98 years ago

This what Europe used to look like, tough, angry, intolerant, industrious, divided and made of cast iron. Over the years a few things have changed but the overall shape and the glowering, ugly faces remain and Britain is very much an island.

Get down from that cross, we could use the wood

My head was spinning slowly and there was the dim beginning of physical pain, just about everywhere. I decided to go out for a walk about, fill the time creatively with something, maybe take photographs and avoid the weather. Soon I was wandering on a stony, muddy beach but the dimmed pain was getting stronger and I felt panicky, coming up like a tropical storm on the horizon. Quivering as if in anti-gravity boots I stumbled, there was a warm flush, physical pain gives way to physical weakness. I have been in a car crash, it happened a few days ago but it was real, only now, much later am I beginning to feel the shock. Is that me? So desensitised, so uncoupled from feeling that I take a punch like a dinosaur. The punch is landed, the blow presses the flesh and triggers the nerves but the scream and electricity and pain travels so slowly from the source on the long and winding distance to the centre a huge portion of time elapses before anything registers. How can that be? I conclude that I'm wired up in a way that lends it's self towards the dysfunctional, perhaps it's a gift. It may have been drugs or witnessed family trauma, years of religion and cod philosophy, or being nurtured in the best working class hopelessly emotionally stunted traditions, maybe read too few or the wrong books, now I'm lost inside myself.  

Naturally I contemplated some kind of inner suicide, a easy way to run away that, in the plan, always has some pleasurable activity factored in there as a prelude to the final awful ending. A pleasant golden frame into which the unspeakable act is conveniently placed. These are generally complex, warm and foreign activities, like a holiday but with an end that's the end. They've been rolled around and developed over years, thumbed like some business contingency plan written when there was a staff surplus and a big box had to be ticked. They follow the “Star is Born” model (the black and white version) and promise the dreamer a suitable and almost dignified conclusion, “shaking off futility or just punishing somebody”, so that's about it for that. The experience is like visiting a parking lot but not being able to find your car so you have to shuffle to the exit and rely on public transport or make a quick phone call to be rescued by a family member. It's an embarrassing audition and rehearsal sequence that will not lead to a performance but the script remains familiar and well thumbed over before it's finally filed away.

Once I'd stopped trembling from the most likely age related stumble I felt better, strangely the sun came out and I started taking badly composed flimsy photographs and fiddling with the phone. It was a useful distraction but I still felt that illicit urge to run, like I was walking around with a target across my chest. I responded as per normal, turned my back on sunny highways and ideal quiet airports and went home. I self harmed with a packet of plain crisps in the kitchen, they seemed extra oily and greasy. This helped my inner loathing just a bit. Then I flopped, the couch conveniently caught me.

I don't know where stuff comes from. Perhaps I should make honest lists or fill notebooks. Here I am and I've no idea where I'm going. Life's directions has become caught up in flotsam and jetsam theories and methodology. Like yellow bath ducks or ping pong balls thrown onto the tides and now circulating around the globe, probably in the Pacific Ocean by now.

A day ahead

I’m fairly satisfied that the things going on in my head are not quite normal, however that doesn't make them uncommon, there are numbers and statistics, anecdotes and description, explanations and quite a bit of scientific and medical study out there. It's all documented. In some places the legislation has changed, moved on, taken into account the wider world of political imperatives, human rights, values and that most fickle and awkward part of this to capture and define, public opinion and taste. I'll ignore religion in this as that tends to be of little help, it's like a dam built against progress, resisting the Zeitgeist with a purpose and determination that is of course divine and beligerant. It will never help (unless the divine nature changes).

So being myself again, I'm in some supermarket, picking up things, putting them down, reading labels, putting them in the cart, feigning interest. It's all vague and embarrassing but it goes with the job, the need for constant pretence defended by a robust presentation. The hard, unspeakable part of a living out an elaborate lie. Maybe now if I'm driving a car, alone, not part of a group, a bunch, no brothers or sisters, no companions. The feel the intrusive lens remains on me, be it truth or imagined, I'm outside of my body all the time, floating and capturing the moment and feeding it all back in so that it can be dissected, judged and marked, commented on, perhaps even approved of before it sinks and drowns in that other morass. Remorse.

