Diogenes and Alexander

For Scot & Ghetufool

A dear friend asks some questions in comments on my previous post. I numbered them for convenience, intending to answer them one by one. (So much for intentions.)

(1) Do you think this kind of serenity is possible in daily life? or (2) that I have to be retired like you to have enough time to ponder about things all around?

(3) how much time a man can devote to understand himself, the spirit part of it? we are all chasing that illusive security in life that will never come. Obviously, you have some kind of security to fall back so that you can hone your calm lifestyle. you don’t need to worry about deadlines. you declare your own deadlines. you dismiss them at your will.

(4) So is this a kind of writing expected from a retired man? (5) were you such sensitive when you were struggling to feed your family?

(6) or is this plain maturity which can only come after going through all the turmoil and realising, as wise men say, everything is futile?

I think every part of our experience needs to be given equal respect and value. We may cherish serenity as a goal. Usually we do. We are wired that way. We are programmed to seek serenity, but only under certain conditions, which don’t always apply. See Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Physiological needs take precedence! Then physical safety. Then psychological security. The sun we love so much can be obscured by many layers of clouds.

We may dance on the pinnacle of Maslow’s Pyramid, but clear skies today doesn’t mean no storms tomorrow. The most primitive need can puncture the highest pretension.

I cannot pretend to know anything of what happens in any other person, or whether it is possible to be serene anywhere else but here and now. Doubtless I’m spoilt, pampered, over-privileged; but why should that matter to anyone else? No writer can make any promise to any reader. It’s best to consider the written word as fiction---the spoken word too! All the same I want to speak truth, and prefer silence to lies. Words---these kind of words---are meant to touch a place, not deliver a guarantee. Anything else is corrupt in principle.

I think in this world there are more would-be Alexanders than would-be Diogenes. But here’s a delightful story copied verbatim from the website of King Biscuit Man, to whom hearty thanks.

The time Alexander the Great came to Athens, he heard about Diogenes.

One day he went to pay a visit to him.
[Diogenes continues the tale.]

It was morning, just time of dusk: I heard voices and marching horses, I came out my pithos (large tub) and saw Alexander and his horse men. I lay down in front of my tub, feeling the warm sun.

Alexander and the horse men stopped, and he came to me. He greeted me and I did the same, then stared at me for a long time with out saying anything. I looked at him as well, he was young, very young, allmost a child.

Then he asked: it is true that you live in that tub? or it is just one of those pranks filosophers do in order for the people to talk and admire them?

I will answer with a question, Alexander! Is it true you want to conquer Persia, and so unite all Greeks under your leadership? or do you do all this just for the sake of getting the admiration of people?

He liked my answer! he smiled and touched my tub said: one tub full of wisdom.

I liked his words and I felt flattered, but quickly replied: I prefer one drop of luck than a tub full of wisdom, great King! Sometimes wisdom drives you to a bitter taste of vanity, and all your works will stop in death! and one drop of luck can open streets you never could imagine and give you happiness you never knew!

Alexander understood every word and knew the meaning of luck in life better than anyone, then he came closer to me and said: I would like to do something very important for you Diogenes. I know you chose this kind solitaire life, but I think that sometimes in your life you want something better. Ask me, what you want and it will be a pleasure for me to give it to you.

He stood in front of me while hiding the sun, I gave him the following answer:

I want only one thing Alexander. You stand in front of me, and you’ re hiding the sun, so, don’ t take from me, the thing that you can not give me!

Memory’s Carillon

Centennial Carillon
uploaded to flickr by PeVermelho

I don’t know if there is anyone, even myself, who can quite grasp what I’m getting at here. Whatever “here” means.

I live over the street and sleep with the window wide open. The street is small and crowded, each house 12 foot wide and joined to the next. At night it’s utterly silent. No traffic, not even a footfall: too quiet really, for a piece of litter scraping on the pavement in the breeze is sometimes enough to wake me. A taxi-driver, returning after a late fare, tip-toes into his house but something creaks at some point, and it echoes down the street. Then on Friday night and Saturday morning the silence is punctuated by the return of revellers, some of those non-Muslims who rent a room on this low-life street, who get paid in cash for their week’s manual work and have been joyously celebrating the fact.

