Disguised as a non-demented

Missing life much?

Watching endless YouTube clips on strange and unusual animals, Trump's America, the Epstein list, atheism vs theism, rugby league, Cab Calloway, Lindy Hopping, convergent evolution and some gaming channels.

I then look at the paper. The culture section looks interesting. I wonder what it would be like to go to the theatre. When was the last time I went to an art gallery?

I wish I could just pop out of this fug and rejoin society again.

Then I think, what the hell would I do? And I realise that with my inert executive functions I ultimately have no desire to do much of anything and would be of little use to anyone.

I felt normal

While walking Tomos in The Bishop's Fields I met a woman walking her dog, but she wasn't from round here and her dog was nervous in a new place. I assured her it was safe and it was fine to take the lead off.

So we made conversation and walked round the fields, letting the dogs play and meeting other dogs on the way. 

I went to Niche and acted normal.

No one suspected a thing!

No one suspects a thing.

Then I came home and  for the first time in ages and felt sad. 

Here I am, stuck here, unable to work, no will to do anything, missing the humans and the dogs (my god, I dream about the dogs!) and trying to keep my faculties as sharp as they can be.

For 95% of the time I barely feel any up or down emotions these days. 

That’s the Sertraline. 

If I’m stressed I come out in hives. 

Other than that, I’m so relaxed I’m almost supine.

Looking up

I look at the clouds and their shapes. Today cumulonimbus; yesterday, angels.

The modern system for classifying and naming clouds is largely based on the work of Luke Howard, a London pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, who proposed a system in 1802. 

I guess they were just ‘clouds’ up until this point.

It’s also round about this time that the apostrophe was introduced into English punctuation. 

Must have been the fashion to complicate stuff.

Anyway...

I look at the roof tops, the chimney stacks, the slates, the windows and their surrounds, the colours, the pointing, the brickwork or stonework or render. I look at the plants, the flowers, the trees, the people, the birds, the dogs, the shop windows, the floor; everything

I sniff the air (even through my rubbish sinuses) and try to concentrate on the scents of flowers to the smell of wet tarmac. 

I listen to everything - near and far - and try to decode it, picking out the distant hum of the jet planes and the cars, to the thudding and screeching of building work.

I look at the light and shadows on the land. I look up again at the sky to see if we are due shade or sunlight with any passing clouds.

I look at Tomos, and in my mind ask him to forgive me if I've been distracted. After all, I'm there to enjoy the moment with him, like he does every for every second of his life.

Inside 18th and 14th century brains

A couple of posts ago I mentioned Kubrick’s 1975 film, Barry Lyndon.

The critics at the time bemoaned its coldness  - or in 21st century parlance its lack of 'relatability'.

James Marriott wrote about the movie recently having - of course - researched this period very thoroughly. 

The 18th century was on the verge of the ages of industrialisation and enlightenment. 

It is an age of colossal wage disparity (rarely mentioned in those tedious costume dramas) where the majority of the population were agricultural labourers who starved for much of the time, and where the landed classes had astonishingly complex and unspoken rules of etiquette, where the distance you stood from each other, your bow, and in what order was a minefield. 

Laughter was considered impolite; an affected titter was all that was acceptable.

The elite viewed the those beneath them as sub-human, rather like the ultra-rich do today.

Life was cheap and random acts of cruelty were the order of the day. 

Putting cats on bonfires and hearing them scream was a popular past time, considered the height of hilarity.

Again, there has been a recent upsurge in the torture of cats, which is another strange correlation with the 18th century.

The coldness of the people in the film is a result of Kubrick’s exhaustive research. It was a period between the feudal and the industrial, and evidently very alien.

I’ve always loved a series called Inside the Medieval Mind which was originally on the Open University. 

One thing that stuck in my mind the Mapa Mundi - one of the oldest maps of the then known world. It it square, and has at its centre Jerusalem - the Holy Land being the centre of the world. On the perphery of the map are the dog-headed men.

Whether they existed was not the question - it was a given. 

The question of the day was do they have the soul of a dog or the soul of a man? 

If they have the souls of men, then they could be converted to Christianity and missionaries would be sent out to do so.

If they have the soul of a dog they can’t.

Their world was totally supernatural.

I sometimes imagine having the ability to go back in time. Even if we could speak as they did, how would we have navigated the unspoken societal rules?

I’d have been burned at the stake within hours of touch-down. 

That's enough Blues-Rock for one lifetime

At Wells Beer Festival on Friday. God it was loud, heavy meal pumping out from the speakers. 

I asked Jan as soon as I got there “Is this din going on all night?” 

Smiling, he said, “Yes.”

So I had my headphones on, and then the band started. ‘Fire’ by Jimi Hendrix, some Led-Zeppelin, some Cream, etc etc.

I loved this type of music from an early age, but I’ve really had enough of it.

60 years of this type of music being played by what seems like the majority of pub bands. 

I’m sick of second rate Zeppelin or Cream impersonators.

I hear other genres of music are available.

Great TV can also be trash

When I was in the 6th form at school, out of the 4 channels, Channel 4 could be relied on to provide interesting alternatives to the other 3.

One of the programmes they aired was The Gong Show, a late 70s US  - and it could only be the US that produced this particular programme - talent show which is still one of the craziest I’ve ever seen.

It features some of the most bizarre acts, with a live band (as they all did back in the day), a panel who physically beat a gong if the acts sucks, regulars such as The Unknown Comic and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. 

The whole show was just a giant anarchic party. 

