What can I do that's more interesting, more appealing?

Barry Manilow Complex

I'm finding it increasingly hard to write these things.

I know, there has to be a god, you're thinking. 

But subject matter is ever more difficult to come by. 

Life has become more, easy, in a way. I now know more people to chat to in Wells, or at least say hello to. Takes a while. 

If it's me it does. 

Some people obviously avoid me like the plague. And who can blame them?

Me bombarding them with lewd phrases and a random 'ANUS' now and again. 

Telling people about the virtues of ear-syringing, or out of politeness they ask me about Dungeons and Dragons and I actually try to explain it to them. 

I'm not all Dungeons and Dragons you know. I also play Traveller and Pathfinder.

See? A man of many interests.

There are people I avoid too. Gregory Twat and Barry Tedious are 2 who spring to mind. 

I guess having the same day over and over again does that to you, as regards news. 

It's okay though.

Toilet Update

I love a good toilet me, as you know.  

And to me toilet is also a verb, as in to toilet.

I toilet, you toilet, she toilets, we toilette.

"Hold me bag Deirdre, I'm just going to have a toilet for a couple of hours."

Makes sense, huh?

Toilets in pubs are a thing too. In the old Slab House Inn  - a family pub up the road that was burnt to the ground and is now a housing development (the 2 are not related - ok? OKAY??) served great food but had pictures of nude ladies in the men's. 

It was really inappropriate. It was like the landlord showing you his dirty mag from under the counter when the Dorises weren't around.

"Look at that eh? Phwooorr!"

Well, I went for a walk with Richard and Charlotte, my fashionable new friends I shan't be introducing you to, and I took the opportunity to have a toilet, and this is what I encountered.

 Even the little boys (or dwarves) will get a complex.

I'm still in shock.

In the future...

In the last post I predicted that the human race is headed towards an aesthetic singularity. 

So it is now, with great confidence, that I predict that in the future everyone will look like Punky Meadows, from hot rock band, Angel.

"In the publicity photo, Punky can be seen with a beautiful shiny hairdo...."

Lip filler, botox, make-up, dyed hair, probably some plastic surgery too. 

It could equally be Aunty Val from Manchester, as she drunkenly tries to get off with some footballer in a nightclub.

It's where we're heading, folks.

Too bloody hot

During the last few days it’s been very hot. Too hot, in fact. 

Apparently it takes 2 weeks for the human body to acclimatise to different temperatures. Trouble is in the UK with a temperate climate it fluctuates all over the place, so we never have time to get used to shit, hence we’re always complaining  it’s too hot, too cold, we need the rain, it’s too wet, etc.

It’s gone from 30 yesterday to barely 20 today. This is great, as I can wear clothes again.

A relief for everyone. 

I am looking every bit my age now. Withered body, flabby breasts, pot-bellied, bald.

Reminds me of the bloke in the Contacts magazine from my friend's dad's colossal porn collection. One of the classifieds pictured a middle-aged bloke in his 50s with a black Brylcreemed comb-over, National Health glasses, full-length shot, standing in his Y-fronts.

"Ex-forces, gammy leg, looking for couples."

Who could resist such an Adonis?

I don't know why it stayed in my mind. Probably because I didn't know what a gammy leg was. 

And it was a very powerful image. 

Very, very powerful image...

So anyway, I need to rectify my revoltingness. 

Hopefully there's a pill or something.

What I have been mostly watching

Giff-gaffing doesn’t win you the moral argument. Ask Jordan Peterson, or the bloke down the pub who hands out Reform Party leaflets.

Jordan Peterson is the Canadian psychology professor who became a cultural phenomenon by telling young men to make their beds and take themselves more seriously. 

In other words all the stuff their mums had been telling them for years that they'd just ignored. 

He recently went to pieces on a 20 atheists vs one Christian show - he's gone all religious now, yet he denies it with obfuscation, deflection and word-salads as these clever young people tore him to shreds.

Enjoy! (as they say)

Adam Curtis is a film maker who follows in the seldom broadcast social and cultural analysis of Clive James, Jonathan Meades and even Jon Ronson, in showing us what’s really going on under the surface.

Shifty is a 5 part series chronicling life in the UK for the last 2 decades of the 20th century.

More like an essay than a the usual BBC documentaries; those of us who lived through it or know about the subject matter will not necessarily agree, but it all adds to the conversation or at least starts one.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002d2jv/shifty

I'm afraid it's probably unavailable for those of you outside the UK.

My viewing figures are down

So what can I do?  

I know I go on. Same old stuff. I mean I'm quite content but at one point I was getting 200 views for every post, no it's down to just over 100. 

Did I become boring?

Was I was I always boring?

I should look to some popular people for advice.

I asked an old Welsh fellow what the trick is: 

Or should I be more like Drimble Wedge and The Vegetation? 