So at 3:58 I decided to get up.

Scot asked, of something in my last post, “Is that a metaphor?” Yes it is, Scot. All of it is metaphor, even though I seldom understand it myself, at the time.

What I write is always inspired by feelings of heightened intensity, which you might want to call “joy”, though they come in so many flavours, that you wouldn’t think they could all have the same name.

My quest is not to chase those feelings, because they can’t be hunted down, at least in my experience. They happen. So I try to understand the circumstances which lead to their birth. (I wonder if there was ever a time when human adults had not discovered the link between sex and babies.)

In my extended researches so far, these feelings---sometimes they are needle-sharp moments of joy or recognition, at others an epiphany which seems to have neither beginning nor end---have something to do with time or memory. The present has to be clearly in focus, without the distractions of anxiety or stress or reluctance to do what one is doing or antagonism to one’s environment. One is gazing as it were over unruffled water---or let me seize the offered metaphor---listening to the silence of the night.

In such moments I am sensitive to the slightest footfall, the tiniest zephyr which ruffles the still lake’s surface. This is when I see clearly how memory interlaces with present experience, layer after layer. It only takes the cry of a starling, a whiff of some acrid smoke, a resin released by the lopping of tree-branches, or the petrichor diffused by rainfall after drought---any of a million triggers.

On wings of memory---but it’s faster than any wings. It’s a bass-line in harmony with the present melody, a background percussion that adds a dimension to the moment of now. Or an echo (but not a déjà-vu moment, that’s a different phenomenon).

The place where memory transports me most often is between the ages of three and seven: especially when I was five. How do I know which? Circumstantial evidence: my life was fractured in those days. I was in Perth Australia. Then on a ship to England; in my grandparents’ house there; in Holland; back in my grandparents’ house; in my stepfather’s house; at boarding-school; in hospital; out again; back to school. There’s a busy timeline to plot the memories against.

I feel drawn to things which trigger those memories, such as places which haven’t changed, old vehicles, old books, animals, trees, anything or anyone “timeless”. I’ve only to search the archives of this blog---I mean in memory, not literally searching---to find examples of the strangeness of memory. Here’s one, extracted from a post called “Hope” (October 30th 2007). I wrote it in the third person:

In a well-prepared field a bone-like piece of flint stood alone, thrown up by the plough. His heart leapt up, as it had in a similar moment when he was nine: not for the flint but for hope. He smelt that hope, kneaded it in his hand like the Plasticine they used to model with. What is hope? A vision of what we once knew? These were the questions he asked later, in the stillness of home, when thought was restored.

Perhaps these “moments”---the moments he lived for---were the doors to another world, in which souls were not separate. Or perhaps (he was astonished by the audacity of this idea) his memories and imaginings were the threads binding the world, keeping it full of Hope.

What does it mean, when a flint pebble on the surface of a ploughed field, seen a year ago, reminds me of a similar incident fifty-seven years earlier? Even if you dismiss it as imagination, it’s no less odd. On this occasion I felt that the significance of the sighting was its association with hope, that most intoxicating of feelings.

Feelings are the fixative of memory. And sometimes it seems to me that those feelings, or the seemingly insignificant incidents to which they attach themselves, can be traced to even earlier times. When I relive the five-year-old memories, for example---the smell of grain being winched up in sacks into warehouses, mingled with the smell of chickens roaming wild, pecking up the fallen grains from the cobbled wharf below---they seem to signify something, as if they echo back to something even earlier. Or I have walked along a woodland path, or an exposed hill-ridge, and felt a direct connection with prehistoric wayfarers and hunters.

