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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.     |
| A Doughnut Post This is weird. America being the spiritual home of the donut, it is natural that a dazzling variety of this rotund snack should be on offer. You can have a plain one (usually with sugar coating the outside), a chocolate-coated version, one with frosting and/or sprinkles (even the chocolate type of sprinkles known as "jimmies" in this neck of the woods). If you're really sugar-hungry, there's the Boston Creme, a wonderful loop filled with a custardy, creamy concoction and topped with a layer of chocolate. American donuts are truly amazing but usually avoided by myself since the sugar destroys my day. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Andrea brings home something she calls a "basic" donut. I thought I'd seen them all but this one is different. For a start it looks as though it has been cooked in batter. It's when I pick one up that I realize just how different this beast is. It feels exactly like a British doughnut. You must know the slightly greasy touch of those doughy monsters. This one feels the same. I taste it. Land o' Goshen, this is a Brit donut or an exact copy. That heavy, lumpen taste and texture, the dryness that sucks the moisture from your mouth, the lead weight that sits in your stomach for hours afterwards - this is a Brit donut for sure. Who would have thought that this brash America with its brain-numbing array of donuts would yet save a little space for the original, cloddish variety, a DOUGHnut indeed? Yet the most surprising fact of all is that Andrea announces that this is her favorite type. Sometimes she is more British than the Brits... Word Count: 279 |
| History And All That A few thoughts occurred when I read the prompts for Express It In Eight this morning. I find it impossible to write an 8-line poem since I have too much to say on the subject. In the hope that, if I get these things out into the world, I might be able to write a few verses, this follows: Historians hate it when someone at the back of the class stands up and says, “ Hold on a moment. I was there and that is not how it happened at all.” That is why history starts when living memory has just about died out. When I was at school, back in the fifties and sixties, history stopped at the First World War (known then as the Great War, mainly because it wasn’t). As I have grown older, I have learned that the Second World War is now on the curriculum and, for all I know, the Korean War has joined it. This is quite natural and how things are meant to be. History is all about the past and should not be something that I remember. I find it disturbing when people talk about something as history when its memory is still as clear as yesterday in my head. Buddy Holly and the Crickets recording That’ll Be the Day is not history. Neither is Muhammad Ali winning his first heavyweight title nor is Lawrence Welk’s last television show. These are memories and I can still stand up in the back row and shout, for instance, “No, he didn’t. His name at the time was Cassius Clay and I watched the fight on TV. There was no Muhammad Ali back then.” History is different. No one can ever argue me out of my memories but, with the right references and documentary evidence, I can be persuaded to change my view on history. That is important to me since my main period of interest in English history is from 450AD to 1066AD. There are new finds every day in that area that have forced us to re-evaluate our thoughts completely. If we take it that I was not hugely interested in world events before the age of about ten, anything that happened after 1958 cannot possibly be history. It’s mine and you mess with it at your peril. Word count: 385 |
| Facebook Reflections Facebook is a terrible thing if you're happy with your life as it is. The moment you open an account with FB, you're putting yourself right out there where you can be spotted by old friends, acquaintances and ex-colleagues from former workplaces. For those of us who can only take a certain amount of social interaction, the avalanche of "blasts from the past" is likely to be more than we didn't ask for. it's not that we have changed our minds or feelings about people from long ago. In fact, it's more about wanting to keep things as they were. A lot can happen in ten years or more and we will have moved on. The likelihood is that they will have changed too. How much better it is to retain the memory of them as they were, to preserve them as young, hale and hearty. What possible good can come of two cranky old fogies pretending that nothing has changed and they're still the utter fools they were back then? My early years on FB were spent largely in ducking friend requests from people I once knew. It took only a few experiences of that first rush of enthusiasm followed by the realisation that I had nothing to talk about with the long-lost one for me to become expert in hiding in plain view. The clear but terrible truth is that those new and virtual friends you've made because you play the same FB game or have commented on one of their posts are your real friends now. You have more in common with them and they change with you as you change with them. Those in the past stay in the past where they can be ageless, invincible and steadfast to whatever they believed in then. I am immensely proud, however, that I have one friend from long ago that I correspond with fairly regularly. Thanks to this, I can claim to be reasonably human and not totally antisocial. But I've learned my lesson about trying to contact old friends. Don't do it, buddy - let them live forever in your memory. Word count: 355 |
| Name That Tune There is a piece of music that I have heard many times in my life without knowing who wrote it or what it is named. It cropped up again in the funeral scene in a television show I was watching a day or two ago and I decided that I had to find out what it is. With Andrea’s detective skills to assist, I discovered that it is Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor. Now, thanks to YouTube, I can listen to it whenever I want. It is simple yet haunting, understated yet compelling. I’ll embed it below this piece so that you can hear it too. You’ll have heard it many times, I’m sure, but there will be those who, like me, never knew its source. What an excellent opportunity to turn to a friend when it comes on and say, “Ah yes, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor!” Word count: 150 |
| Another YouTube Gem Chris Isaak introducing the band members at a gig: “Scott Plunkett on the piano…” |
| Passing the Mustard How exactly does one cut mustard? Or crack corn, for that matter. |