Back in my head there's a cacophony, unrelenting, options screaming for decisions, jousting for attention and a slice of peace. Reflection. It all passes understanding and falls backwards into misunderstanding. That's the normal, serial misunderstanding. The words I say are muzzled and muted, squeezed, coupled up saxophone notes in dim jazz clubs, a lazy tinkling cymbal or a dull economic bass thump, a foreign music that even as it's stretching ears and brain cells defies understanding. That word again, that intoxicating word spun into the interpretation in that song and that music and melody, in a bucket at the bottom of the well. In the water at the bottom of the well, deep and drowned.

I'm still making this unscripted documentary, for myself, for the sake of some superstitious drive to touch the wood at the root of the tree, for luck and vague shit, for old times sake, for a better hallucination. The ongoing delusion, the ongoing and elaborate self serving fiction. It keeps me alive, smiling, confused and lit up from within with some green ray. I will not deny myself any twinkle in my eye, I will not deny that thought, the one that came from nowhere like some lost migrating bird and as it so happens landed on my head and then in a quasi religious way, as a part of some mystical process it got inside and decided to settle there. That was the story of that thought.

I am indeed a full day ahead of myself. A privileged position that may turn out to be very useful.

Social media explained

Non-driving robot week

Odd and varied behaviour: On today's random journey I was following a Fiat Punto travelling across the Forth Bridge, suddenly a sandwich flew out of the driver's window and bounced on the road in front of me. I took the driver's action to be deliberate and I wondered quite what had led up to that action. As the sandwich sped by me I noticed that it was brown and triangular, I couldn't however distinguish the filling though I strongly suspected that it had not been to the driver's taste. Why had he thrown it out and why was he eating a sandwich whilst driving across the bridge? Of course it may be that his female copilot had been eating the sandwich and either on impulse, opportunity or as a result of some in car altercation had decided to throw it through the open driver's window and onto the wet road surface. I imagined that in the car an emergency had occurred, the sandwich, though labeled as egg and cress had, due to in factory contamination, contained traces of nuts. The driver, on his long journey from Broxburn to Inverkeithing had become hungry and requested that his companion open up the £2.50 Lite Bite Tesco sandwich and hand it over to him as he drove. She complied and handed the crumby snack over. He bit into it but within a few seconds felt a strange tightening in his throat and quickly deduced that he was on the verge of anaphalacitic shock and there and then decided to ditch the offending sandwich before it killed him. The sandwich hit the road, he however now had a small trace of nutty debris coursing through his sensitive blood stream.

That trace amount slowly closed his throat and airways and he slumped into unconsciousness across the steering wheel. The female passenger quickly grabbed the wheel and steered a straight course across the bridge to the northern lay-by where she parked up. She then had the presence of mind to give the driver a good slap and he then came round complaining of a sore throat, face and head and feeling hungry. “There's another one of those sandwiches that you like left in the packet,” she said.

More on robots

Good advice from our metal friend.

The ten golden laws of robotic diplomacy.

If you ever meet up with a wise robot please choose your words carefully. Conversations with wise mechanical men are notoriously tricky and you ensure you follow the following things that follow the final use of the word follow in this sentence, follow?

Eye contact is good, steely wrist to fleshy neck is not.

Speak clearly, avoid saliva spray, robots dislike excessive human moisture and bodily fluids, (sweaty palms can produce mild electrical shocks).

Don't put on a funny voice.

Don't do a funny 80's dance or adopt a comedy robot gait.

Don't offer up a can of oil as if it was some kind of acceptable beverage.

Just act as normally as you can if you are any kind of slightly ill at ease middle-aged person who's never quite come to terms with the hand of cards that life has dealt you.

Try no to speak in mathematical formulae or binary code.

Most robots consider Japanese to be their mother tongue, learn it.

Don't try to plug any mobile appliances you may be carrying into any of the robot's ports. This can cause serious offence.

Robots aren’t stupid, don't address them as if they are washing machines or other white goods (and why are you talking to washing machines in the first place?).

Gossip about Bender and any of the cast of Futurama is a good icebreaker.

A warm room does soothe the circuits, check out the environment and get the ambiance right first time.

If the robot offers you a snack made up mostly of iron filings then he/she is only having a laugh.

In robot etiquette it is quite acceptable to leave a slightly greasy stain on a chair or carpet.

That's about all I know.