These are some of the things I find worthy of exploration. Meanwhile, the affairs of the day---the politicians, celebrities, fashions, news stories---seem hollow hearsay. They don’t touch me, don’t ring bells as my senses do, echoing across the expanse of time like a carillon of memory till Kingdom come.

Return to wayfaring (2)

In hindsight, my last post sounds a little Quixotic: retired man goes on mysterious Quest, tries to attach importance to his ramblings---the ones on foot and the verbal ones, both. That’s a fair enough summary, especially the reference to “hindsight”---a theme I’ll develop further.

On the walk I partly described in my last, I encountered no windmills to charge at, only a field of young bulls. Their behaviour makes perfect sense when you see them as male teenagers, alert to strangers setting foot on their territory, competing to be the boldest.

In my last, I had wandered, in Dante’s words, per una selva oscura---through a dark wood, all the while glimpsing sunlit meadows through the dappled leaves, but frustrated in my attempts to get there; increasingly rebellious, hemmed in by barbed wire and the limitations of public rights of way. At last I was back on the official footpath, but, with warnings to keep my dog on a leash, it led straight through this gang of truculent bovines. I was mindful of Hayden’s wisdom about animals: to look them fixedly in the eye is a provocation, as it would be with us. So I lowered my gaze to the ground and kept my distance from the bull who stood in my way on the path I was to follow. Soon after I had passed, the gang decided to follow me, their snuffling breath hot on my heels. I was tempted to make a run for it but kept a steady pace till I reached the stile, a toreador in an audience of bulls. After climbing over, I was safe, and so were they from me, so we could test one another’s valour without risk. Beneath their aggression they were shy, and the flash from my camera startled them a little.

Beyond the guardian bulls, the other side of the rustic stile, I arrived at a different terrain. All at once I was put in mind of two books I’d found at my grandparents’ house as a child, by Gene Stratton Porter: The Song of the Cardinal and Girl of the Limberlost. I had not wanted to read them. They seemed like books for girls and moreover they spoke of the solitary life in forests. That wasn’t what I wanted. I missed the adventurous company of my cousin Mark, who was still absent in Kenya, or his mother my Aunt Peggy, who was adventurous in her own ways and always had suggestions for how I might spend my time. My intrinsic wayfaring nature has not changed: but in adolescence we boys are swayed by powerful ungovernable forces which predispose us to swagger in gangs, and later hunt for the female prize.

Before entering that new terrain beyond the bulls, I want to mention another book: Slide Rule, the autobiography of aeronautical engineer and novelist Nevil Shute. Much of his story is devoted to contrasting two projects which ran side by side in competition. These were to develop airships. One, the R100, was developed using private capital, and Shute was its “Chief Calculator”, responsible for determining the stresses on components and assembly, a repetitive arithmetical task in the days before computers or even electronic calculators: hence the slide rule of his title.

R100 visiting Toronto

The competing project was sponsored by the British Government and managed by civil servants. It produced the R101, notorious for crashing with much loss of life on its maiden international flight.

Why did one project succeed and the other fail? Shute offers many reasons. As an engineer he is passionate on the subject, and as an engineer myself (if only of the software variety) I was fascinated by the wealth of detail. As a novelist fascinated by human motivation he noted something which has stuck in my mind for twenty years, since I first read his memoir. It’s rather too long to quote in full, but it goes like this. Those whose remuneration is subject to their status in a hierarchy, who depend on their jobs to support themselves and family, can’t afford to speak out (blow the whistle, as we would now say) when they see things happen which offend their professional judgement. Greed distorts vision, as we see in this world financial crisis. Those with private means, on the other hand, can afford to be brave and speak the truth. Shute wraps up his observations as follows:

I do not know the financial condition of the high officials in the Air Ministry at the time of the R101 disaster. I suspect, however, that an investigation would reveal that it was England’s bad luck that at that time [around 1929] none of them had any substantial private means. At rock bottom, that to me is probably the fundamental cause of the tragedy.