Such a tonic. 

When I watch it I have a fixed grin from start to finish. 

Howard's Way

Simon Park who composed and played this theme for the appalling 80s serial also did the Eastenders theme.

A great talent for viral irritation.

Here are the lyrics which must have been in Simon's head as he composed the shite.

Howard's way.

It's always Howard's way.

He always gets his way.

Bloody Howard's way....etc

Games Holiday 2024

But what is the meaning of the word ‘Spam’?

I’ve made it, baby!

 I’m so popular now that i got my first piece of Spam in the comments. It’s marked a turning point in my career.

Um, Actually, it hasn’t. It hasn’t done anything of the kind. 

I thought I would be deluged, but no. 

Disappointment.

Spam ain’t what it was.

Adrian still eats this.

At least there’s still lots of young women with no clothes on who like my Instagram photos.

Life in a Cotswolds Farmhouse

It’s Wednesday evening. With the exception of being driven to Tescos, I haven’t actually left the farmhouse since arriving here on Friday. I don’t really do anything like the strategic wargaming or bored-games that everyone else seems to like. I ran a Mutant Crawl Classics game for 4 1/2 hours the other day. That was bonkers and hard-work. I was absolutely drained at the end.

In the game, the characters are living a stone-age existence in a world similar to Earth, the climate is tropical, the sun large and red, the sky a teal/turquoise and the moon is replaced by a large crescent over the horizon. The object of the game is a rites-of-passage where you must go to ancient fantastic places and retrieve artifacts, which can be as mundane as thermos flasks or as fantastical as plasma rifles. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The trouble with RPGs - you have to rehearse and revise and be on top of the entire story you’re running for that session or it can be crap.

Luckily no one wanted to play it again. 

Sometimes you can wing it and it will be great, but I have less confidence I’ll be able to pull that one off. I have less capacity to absorb information these days (it was never great)  and to recall said information on cue.

Went for a pub lunch on Thursday. I couldn’t work out the taste of the burger - it was either excessively salty or excessively burnt. 

I did some role-playing for an hour as Hubert H Humphrey as the precursor to a wargame that I wasn’t a part of. I enjoyed the role-playing though. 

In another D&D game I play an incredibly camp Bard who I’m trying to keep different from Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s fun. 

Traveller has a science-fiction setting in which I play an Australian doctor and wellness consultant obsessed with people’s nutrition, forcing Brussel sprout and mung bean smoothies on them at inappropriate moments. 

Spending a lot more time on my own. That’s just my nature nowadays though. 

Read the Saturday Times. That was a pleasure. Giles Coren, Janice Turner, James Marriott, and also the awful Gerard Butler, just because I can’t believe how truly awful he is.

Even The Times seems to be embarrassed about him, omitting the link to his column in the paper’s Comments section.

The literary critic hails The Shipping News by Annie Proux, a truly great novel bursting with flavour on every page. Nice to have my good taste confirmed.

We stay up late to recall past players and friends, some of whom are no longer with us in life, and others who were too obnoxious to be invited back. 

We try and decipher someone’s curmudgeonliness, then laugh at our own. 

Good times. 

We are a 14 yard skipful of neuroses.

I’m loving staying in bed. It’s much better than walking around looking for things to do. Just staying here so comfortable and warm with my thoughts. 

Oh well, I suppose I’d better be social…

Brix and Me

So I’ve been looking at videos of The Fall who I didn’t like very much. I first came across them at Maidstone College of Art sharing a house with some fine artists.

I saw an interview with Mark E Smith and at that moment the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen (I was 19) and that was Brix, his wife.

80s beauty

When she was in the band they were at their best.

Oh, the life we could have had.

So that was in a way, quite depressing.

Really pretty small blonde women with beautiful big smiles. Most of whom turned out were Jewish.

Do I have a type? I certainly did back then. 

It’s weird to think ‘that’s it‘ on the relationship front.

I don’t think I could have one anymore as it’s not fair on the other to burden them with the illness and also what do they get out of it?

And I just want to be left alone for hours at a time.

But I don’t think that last bit is anything to do with the illness. 😜

Mark E Smith and me

So I then watched lots of Fall songs and clips of interviews. I watched him eviscerate the ever fawning Lauren Laverne. I enjoyed that. 

Rediscovering through streaming sites or Youtube all that music we turned our noses up at or didn’t understand back in the day.

But he was needlessly rude and cruel to so many people, with fights on stage and a revolving door of band members.

What a diet of booze, fags and speed does to you.

He was a fascinating character. He didn’t sing but he could, he wasn’t a poet, but more of a performance artist. He was loyal to Salford, bitter about Northern industrial decline but also wallowing in the grime and depression of it, a tyrant to his band, a narcissist who cared nothing for people’s approval, a refreshingly original thinker who called things out not to toe the trend but because it was true as he saw it.

Self-destructive, charismatic, a one-off.

Charisma beats looks - which is what attracted Brix to him.

The world needs people like Mark E Smith.

Glad I never met him.

Smalltown Attitude

Maybe I should rename this blog. Sounds like a punk fanzine from the 80s.

Maybe it was.

Gossipy little places where people talk a thousand miles an hour about people you don’t know and don’t care about. 

People’s lives often begin at home and end at the town or village’s boundaries.

And everyone’s mad at my age. Half given-up, half fed-up. Shaking your head in either despair or laughter.

God…

That’s what dreams are for, I guess. Me and Brix living the life…

…in Shepton.