In the calm that I now enjoy, I pursue less
pragmatic, more emotional and cerebral pursuits such as music; by listening to
it and playing my guitars, and visiting National Trust sites, taking photos, reading,
writing stories, some computer work on the golf web site using Dreamweaver and Photoshop,
and once again, playing golf, having joined a local club at the start of
October.
Life hasn’t been all roses. It has been
clouded by the funerals of two people of whom I was fond. However, I am at that
age when friends pass. This is a feature of life that must be accepted, albeit
with wet eyes and a heavy heart.
With these losses in mind, I still feel “How
lucky are we?” with the lives we lead and have led. Yes, we have things that we’d
like to be different, but, on balance, generally, I believe we’re blessed; with
full stomachs, a roof over our heads and most of all, our friendships. It is
easy to overlook what we have and complain about what we don’t have. But, when
reflecting on life without agenda, most times, on balance, it is a kindly a
Fairy Godmother - for me at least.
On Graham Norton’s Radio 2 programme, he has
an agony aunt theme encouraging people to call in about things that are
troubling them. One person wrote in bemoaning the fact that as time passes, valued
friendships are lost. Surely this is an inevitable part of life? I am lucky
enough to be in contact with a dozen guys and half a dozen women from my
schooldays, five of whom go back to our junior school days when we were wide-eyed
innocents, new to Basildon in the mid-50s. But, from another angle, there must
be hundreds of valued friends across my life with whom I have lost contact,
including ones that were “Best Friends” at some stage.
These ‘very old’ school friends aside, there
are easily fifty others whom I have known for between 20 to 40 years. It seems to me that
this is a natural facet of life. I send this mail to about 100 of you who are
important enough to me for us to exchange Christmas cards, e-mails, texts and
phone calls - until we don’t.
I had some very close friends when I lived
in Portugal but relocation back to Essex for me and back to other parts of the
world for some of them, or just remaining in Portugal, changed our realities
and we became less close. The world moves on. Luckily, the circle of friends
always grows and few friendships end completely. With communications being what
they are nowadays, keeping in touch is easy for those who have become less
close that they once were.
For example, people like João and Cristina
Mattos who in the mid-90s, took me around obscure Portuguese villages at the
time of my birthday to show me the real Portugal, not what I would see as an
estrangeiro. My birthday is in June. This coincided with the feast days of
several saints who were the patrons of various villages near Lisbon.
Consequently, those visits were on village holidays where eating, drinking and
music was compulsory. I think it was the law - not sure. João and Cristina are
still friends but as they are in Portugal and I am here, our conversations are
less frequent than they were, but when they occur, they are as close and as warm
as ever.
I mention this here as my experience has
been that friendships are natural organisms. While some, a few, will last a
lifetime, realistically, the river of friends is flowing constantly and when some
pass from the mainstream into the
shallows or run aground, that’s just a natural process with new friends joining
the stronger current, geography and of course, chemistry, being a key influence.
We expect this as teenagers in our boyfriend/girlfriend
years and some of us have experienced it from the break-up of a marriage. You
become intensely close, sharing your deepest thoughts and dreams - and then it
fades to a parting of the ways. That’s life.
When I come to Essex for a specific purpose,
I stay a while beyond that purpose and try to see a few of you. At the last
visit in early-Oct., I stayed for the week and saw 30 or so friends from several
different areas of the Christmas Card list. It meant lunch and or dinner every
day (what a hardship), as the backdrop to a 2-3 hour conversation with people I
hadn’t seen for some time. Even so, I had to apologise to others that I wasn’t
able to see. This is my life now. As I live 120 miles away, the drink, dinner, chat
or casual popping-in is not as easy to arrange as in the past.
But - we have phones and the internet
wherever we go, and the Joy of Texts (remember that book from the 70s?) plus
e-mail, so keeping in touch and exchanging thoughts is easier than ever.