Wreckage of the R101
Special thanks to http://www.roll-of-honour.com/

I was going to describe the “terrain beyond the bulls”. The above digression may appear irrelevant to that thread, but all will be revealed. I wrote in my last:

I’m fulfilling the obligations of retirement from professional life. The shackles are off now, so I must act like a man released to freedom.

I don’t know who has private means these days, or what they do with it; but retirement on a small pension is pretty near to it, when you’re in good health and free from encumbrance. It’s not a time to pursue money or fame. I suppose many of those boys I went to school with are school governors now, or sitting on committees or charity boards, giving their views fearlessly, their honesty being its own reward. I can understand the pull towards community which some may feel: to pay back something of what they have received.

I'm a lifelong avoider of community, though I help my neighbours, whether on the street, or, through an old people’s charity, those who need the services of a handyman to fix things they have no longer the strength to do. Beyond that, I feel the urge to explore certain mysteries of life: to leave the safe flock and pursue certain inner impulses. This global weblog is a log of those explorations. A tentative hypothesis will be revealed in my next: or perhaps the post after that. Anyway, sooner or later.

Return to wayfaring

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura Che la diritta via era smarrita Ahi quanto a dir quel era è cosa dura Esta selva selvaggia e aspre e forte Che nel penser rinova la paura! Tant’è amara che poco e più morte Ma per trattar del ben ch’i’vi trovai Diro de l’altre cose ch’i’v’ho scorte.	Midway along our road of life I woke to find myself in a dark and secret wood for I had lost the narrow path. To evoke what it was like---how hard, I barely could. this wood was savage, dense and strange! The thought of it renews those fears that I withstood, a place so bitter, only to be caught in death is worse. Yet there I found my share of good, so now I’ll tell what else I brought. ***

It’s time I explained what the “Wayfaring” of my title means: at least what it means to me. Something simple, certainly, but deep too. How many times have you said, or heard someone say “There’s nothing like a walk in the fresh air for clearing one’s head”? Perhaps from a headache, a hangover even; or to dwell in a space where emotions can have free access to your consciousness, to convey their true message and then disperse.

It was last year, whilst working in MaxiRam Castle (I still use the codename, though there is no longer a need for secrecy), that my blog’s present title was coined: A Wayfarer’s Notes. For I came to see ever more clearly that my inspiration was fed by the hour-long walk I took “religiously” every lunchtime. It was the perfect antidote to the overarching conspiracy in business life to enthrone false ideals as the true reality; ideals involving backbiting competition, urgency and stress. It was then that, looking for a more descriptive title, I hit on Pedestrian Thoughts. But pedestrian, though it carries the desired meaning “on foot”, carries the undesired meaning Of writing: prosaic, dull; uninspired, undistinguished. It would not do: such modesty is not becoming. It carries the further meaning: Of people and things: commonplace, ordinary. This was a plus point for me, for it’s an article of my private religion that within the commonplace and ordinary lies our salvation. There’s a popular hymn which begins “New every morning is the love”, which contains a couple of lines which have run in my head for almost sixty years, and now I understand them:

The trivial round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask

Anyhow, that's how the Wayfarer title came into being.

I was feeling a little out of sorts, apparently unable to escape the gravitational attraction of the outer world, the urban vibes, whatever you want to call it. The wilderness was calling to me, but from where in particular? I pored over maps of the Chiltern Hills, till I discovered which spot beckoned me most insistently, and set out in my grand car of yesteryear, that I call “The Gift Horse” because it was sold to me for little more than the cost of a tankful of petrol. Faithful as it has been till now, it gave me a little scare. It didn’t seem to be registering my speed, or the passage of the miles. My previous Volvo had suffered this malady and never recovered: not a fatal illness of course, but the first of many mechanical failures which resulted in its final ignominy, a loss of locomotion. Let us keep always before us the memento mori, the death’s head, to remind us of our own mortality. Driving along a straight road, I kept checking these dials as best I could. They were working! So why had I thought otherwise? A brainstorm, surely. I must have checked my speed whilst stopped at a traffic light, and been shocked that it registered as zero. I’ve had brainstorms before. Twice in the last few years I have panicked because I couldn’t remember my age, or what year it was. It wasn't hard to obtain these bits of information, but they lacked the familiarity I was expecting. Was it a mini-stroke, or the first symptom of dementia? I think not, but at any rate these things are an indication to clear the head with the fresh air of wayfaring.