Treat 'em mean keep 'em keen. That kind of thing?

I think the latter is more me.

When was our zenith?

When did we peak?

I'm talking about human excellence. In the sciences, arts; creativity. What it is to be human. What we can achieve if the best minds and talents are nurtured, encouraged.

Very few people know who the engineer of the Burj Khalifa was. 

More people know what Kim Kardashion has for breakfast.

Great people of our age are pouting morons.

Exude Izzy! Exude!

I just watched a documentary on Stanley Kubrick, genius director. 

He picked the greatest hard-science fiction author of his age - Arthur C Clarke - to co-write the story with. Arthur C Clarke had an extensive background in science and predicted back in the early 60s the use of satellite technology for communications, so that a doctor in London could perform an operation on a patient in Calcutta.

What we now call a futurologist.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) features iPads , artificial intelligence, and asks fundamental questions about our place in the universe.

Unlike the great cultural milestone that was Sex in the City 2. 

Kubrick created a new standard of special effects, technologies and ways of shooting scenes by aiming for perfection, and encouraging and enabling excellent people to go and figure things out so they could contribute to his vision.

He used Zeiss lenses made for NASA which were F0.7, to shoot Barry Lyndon and lit the whole film by candlelight and no electric lights, having exhaustively studied English 18th century paintings. 

His films became fewer as he got older as the perfection he sought in preparing for his movies was increasingly exhaustive. For example, he employed his nephew to photograph every house in Commercial Road in Shoreditch, which entailed a separate shot up a ladder so there was zero perspective convergence. (This is all before digital cameras, let alone Google Streetview).

It took a year, and they made a huge Bayeux Tapestry of them all. 

Stanley said 'It sure beats going there, huh?'

In the end they made the front they needed on a film set. 

What's all this about then? 

I suggest we probably peaked 60ish years ago. 

We live in an age of homogeneity: botox and fillers and deadening hairdos with which people try to reach an aesthetic singularity, finished off with make-up techniques perfected by drag queens. 

Young men with absurd dental implants, bulging  biceps and shoulders, with the skin colour of pure creosote. Then covered in tattoos that look like any doodled notepad next to a telephone.

People no longer wish to be individual. This idea that for northern European women the upper lip should be as plump as the lower lip, despite having the wrong bone structure and skin colour to accommodate it.

Music that is so utterly banal and boring as to reduce me to sleep in seconds. Where people like Cowell talk about "The Product" rather than the song.

Scum.

That anyone creative is at the bottom of the pile. That English, art, drama and music are now the least popular subjects in state schools, leaving only kids from wealthy backgrounds with the opportunity to pursue careers in them.

The country that gave the word the most mongrel and elastic language ever, and the person who shows us who we are, now eschewing it all to turn us from a 1st rate Britain into a 3rd rate China.

The commodification of everything has put a stick in the spokes of what it is to be human. As Frank Zappa said, American culture can be summed up as “What’s the bottom line?”

So kids are driven to careers which will soon be swallowed up by the leviathan of AI, or A1 as US Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls it.

Yes, she of the WWE.

An art scene that is purely market-driven to decorate the foyers of large banks and the preposterous homes of those who toil in them, in order to show off their great taste they neither have nor are even interested in acquiring. 

"I mean, they must be good. I paid a fortune for them!"

Our differences which were fascinating and wonderful are eroding. Those old colloquialisms found all over the British Isles, subtly different accents from town to town, have become disappeared or are disappearing fast thanks to radio, TV and now the internet.

For example you rarely hear rural Buckingham or Kent accents any more. They've been replaced by estuary English.

Those almost incomprehensible accents I heard at school have softened to become a broad Mummerset.

I listened to a fantastic podcast the other day which explains how social media has essentially fucked us up. 

That it was all going so well and the future was rosy, until in 2006 Facebook introduced the Like button and Twitter the opportunity to retweet...

PICK YOUR BINARY SIDE AND START HURLING INSULTS!

It’s really worth listening to.

We live in a world where a narcissistic conman and reality TV star and who has aspirations to be an unenlightened despot more appropriate to Turkmenistan than a liberal democracy, is the leader of what used to be known as The Free World; enabled by immoral lickspittles whose CVs comprise solely of how far they can get their tongues up Jabba the Trump's anus.

In summary,, I'll leave you with this. 

And...breathe

So we arrive with nothing. We leave with nothing. 

It's the in between that's the difficult bit.

Well, I found it quite difficult anyway. 

My Dad who is quite wise said it's about picking where you want to be on a line with money at one end, and pleasure on the other. What are your priorities?

I think the old bugger's right.

"Hey Stud! Let's boogie!"

Went out with friends on Friday at 4pm. Came home around 10.30. I had a good time but I'm on the cusp of 56 and I don't want to have let myself down. I can be quite a show-off with a few beers inside of me, and quite dumb as well.