However, it is exactly these self-same gifts that confound us. As, with a
single voice, the common complaint from most of you is likely to be - “No
TIME!” Our table is laden too heavily with toys, demands and opportunities. The
simple illustration is this letter. I have so much to tell you - but I know I’ll
get to page four before I’ve covered even half of it. So let’s start now, with
i-Tunes.
I have three i-Pods, all loaded with
different playlists, albums and as a result, styles of music. My CD collection
is catholic (with a small ‘c’ you’ll notice, so the adjective rather than the
noun), leaning towards the tuneful and melodic rather than the noisy. There are
rocking, driving numbers in the collection, of the style where several notes
are involved, such as the Chambers Brothers’ “Can’t Turn You Loose”, Aretha
Franklin doing “Think” and Cliff doing “Move It”, rather than anything
head-bangers might favour. Best of all about i-Tunes, is the availability of
old stuff and how cheap it is.
This is fed so often by BBC4 on a Friday
night which has featured The Beatles, The Eagles, Paul Carrack, Squeeze etc.,
plus Jeff Lynne, whose biopic prompted memories of Roy Orbison and the Travelling
Wilburys; more or less, the music of the 70s and 80s. Having had the memory
stirred by these programmes led me to the i-Tunes Store and several new
downloads of old material. It seems I am a mug for a bargain when it’s £9.99 or
less. I am now the proud owner of several identical copies of the Big O doing
Only the Lonely - Dream Baby and Crying - across albums featuring those seductive
words “Hits”, “Collection” and Greatest” - in various permutations.
Also, from time to time, conversations with
friends bring new finds. Kristina Train, Jenn Bostic and Toby Keith have all come
into the picture lately, along with Sugarland, Lady Antebellum, The Band Perry
and The Civil Wars. Life continues to deliver new talents.
A
word of warning, don’t buy Toby Keith if you have any regard for political
correctness. The song that made me buy him was “The Size I Wear”, which, as
with most Country songs, is a tear-jerker about two friends in a bar, the
singer and his best friend John, chugging beers when a bunch of secretaries
walk in. The song is about the conversation they have in deciding to whom to
offer their hearts. The chorus line goes… “She was five foot two, and 95 pounds, Round in
the places she’s supposed to be round.
You can take that waitress or the blonde over there but stand back John, that’s
the size I wear.” Such
moving sentiment. I am welling up.
Do you ever watch science on TV? Again BBC4 and
BBC2 make your head spin. Apparently, science assures us that everything in the
universe moves from Order to Disorder. Well, if you’d ever seen my mates trying
to organise a night out, this comes as no great surprise. In making our social
plans, we start with Chaos and Disorder. It goes downhill from there. Science
is trying to make ‘Stating the Bloomin’ Obvious’ a discovery.
My current TV watching is about 10% science,
e.g. Eat, Fast and Live Longer (where the first comma is key to gaining a correct
understanding of the message), 40% cop drama; Body of Proof, The Mentalist, The Closer, Castle etc., and
40% comedy such as Big Bang Theory, New Girl, 2 Broke Girls, 8 Out of 10 Cats,
HIGNFY and Buzzcocks. As you see, not much on maths.
I joined my local golf club on Oct. 1st - Spalding GC - and have played there a few times. The course is 105 years old,
well-established and picturesque. October weather has been kind enough to
permit several enjoyable rounds. The AGM was last Thursday evening. Well! What
a turnout - and what a frank exchange of views! Strong articulate people
putting their cases to strong articulate people; teeth sharpened and no holds
barred. It was refreshing to see such openness and rejection of circumlocution.
And to think, I was just planning on watching TV that night.
Moving seamlessly, into something quite
unrelated - when I see the pretence born from the privilege of position, masquerading
as polite good manners, I am dismayed that people are dumb enough to think that
pretence to cover up bullying ever works. The influence that allowed Jimmy
Savile to do what he’s done, Andrew Mitchell to continue to pretend that he
didn’t talk down to the police on the gate, the Hillsboro cover up and the calls
for an inquiry into the policing at Orgreave, Sooner or later, the truth comes
out and the great and the good are made to look stupid, shameful and dishonest.