I settled on a certain wooded valley next the headquarters of Wycliffe Bible Translators: “Their one aim is to offer the Bible in every language that needs it.” The Public Footpath goes straight through their complex of huts, but I took a different route this time. I was drawn to a lost world, an unofficial automobile graveyard. There was a path through the valley-bottom, where the only sunlight was filtered and dappled by the trees, strewn with a few bits of old cars, lorries or vans, in their last stages of returning to Mother Nature’s embrace. As it happened I meandered uncertainly, doubling back, not sure where my feet would take me. I was drawn to sunlit meadows on the other side of a narrow steeply winding road, but there was no public footpath there and I couldn't get through. I was like a dog with its nose to the ground, following a scent, trying to get back on track. Up a steep winding road nearby came the growl of a skip-lorry (which I suppose in America would be called a dumpster truck), its chains clanking, its gear-changes laboured yet ultimately triumphant. Did the driver see me, through these beech-trees? For some reason I felt like a fugitive.

An overgrown track comes off this winding road, so steep that only a tractor or big-wheeled timber lorry can ascend. It leads to a yard where logs are stored, fenced with holly-trees and barbed-wire. It also contains dilapidated sheds and a collection of vehicles huddled together in the churned-up mud. Some look barely functional, others would need months of loving restoration to get them working again. I wanted a closer look, but feared an encounter with the owner. For all I knew, he might be keeping watch over his treasures with a shotgun. This being England, it would be licensed for sporting purposes only, but I would not care to discover his definition of “sporting”.

I found a place where the barbed-wire had sagged; listened intently, strained to see any movement, sniffed the air like any woodland mammal. There was an odd scent: not pine but some kind of wood-resin: perhaps holly-wood? All was still, so camera in hand, I swiftly leapt the fence and sought out the oldest vehicle, to get a shot. We both, the lorry and I, were surprised by the camera’s flash, which lit up the number-plate like an animal’s eyes caught in headlights. Then I climbed the chassis behind the cab to get the cab’s interior, before melting out of the compound like a silent thief.

I should get out more, for more wayfaring expeditions. I do enough rational, useful stuff: installing an old sink in my backyard, for example, to assist in gardening, scrubbing muddy boots and the like. And when I haven’t been pottering in the backyard, I’ve been walking to the supermarket with my bag-on-wheels like any senior citizen living out his days in simple obscurity.


No, my wayfaring expeditions are not insanity. I’m fulfilling the obligations of retirement from professional life. The shackles are off now, so I must act like a man released to freedom. I don’t need to follow the crowd any more. I go walking to follow my nose and not my head, like a man who lets the dog take him for a walk. There is that in me which wants to go somewhere, and I will follow it. My wayfaring is not for physical fitness or curiosity; but rather, a mysterious quest, a scientific investigation even. More in my next.

*** First three tercets of Dante’s Inferno, translated by Willis Barnstone.

The lure of literature

Shakespeare & Co, Paris
posted to flickr by CytecK

Some see blogs as self-indulgent monologues. But to be pedantic---and who’s to stop me, this is my own self-indulgent monologue---a blog is not a literary form and can’t be classified. It’s an application of technology that opens up possibilities, just as a large block of marble is not a sculpture. When Michelangelo started to work on one, he could already see the exquisite form trapped inside, and would chip away to free the prisoner, making his vision real.