| Writing Fears The family that does things together, stays together, or so they say. That was certainly true of my little family last month, for December found us all (even a sister of my beloved wife) in the grip of the dreaded covid. We all survived it adequately enough, being still here, but it did prove a severe disruption to our plans for the end of the year. For me, the terrible thing was that I found myself unable to write. This passed in stages as January dawned and I have been back in the swing of poetry for a while now. Short stories proved more difficult, however. It was not just the greater amount of time and effort required by them. The small matter of inspiration was a major obstacle. The old brain stubbornly refused to come up with anything, even at the prodding of the most interesting of suggestions. I suspect that the real problem was not some imagined departure of a mythical muse. It was more likely that the mind, on finding itself on enforced vacation, began to enjoy the peace and quiet, refusing to go back to work when the nauseating symptoms lessened and drifted away. Yesterday I succeeded in forcing the brain back into harness and dashing off a story for SCREAMS!!! This was occasioned by a dream I had in the early hours that morning. It left me wide awake at four o’clock, thinking about the events in the dream. And then I realised it could easily form the basis for a story and that was the end of any possibility of further sleep. I rose and bashed out something with just enough time for a quick edit and prettification before the deadline. The thing is, I can’t count on having a dream every time I see a contest I want to enter. This apparent breakthrough is really just a flash in the pan until I manage another story. The whole thing may well have been the brain’s way of fobbing me off so I’ll stop nagging it. It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever be able to write anything longer than a few lines again. Ever. Such are the terrible fears of the writer in the low points of life. Word count: 376 |
| Digging around in the archives, I came upon this: Walpurgisnacht One of my favourite literary tricks (although frowned upon by the powers that be) is to seize the readers by the lapels and talk excitedly into their faces. So, if I, for instance, were to decide upon a chief character by the name of Chariadne, I might suddenly insist upon accurate pronunciation of the word, emphasising that the first two letters be spoken as a K, rather than the obvious options of CH or SH. Pointing out that each vowel is intended to have its day, none being silent, I would then have to maintain that the last two letters be sounded as NEE and not NAY or NUH. In similar fashion, when prompted to write a story about Walpurgis Night, I am immediately compelled to change it to Walpurgisnacht, the German being the way I first heard mention of the feast. It is, after all, a strange thing to English minds, the festival never having gained a foothold in Britain apart from a brief moment in the villages of Lincolnshire, amounting to no more than hanging a few cowslips to ward off evil. The Germans make much more of it and have built an atmosphere both dark and forbidding around what was once a Christian festival. In my memory, it is the inspiration for a scene in Goethe’s Faust that relies heavily upon witchy influences. Oh, those jolly Germans. Imagine my disappointment, then, on being advised by Wikipedia that the whole thing began as a feast day celebrating a Saint Walpurga. I suppose it’s mildly satisfying that, after centuries of being accused of stealing pagan festivals, Christianity can at last level the same accusation at the opposition. But the threads of meaning become too complex for me to bother with when in search of a short story and I think I need to consider instead the other prompt, “A test of courage.” All that remains it is to think of something horrifying in that context. And to stay well away from Wikipedia! Word count: 343 |
| Gripe of the Day There is no such thing as “very unique.” The word “unique” means “the only one of its kind.” Which means, of course, that it cannot have a competitor that is slightly more unique. That would be like saying, “Oh yes, this here stands alone above all else. Except that there’s one over there that is better.” You cannot grade uniqueness; if something is the sole example, nothing else can be. To say that something is “very unique” is to say that it’s the only, only one. There’s a word for that and the word is “redundant.” Let’s stop robbing words of their power. The word “unique” should be rarely used because it is extremely uncommon for anything to be so much better than its peers that it eclipses all of them. “Awesome” should also be almost extinct nowadays, since we are so jaded that nothing fills us with awe anymore. And may the phrase “way, shape or form” be made a criminal offence; any one of those three words means all that you’re trying to say. Word count: 176 |
| A Thank You A few days ago I received, through snail mail, a postcard from WdC. It was probably just a part of a mass mailing to all members or had been triggered by some unnoticed milestone on my WdC career, containing a snippet of wisdom suggesting that I create opportunity rather than wait for it. There is a faint chance that this was occasioned by my insistence that I am no longer interested in publication, but I doubt it. The Master and Mistress have better things to do than to concern themselves with my insignificant being, I’m sure. Nevertheless (go on, Northern, tell me I have no business using so obsolete a construction), this postcard has been extremely welcome to me in my present state. This is partly because I have been feeling rather ill and low of late (both of which prevented me from replying in correctly grateful manner until now) and also because it is an actual physical contact with another human being. Whether it was initiated by a machine or not, the fact remains that it has been addressed in a person’s handwriting, thereafter having a real postage stamp affixed to it by glue that may even have been moistened by the application of a lick from a human tongue. What a wonderful thing to receive out of the blue! It takes me back to the days before the internet and email, to a time when the mailman’s daily visit was something to be looked forward to, instead of the cue for the chore of sorting invoices from junk mail. Someone somewhere has taken the time and trouble to write a few words and post this postcard, not to some mysterious householder or occupant, but to me, even adding after my name my WdC handle, beholden (taking the extra care of using the lower case version of the initial letter, as I do). I am humbled by such dedication to the maintenance of a time-honoured tradition in this age of the immediate and fleeting. So this post is in the nature of a thank you, a registration of the gratitude I feel for being noticed for a passing moment at least. It may have been the physical nature of the postcard that elicits this response, rather than any great impression made by the encouragement to “Write on,” but the gratitude is real and heartfelt. The card does indeed reside by my computer now, to be noticed and recalled with affection from time to time. Thank you, WdC. Word count: 418 |
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