Ensure you insure

Late in the day we explore the possibility of once again getting it all straight and legal, always a tough call. Words that seem to be just a shade short of right and appropriate, but we must keep within an inch or less of the law and the ideas that pour forth from that idea. After all we are respectable, reliable and up to a point safe and bankable. That can't be said for everybody. So there is no point obsessing about it, you make your call or click or whatever and choose one of a million options, the one that somehow covers your basic needs, has a nice name or a pleasant logo and fits with that number you thought of when there was still time left in which to think. You can just about remember it. Enter the magic numbers and the security code and you're in and gone. Two months later you get a cuddly toy in the post. Simple.

Stay in shape

Things have changed. It was a huge shop window, brightly lit in a headache inducing way, whites, bright pinks, wild oranges and hot purples circled and bounced into the corners, lights pooled and swam, it was a show, even empty, bereft of product. It was all daring, distracting and hypnotic but my gaze and attention wouldn't hold. I was far to hungry to be entertained or enticed. Food was my current preoccupation, not the joy of art or design and filling spaces. Food was becoming a background obsession, playing on my consciousness like that stupid light show, I was feeling hungry, in and out of shapes.

Shapes are everywhere, here, there, all around, the universe is full of shapes, made up of shapes, I am a shape and I must maintain that shape or at least control it. With shape and self awareness comes responsibility, what actual shape to aspire to? Which one to choose and maintain?

I looked away from those hungry windows and their vapid but tantalising colours, across great paved areas, blank spaces set for vehicles and traffic, green lines for pedestrians, signs and awkward bollards, trees blocked in by regulation, more shapes and boundaries and definitions. I observed my own shape fitting in with the others, my shadow stepping across the surfaces, my eyes measuring and grading spaces and dimensions. Sizing up and taking account of the space, sensing as if through giant whiskers that touched the far walls, the concrete and the road noise that rose from behind the masked barriers. I am here, this shape in space.

And then she comes in to my outside space, talking, talking already without any invitation, telling me things and insisting, a threatening and enticing shape, a shape that pulls me out of shape, automatically. I decide to just stay in this orbit, to fix my reference points, to focus on myself and ignore but the joints and linkages are weak and things seep through. I stay in my orbit, tainted but revolving and with no small effort retained my shape.

Time travel made easy

It was when I was a very small boy that I first learned about time travel as a possible workable concept and potential career. I was intrigued by how it might be manipulated. I was of course stubborn and ignorant but also driven and destructive. So at first I took the simple route, I stopped clocks, holding back their mechanisms with pieces of cardboard so they strained for a tiny second and then fell silent. I would also remove the batteries from the new fangled electric clocks, then on clocks without face glass I'd catch the hands, cruelly twisting them together, like tying the legs of a pony so they stuck at some useless hours. Cheap watches were hit with hammers, expensive watches had their winders removed, that worked best, they died a slow, wound down death. I liked that and I liked the unpredictable nature of it. Of course all I was doing was stopping the measure of time and pretending that gave me some kind of power over time. Of course it didn't, for every clock or watch I quietly knobbled there were a million more ticking up or down the measured mile of time. I needed to find something that would work on a bigger scale, or something that worked on a smaller scale, affecting only me. For my young hungry mind it was a perplexing, taxing but addictive conundrum.

My breakthrough came as I watched rainwater splashing down and across the rooftop gulleys from my bedroom window. I studied the flow, the downward direction, the twists in the routes, the separation of streams that then met again and came together. The pools and puddles, the tick, the drip, the splash of each shower's downpour on the roof pattern. It was whilst watching these dancing but constrained and relentless waters that I formed my first theory about the flow and fluidity of time. It was there, always moving, always finding a level, always travelling, all you had to do was get into that flow. Once in it you could run against it, go with it or run ahead of it. It was just a matter of choosing your direction and, critically deciding on how much effort you needed to expend.

My first few attempts were clumsy and funny, like a lost dog swimming, I splashed and got nowhere, I couldn't separate myself from the curse of now. I treaded water and time mastered me. But I was determined and I persevered. The words of my old grandfather came back to me many times as I practised, “You'll never become anything unless you break out of the mainstream, quitters don't win and winners don't quit.” I wouldn't quit.

