True wisdom

Kim Jong-un's note takers just write gibberish for effect. To make the not so great man look greater, to perpetuate the myth that he is forever producing wise quips and pointers, a flow of original ideas, good practise and inspirational thinking that, for the greater good of the Korean people and the wider world must not be lost. He really knows how to do things. Just hold a mirror to his lips to see if he actually breathes, he may be dead or a machine. I just about know how to make a passable cup of coffee, where to look on Autotrader and how to unwrap a McVities Digestive Medley biscuit. I know about snacks and quality time on a laptop or the phone. Precious moments of self indulgence when nothing really happens other than the ritualistic wasting of that most precious but undervalued item, time. Time to yourself, snooze time or reading or dreaming time. Time perhaps to remove you shoes and try to tickle your own feet, hot and tired as they probably are. Some people see time as a story, a curve or an arc in the universe and all of us, apart from Dr Who walk along it, or are at least on it, travelling together in the same way. Heads up or down on this elongated pilgrimage, determined to spend our days doing what we like or what we feel to be right. Looking out for our fellow travellers and helping them with their heavy loads. That's the burden time gives us all. Shovelling shit, earning a crust, creating stuff or horsing around. That relentless ticking and candle burning that spills us out into the great endeavour of just getting by.  We fall in love, we get angry, hungry, frustrated, but the clock can't be stopped and the long march drags on. The trouble is that we soon realise that the long march isn't so long, it's all quite finite and really rather short. All those diagrams of time that stretch it out and show our lives and civilisations as a fleck of paint, a messy stain or a tear drop around midnight's final seconds on the 31st of December. That's how much we mean. Where is your good cup of coffee, your well presented pet, your straight shelf, your soufflé or your wondrous academic achievements? Where are your friends and family, your neat cupboards, your manicured lawn or your beach holidays? Probably captured, in random phrases and works, in Korean script or bad English in Kim Jong-un's great library of notebooks. For indeed as the Dali-Lama, Steven King or Heinrich Himmler might have said; “all true wisdom is somewhere and I'm fucked if I know where that somewhere is so it must be someplace and why would it not be there, in the notebooks of Mr Kim Jong-un.”