mother’s heavyweight typewriter (no doubt she’d have bequeathed it to me in her will). And then there’s the fact that we don’t have to run anymore. All that sweaty exercise and puffing and panting just to arrive somewhere a little earlier. Totally pointless. As an experiment, a while back I actually tried to run, managed about three steps and nearly fell over. It was a frightening experience, never to be repeated. So cheer up, fellow wrinklies. There is still so much to enjoy and be grateful for. Every day we enter a world that is changing and growing in new ways and have this amazing opportunity to watch the process and make notes. As writers, we can leave behind us a document of the glories of old age for the instruction of the generations that follow. That ought to slow them down a bit. Word Count: 659 |
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I've always remembered that episode and thought that was a fun idea.
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? 