I think I had a good time. 

My key-demographic is now the horny pensioner. Thankfully nothing has happened in this department, and luckily with my diagnosis and living in the parental home, it should be a sufficient repellant.

Apart from that, I am running Dungeons and Dragons on Thursdays and the thrill-factor seems to be back on eleventy, which is where we want it.

We had 2 guest players this time and they enjoyed it too.

So that's good. We are back on track! Also playing Mondays, Wednesdays and the very occasional Friday.

Been playing BG3 - over a 1,000 hours just on the PC.

Reading the paper. Do you go to the columnists you either love or hate? I do. Nothing inbetween.

What's that about?

Here's something beautiful. Check out the harpsichord!

Trump - a footnote, from a YouTube commentator:

An Insurrectionist threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act??? A Draft dodger demanding he be honored with a military parade??? A Felon demanding law & order??? The irony is not lost.

An end to navel -gazing

"He was black, so he might have pulled a knife out"

I see racism's on the increase. Reform - the party for the modern Daily Express reader - seems to have more batshit crazy councillors than Labour and the Conservatives combined.

And with batshit populism on the rise everywhere, it seems to have gifted the bigoted and the dim with a green light to air their prejudices, all in the name of Free Speech.

The other day a dog walker told me her daughter lives in Bristol, and her dog was attacked by a larger dog, but because the owner was black he may have pulled a knife on her so she just had to back away.

Obviously a large out of control dog is one thing. Like the dogs in question, the owners are often a 'type' .

We think of drug-dealing gangsters, but again these can be of any ethnicity. 

Why she felt the need to mention his skin colour when the majority of knife crime is black on black, to me is just racism.

It's like when you hear the phrase 'black bastard', as though the blackness of the person's skin had any bearing on his bastardness.

That's why the police mentioned that it was a white man who drove into a crowd of Liverpool football fans, as with social media had it been even mentioned that it was a brown person, the racist mob may have descended into violence, like last summer when a disturbed teenager who it was rumoured was Muslim but it turned out was not, stabbed some children to death in a nursery in Southport. 

These are scary times we live in. It feels like we're in a powder keg and one spark on social media is all it ever needs.

And it's all part of free speech. 

Which should of course come with responsibility.

The Beautiful Cathedral City of Wells...

Wells is a proper old Medieval town - and one of the smallest cities in England. It gets its city status purely by having its own cathedral.

There are plenty of stonemasons earning a living in these here parts, so I wanted to show some of the utterly shite repairs.

Someone has presumably ticked the 'okay' box and paid money for these.

This joker's used a stone repair mix instead of mortar, and it's already failed

Same again.

Obviously some left in his bucket.

Nothing like having pride in your job is there? Could have used a sponge.

Yes, that is a Grade 1 listed 850 year old cathedral behind. But who cares?

Wrong colour, too wet, and then they just leave it.

When you can do something to a certain level of proficiency and you have pride in your work, to see crap like this, you just think "What's the point?"

What is the point of me having dedicated all these years, thousands of hours, into a craft when shit like this earns people a living?

My family are musicians. My Dad still can't understand how people who could barely play could make so much money in pop music. 

Why do a good job when the people signing it off either haven't a clue what they're looking at or just couldn't care less?

And the thing is it's everywhere. For example, look at some of the new builds and see how poor some of the bricklaying is.

It's not as difficult as you'd think to make something look right, but it does take time and concentration.

I've seen some shocking work be praised by people who should know better. Even awarded with OBEs (Other Buggers' Efforts) and conservation awards. 

What is the point, indeed.

DMing the kids at Pilton

This was hard work. I'm still pretty kernackered 5 days later. 

One and a half days of prep, then 2 days of running the game with a large group of 6 kids - age range 12-16. 

That's a big range if you think back to when you were that old.

And then throw in a bag of neuro-diversity.

The youngest had quite a high level of ADHD and by the end of the 2nd day he was really getting on the edge of everyone's tolerance, but we got through it.

I had a massive tension headache, then took one ibuprofen and slept for 11 hours. 

Ah well. It's what I live for...

Dancing?? on a Saturday???

Ugh! You bastard.

I admit, it was me, in the White Hart, last Saturday. 

Boppin' about like a right Bertie. 

I think it was grab a granny night, as we used to call them.

Some joker called me a pirate on the Facebook post. 

I can see why.

As lovely old Dick van Dyke said: 

'Sing like no one's listening; dance like no one's watching.'

Gyles Brandreth in The Times, said: 

“Stop thinking about yourself. I find this one hard. We’ve all turned our lives into one big selfie. Breaking the mirror won’t give you seven years’ bad luck; it’ll add seven years to your life because happy people live seven to ten years longer.”

Good advice I think.

But what the hell am I going to do now??

T-shirt of the week

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