My non-scientific reasoning told me that flows were strongest when time played tricks, at night, on the solstice, at dawn, at dusk or noon. These were the key times when time itself was busy, preoccupied, distracted, caught up with it's own ends and purposes. If I could break in there, at one of these weak points I could enter the flow and navigate a passage from my self forwards or backwards or in the nowhere time. Maybe I could make time time stand still. That would be my first trick, like stopping all those clocks but this time not mechanically but from the inside, from the heart of time, from the stream.

It required a hearty breakfast, a careful choice of footwear and a good deal of concentration – focus. It was noon (or a minute before), time's attention was elsewhere,this was a key moment. I focused, stood still, my back to the sun and inwardly perceived the flow. It was in me, around me, all over me. I held out a weak open palm and slowly, as the seconded counted down closed my fingers into a fist all around the flow of time. I closed my eyes and pulled tight on the flow, like holding back a straining, stupid puppy dog on a lead. I gripped it, I held it. I felt the breath leave my lungs, I felt a grey draining, I heard the stopping of the clocks as time scrapped on the bottom of the tiny reef I had created. It has stopped but I hardly dared to look out.

I didn't want to lose my concentration but I had to see what was happening. I decided to blink. Blink slowly that is and only letting tiny slivers of light in. I had to keep concentrating and that took a surprising amount of effort. I was after all holding a whole lot of time in my whitening knuckles, a whole lot of time.

Our glorious past

She was talking to her friend across the top the wide and stormy surface of the two champagne glasses, the bubbles rose, dispersed and defused into the conversation, their pink tinge shadowing the words, underlining the points and occasionally, when oxygen was paused for and breathe sucked in, added their own drunken punctuation. “There is nothing at all wrong with that previous sentence”, said the dark haired lady, “I simply wanted to remind you of the great heritage to which we belong, years of activity, expression, theatre and glamour, stretching back into the black, the white, the sepia. The squeals and the traditions, it's all there, exciting and fascinating for us, entrancing for them”. Up popped a bubble. “We can't afford not to maintain the standard of our predecessors’, or even exceed them, the drugs do work.” She giggled as the bubbles burst and she snapped a finger at the young, ginger waiter. She said nothing just momentarily met his eye and pointed a long finger down towards the glass. The boy nodded and spun off towards the dark and mysterious place in the cafe, behind the bar.

“This career has made me a snob and I love it for that, it's done more for me than any man...or woman, I owe it something”. A fresh bottle arrived pristine in a bright white stem ironed napkin, the neck spurting a faint fog as it was tilted and poured. There was no conversation. “A toast!” Declared the blonde lady, “To a glorious past and richer, finer future!” They giggled and there was a brief silence as the drank from the flutes in a well practiced move that avoided wetting the lips or smudging the lipstick. “...And darling, I will not be eating this afternoon as I have such a schedule, such a time and my shape and that is my livelihood to look after...as ever in the grandest style.”

From his station the waiter watched the two converse, occasionally scanning the tables for new customers or signals for attention. Today, this afternoon things were quiet, a light drizzle was falling, the pavement cafes were chewing on the remaining clientele, it was nearing the end of the season, the leaves had lost the summer sheen and were beginning to wrinkle. His gaze returned to the two women, he focused on their necks, the early wrinkles, stretches, tones and pale skin, half hidden by scarves and collars. Then he looked up and saw as a single leaf fell from a tree branch that was stretched across the cafe sunshade, it floated lazily down from above, almost floating from side to side like a parachute and then with it's own strangely determined trajectory landed gently in the champagne glass of the dark haired lady. Time was passing.

Curse of the floating head

Sometimes you just get completely detached from things, it can happen in the strangest of places.

166

Ode to the 166: Trucking along the M9 or some other such number I saw it on the hard shoulder, stopped still, hazard lights blinking meekly, unable to move. A silver 03 plate Alfa Romeo 166, a rare car, a rare sight on the road and possibly a vehicle I might very well have owned had I not got cold feet and walked away from the sale at the last minute of the last second of the eleventh hour. The sight provoked mixed feelings as I rolled by in the less well designed, less stylish, much more common but nonetheless still moving along the motorway Volvo.

The faded beauty of those silver wings

The Moma leather and the little things

Carabinieri blue or racing red

Stylistic pictures in your head

As silky smooth as Sophia Loren

Soft suspension that clings tight through the bend

But there's this broken cam-belt true love cant fix

Bent valves and steam as the oil and water mix

So I'm glad I dodged the 166.