There’s no rule which says you can’t extract literature from a blog. There’s even an existing literary form: the letter, one of those things which people used to write in pen and ink, and place in an envelope, entrusting it to an integrated mail service encircling the globe. We can still do that, thank heaven, but there aren’t enough these days to be selected and compiled into those other venerable artefacts, hard-backed books. Email? Possibly. To me it’s the blog which has unique literary possibilities, much greater than private correspondence, for the blog is already a globally-broadcast letter. In fact I’d like to rechristen it as a glob.

Broadcast: to scatter (seed, etc.) abroad with the hand.

I’ll tell you why I write in the blog form. It’s because there is no fun to write without a reader, just as there’s no current in a wire without a circuit. I suppose it’s a vice but I don’t care: I crave the gratification of instant publication, the spontaneity of almost live performance. Editing is needed always, but since word-processing has made pen-and-ink obsolete, writers are in danger of editing their inspiration to death, so that what arrives at the publisher’s is a factory-pie on a supermarket shelf, compared with one freshly-made from scratch for a few invited guests at home.

All this is by way of expressing gratitude, dear blog-reader, for your role as agent and Muse; for your comments and for your eloquent silences; for being companion and midwife to the birth of something new. It’s to tell you that what you read is a work-in-progress, whilst something more solid and old-fashioned is being shaped from the sketches you see here. A first volume, A Wayfarer’s Childhood, is in progress now, having reached 35,000 words as a memoir from birth to age 15. I intend to stop at age 18, so another three years’ worth will be published here first. The second volume may refer tangentially to intervening years but will mainly cover wayfaring activities from age 64 onwards, following Nietzsche’s dictum: “Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about”.

You may have noticed the copyright notice now appended here. When I previously entertained the idea of writing such books, I was pulled two ways. Blogging has been my main literary activity and I didn’t want to give it up; but if I didn’t there would be no energy left for “serious writing”. So the plan now is to continue drafting here, and never taking down the blog, even after its content has been edited and shaped into proper books. So you and I can carry on as before.

Adieu Lehman Brothers

Leaves of Bodhi Tree
from Flickr TaranRampersad

I’m not a complete stranger to the world of investment banking. Morgan Grenfell sent me to Dublin for a while in ’85 to test a new system they’d commissioned; until they pulled the plug on the project. And more recently, some time in the Nineties, I visited the London headquarters of Lehman Brothers, I can’t recall what for, but I sat in their reception concourse for about forty-five minutes. It was splendid in a modern style, hushed, air-conditioned, a palace of sparkling pink granite, like a minimalist Taj Mahal. But for all its message of timeless solidity, none of this impressed.

I was drawn to the centre-piece. Other lobbies have grand flower-arrangements. Lehman Brothers had a small jungle overhanging a pond, like a botanical garden with fewer species. You’d expect lizards, butterflies and crocodiles to be in there somewhere, or Stanley seeking out Livingstone. Still, none of this impressed.

If you looked carefully, you could see a tall man tending the greenery, his long hair tied back with a bandana. There were hoses and watering-cans discreetly stashed in the undergrowth, but the man was not watering. He was unhurriedly cleaning a Peepal tree, leaf by leaf. This species of banyan, ficus religiosa, is famous as the Bodhi Tree, under which Siddartha Gautama had vowed to sit until he found the Truth.

Lehman Brothers had a Dharma Bum on their payroll. That impressed me.

Resuming normality

Night is full of mysteries. I feel them, want to share them with you, consult you so you may shed light on them. Ah, but dawn is coming. It sheds light, but then the mysteries are not illuminated, they merely vanish.

Dawn blushes red now, over yonder hill. I draw back the curtain, blow out the candle: its waxy aroma hangs in the air. Looking out the window into neighbouring backyards, I see a ruin of ash, with iron frames surviving like skeletons from an ancient battle. The black cat stands in the middle, its tail waving slowly, a feline mystery, orphaned, waiting for its prime benefactors to return from their vacation. Perhaps it subsists on rats, but it doesn't look tough enough.

Ashes beget the Phoenix. And so it is with this blog.