They attract more embarrassment than if they had declared the transgression at
the time of the cover up; all because they thought that the privilege that goes
with position would avoid discovery. Lies come out - at the most inconvenient
of moments, often with more damaging effect than if confessed at the time. Some
people think that lies can be sustained. Looks like Jimmy Savile was one. Let’s
see if Mitchell ever confesses what he did say rather than trying to
keep the focus on what he didn’t say. I suspect he will be allowed to slink
into the shadows without much more fuss. Old Boys’ networks prevail.
On
the subject of pretence, the American Presidential election is warming up
nicely. I get lots of e-mails rubbishing Obama, which is interesting. The
Republicans are not saying what they will do for the voter, only why Obama is
not to be trusted. Well - what a newsflash! A Politician not to be trusted.
Thanks for telling me. I couldn’t have worked that out for myself.
More
importantly, the negative campaign being run by the Republicans speaks volumes
about their lack of confidence in their man. Rather than celebrate his talents,
intelligence, achievements and potential (I believe he may well be a good man),
they are relying on rubbishing a bloke that anyone with half a brain knows you
can’t trust from the moment you first set eyes on him. Thank God I’m not American.
What a poor choice they have - a bloke you can’t trust or a bloke that the Republicans have no faith in. That’s
democracy for you. Oh wait - it’s not really a democracy is it? Due to the Electoral
College system, you get the votes of the people who voted against you. Just
like in this country, where more people vote against a government than for it,
and yet they become the government due to a system devised by slippery eels and
accepted by a gullible, uncaring public. It’s the system that we have - but
it’s not democracy.
Hurricane
Sandy has raised a number of interesting side issues. The Americans continue to
maintain their view at Kyoto where they wouldn’t sign the protocol to control
emissions - that global warming is just a myth. Pursuit of wealth for a few won
through again. Since then, we’ve had Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy visit them
with massive cost in terms of lives, disruption - and money. How many more
people have to die while they maintain that head-in-the-sand denial?
You will know that photography is a hobby. For many years I have promised myself a trip to the Lake District in Oct. or Nov. to see the trees in their autumn colours. Out of the blue, I managed this last Sunday when across a couple of days I got 300 photos and a life lesson. In my hurry to get where I was going, I whizzed past quite a lot of attractive sights. Luckily, at one stage I had to double back on myself so was able to spot beautiful views that I had missed on the way through. The weir at Chapel Stile on page 1, is one of them. Just to the left of where I was standing to take that picture, are three cottages. That is the view they have from their front bedrooms - lucky beggars. Below, is the main reason I went. Trees in many shades of russet and early snow on the hills. There’s much more of this sort of view; huge valleys of green, gold and amber as far as the eye can see in either direction, with snow-covered mountains as a backdrop.
In the B&B, I watched TV on the Monday
night; a new programme to me, called Inside Out. One of the article was about a
woman who labelled herself a ‘serial mistress’. So we are clear, it’s not just
about the sex, she does this out of the goodness of her heart to help
relationships that have got a bit stale - almost a saint, I would say.
Apparently, letting your other half have the occasional Awayday, will help maintain
the buzz. Where that has been lost, ladies, it is your fault for
“wearing leggings, flat shoes and tying your hair in a ponytail” - her words
not mine. Please don’t shoot the messenger. I should mention at this point that
she has had death threats and Twitter abuse. How unfair is that when she is
just trying to keep the sparkle alive?
While that point of view was interesting,
what was more interesting was the fact that there are websites to promote this
lifestyle. One charges £150 a month! AND… they are used more by women than by
men. Looks like I retired too early. Two that got mentioned (for any of you
taking notes), are Affairs 4 U and Illicit Affairs. I’m not making this up. As
a person that hopes to be a writer one day, I only wish I had that much
imagination.
So, quite a lot of nothing in particular. I wish you all fun, peace and contentment in your lives.