Bonfire of the vanities

The fire has finally gone out after consuming the adjacent fence and denuding the overhanging tree-branches. In these mean streets we are grateful more than annoyed.

My next-door neighbour, to be precise the elder son of my next-door neighbour, who appears lower left in my photo (click to enlarge), had complained to the Council (municipal authority) about the state of his neighbours’ backyards: not mine of course, those on the other side. I have spoken in previous posts about the ever-growing heaps of old carpets, fridges, broken furniture, refuse bags of all kinds, flung out the back to decay as best they may, which are the consequence of letting out rooms to migrant workers. The grounds of his complaint were the encouragement to rats, which I discover have made several tunnels to get under my own backyard fence, or possibly they are entrances to the nests where they rear their cute blind babies.

So the council slapped a £1000 fine on each of the two landlords concerned, to be collected if the rubbish was not cleared within 7 days. We have excellent recycling facilities in this town. You take your garbage to the out-of-town site and divide it into cardboard, metal, compostable and so on. But this was too much work for those landlords and their tenants and they were unwilling to load sodden mattresses and used diapers for example into any of their nice vehicles. Easier to burn it all. We sealed all our windows and switched on the fans in bathroom and kitchen to expel the smoky air which crept in regardless; but breathed in dilute smoke all night, and the fire smouldered for more than 24 hours. Now we know what it must be like to live in Peking or other air-polluted industrial cities.

The bonfire is a pile of ash and bed-springs now, and the smell of smoke has almost gone from our towels and curtains. It didn’t rain at all yesterday, which is notable after all the downpours and floods lately, and after dinner I was pottering in my own backyard in the twilight, digging up spring bulbs to put out in pots in the front yard; clearing the summer’s plants from the pots by putting them in the new compost bin, ordered from the Council at the discount price of £8.

It’s a year since I moved into this house, and a year since I left full-time working. The events I described in my last have put an abrupt and slightly humiliating end to my professional career, but it’s nice to have that cleared up neatly. The abruptness was due to male ego---I wanted to prove I could do something---and so was the humiliation, when I realized I probably couldn’t do it, causing a crisis by my resignation from the audit. And this ego is built-in: the constant need for self-respect. Till now, I had various strings to my bow. One of them has just snapped. When the last one snaps---the ability to draw breath---off we go to something or nothing.

Till then, I’ll happily potter in a twilight garden whilst it’s free of toxic smoke. Which sums up life really.

Grim Vista

Note to reader: as this story has developed, its title has changed a few times. Rather than edit the body of the story, I am adding postscripts in the form of comments.

I last worked in an office a year ago, and that was after several years of being “put out to grass” like a retired carthorse. It was eight months’ solid attendance at MaxiRam, as I have recorded in archives of this blog (Feb - August 2007) and when it was over I kept looking for more contracts, unwilling to accept that I had finally retired from that kind of insanity. Nothing came up and so I have subsided into grateful acceptance of being no further use to bureaucracy.

Then came a phone call requesting me to do four days’ auditing of the work of a Government contractor. The person allocated to the job had dropped out and my paper qualifications (earned in 1992) are impeccable. Except that I have never put those qualifications into practice.

It’s in Exeter, Devon, and of course I am expected to drive myself there. Fortunately the Gift Horse is in reasonable shape and should make the journey. The Lead Auditor laughed when I suggested that I could undertake my duties (interviewing and writing reports) with pen and paper. Oh, no: I must come with a laptop computer, if only for the semblance of credibility. I don’t like these machines but my younger daughter has bequeathed me with a clunky one reputed to overheat and with noisy fans. I soon realized this won’t do. So I’ve had to go and buy a new laptop: one that looks as though it belongs to a prosperous consultant. Though I have been a computer professional since 1965 it doesn’t mean I like laptops, networks, workgroups, installing software and getting to know anything new. I can’t even use an ordinary keyboard, having been spoilt by a special ergonomic “natural” one. Curses.

I don’t have to go down there till the 16th but I have to send them a schedule of the people I need to see. I imagine they will mostly be in the “Business Excellence Team” (ugh). So I have to read hundreds of boring documents that make no sense at all. And I haven’t even discussed with whomever is paying me how much he is going to pay me. There’d better be something left over after paying for the laptop, Office 2007, petrol, hotel and I don’t know what else. And the unwelcome ruffling of my spoilt-child existence.

I ought to be practising on the new laptop instead of this usual one that I’m so accustomed to. Ah.

Ought. Ugh.

Sorry about this. Got to get back to work. On a Saturday night.

PS the new computer has Vista. This means that basically it belongs to Microsoft, which occasionally allows me to use it too. I clicked a button next to Search to find a file and it now says "Please do not power off or unplug your machine. Installing update 1 of 24 .."

PPS The Lead Auditor said something about fun. He wouldn't lead any audit team unless there was fun to be had in the thing. I must get used to this manner of speaking with forked tongue. What he really meant was that he was aware he had sounded a bit heavy-handed in the earlier part of our telephone conversation but since he was now my boss I was not to expect apology, just some oblique demonstration that he was actually human. It failed to impress me as intended.

Oh dear, I'll only be there 4 days. They won't have enough time to fire me. I'd better behave and obey.

Cowes Horizons

When you live in East Cowes, your attention is drawn to horizons. Boats are constantly coming and going. All kinds: ferries, tankers, container ships, yachts, dinghies, powerboats, even fishing vessels perhaps. And it’s not just the visual movement that draws your attention to far away.

The first evening, when we had set up the tent, and we heard the sound of the high tide slapping against the concrete of the esplanade, there was a more distant noise, coming from afar, from West Cowes, across the estuary. I was excited for it sounded just like a steam engine: pistons panting, couplings rattling, steam hissing. How could this be? There wasn’t even a railway station any more, though I’d taken the train to Newport a few times to school, and it was a precious rare railway journey in rolling stock that was ancient even then, with framed pictures of old seaside resorts in Devon and the Cornish Riviera. Thanks to a wonderful picture site Geographia, which aims to photograph every square of land in the UK (I can't remember the size of the square but it doesn't matter) I show a photo of how the station was in 1963, with one of those small engines---full gauge, just small engine.

There was a rhythm to the noise and the sounds of revelry. It must have been a procession of drummers in the street, in Cowes itself. You can say West Cowes in certain circumstances, for example to say you took the chain ferry to West Cowes. But Cowes is Cowes and East Cowes is the other side. Yes, it was drummers, massed, marching in carnival, no other instruments. Not Boys Brigade, not military: more Brazilian, more samba, rhythms echoing off the wharves and shipyards. Like a child sent to bed early, I lay on my bed in the tent, wanting to be out, to run to the drums. But the Medina estuary lay between us and I would have to wait for the chain ferry and then by the time I got there the drums would have stopped. Except that they went on for a long time, and I just lay there.





In the morning we took the chain ferry across. It’s also called the Floating Bridge and is probably the same one that I used to go on back in the Fifties; but they have tarted up the place where the pedestrians sit. They’ve provided some rather surreal poems and collages to look at, produced by schoolchildren or local adults:



I amused myself by adding another layer: the reflections on the glass of the scene outside:



Along the winding old High Street, there are pubs with a balcony view of the waterfront, like this:



And amongst the modern yachts in a race there was also this old ketch. The crew was slowly pulling up the sail:



I've chosen the picture above as my desktop wallpaper. Here's a more prosaic image, showing a container ship loaded up. Perhaps it is things for the Island:



Here's another container ship---OOCL Belgium but the ship is registered Hong Kong. Two yachts neck and neck in the foreground, Fawley Oil Refinery in the background, on the mainland:



Here's a photo from East Cowes looking at West Cowes, from near the chain ferry:



And here is a shot of the pretty oil refinery: