About seven years ago I discovered a talent for soothing babies and rocking them off to sleep. Either it has something to do with flexing the knees at exactly the right speed or it has something to do with offering to hold the baby at exactly the right moment - when it is susceptible to being pacified. I used to mostly think the former but in my cynical dotage I'm tending much more to the latter view these days. In any case I got to really enjoy holding babies. Partly I was enjoying challenging the stereotypes and encouraging other males to participate in childcare by setting an example, and partly it was the simple pleasure of providing comfort to the child, obviously, but also to their parent(s) since a calm baby is better than a screaming one. I remember being mocked (by a mother; I'm afraid there is a gender war on and it's important to clarify which attacks come from which side) that if I really enjoyed it then I should do it full time. This was one of those incredibly rare moments when I had an answer ready because I'd already gone down that line of thought. And my answer was that I'd love to do that but I simply couldn't afford to since hands-on one-to-one childcare like that is never going to pay anything like as much as I earn (and, I kid myself, need in order to pay the mortgage and support my family).
Five years ago that enjoyment of holding babies took a dent when my daughter made it abundantly clear that she hated being held by me (or being with me in any shape or form). But other babies still enjoyed my rocking and I still enjoyed holding them, so the feeling largely stayed. And I suppose it still does though I get to do it less often. But whereas that enjoyment of caring for babies developed along with my own babies, it hasn't developed into an enjoyment of caring for primary school-aged children as my own kids have reached that age. I'm certainly not going to be volunteering to run a Sunday school class any time soon, and would rather do crèche any day.
Now, that all sounds fine and cool - different people have different talents, and of those with a talent for looking after kids, some will be good with babes-in-arms, some with primary-agers, some with tweenagers and so on. But it's not actually fine, it's actually a bit of a problem. Because it means, more or less, that I don't actually enjoy being with my kids. And that's not so cool.
This week I happen to be getting to watch a lot of TV, which is quite unusual and, consequently, a novel pleasure. And one thing I happened to see was a video of that cliché, the middle-aged dad who doesn't understand his teenage son. It was an advert so it was fairly abbreviated, concentrated cliché, so we had the son playing loud music on his stereo and the dad shouting at him to turn it down. Then we had the son playing guitar and the dad leaving the room, and later of course we had the son performing a gig to an adoring audience to demonstrate how successful he was in his chosen métier. And of course, everyone watching that was screaming at the dad to see how stupid he was being and to stop and listen to his son and understand things from his point of view. (Why, incidentally, is it so clearly the dad that's in the wrong? Is there no rôle for the son in the necessary reconciliation? Funny the things that occur to you once you become a parent.)
Now, of course, it's all supposed to be symbolic and the music/guitar playing is just a standard symbol of teenage rebellion. The problem is I (and I suspect I'm not alone in this) have a literalist mind, so to me the son is actually playing a guitar, not performing some icon of rebellion. As such it seems easy and obvious for the dad to actually stop and enjoy the music and, thus, build up the necessary rapport with his son. What I can't get my head round is how objectionable a guitar can be to someone of sufficient age. (Perhaps I'm biassed by the recollection of my mum listening to me playing music when I was a teenager and her saying "I can't stand this guitar strumming music" when actually the instrument playing was an organ with no guitar in the mix at all. Or perhaps I'm biassed by being an occasional guitar player myself. Whatever). I can't really comprehend the dad's difficulties in this scenario. I can't make the jump from literal to symbol.
But slowly I'm beginning to understand. To take one example, my son has a book about dragons. It lists dozens of different species of dragon, and details each one, pretending to be like those wildlife books that help you tell your great tit from your stupid tit and so on. For some reason (perhaps because of the association with RPGs, perhaps the proximity to science-fiction) I can't stand this book. But my son reads it and then wants to tell me every conceivable detail about the difference between the kangaroo dragon and the kimono dragon, their eating, mating and toilet habits, and a thousand other things. And I can't stand it; I just want to leave. As I said, that is one example and there are, unfortunately, dozens of others.
I can enjoy spending time with my kids, but (it seems) only if I get to be talking to them about science or music, or other things that I want them to know about. Ha - I almost wrote there "things that I think they'll be interested in". I stopped because even I can see the fallacy of that. Some of what I say they will be interested in, but my whole problem is that I have no patience for listening to them tell me about stuff they are really interested in, like dragons. I am a dad, I am that dad.
That cliché-ridden ad at least makes it easy to see the son's point of view. My experience with the dragons makes the dad's point of view overwhelming clear too. So, if the traditional view is right then I guess I have no choice - I either get with the dragons or slowly lose my son. Great. Ok, tell me about the wyvern again and I'll try and fight my boredom.
There's a song about happiness which I quite like but which my wife doesn't, because, I think, she finds it childish. To my mind it's about taking pills (probably legally, but possibly not) as a means of curing unhappiness, and it's a reflection, or even a rant, about the shallowness that can lead people to doing that or recommending it for others. I hear the singer as a patient being offered anti-depressants and parodying the doctor as saying "Do you want to be happy?", and rejecting the implied viewpoint that being happy is all that matters in life. This interpretation is partly based on knowledge I have of the singer and the fact that he's struggled with depression. This knowledge leads me to interpret the lyrics one way, and read into them things which, objectively, aren't there. Objectively it is simply a song extolling the virtues of being happy. That simple extolling is all my wife hears and why she thinks it's rather less than profound.
To be honest I'm not so much concerned about what the song is supposed to mean. I am selfish so I don't particularly care what the singer meant; all that matters is what the song says to me, and to me it's an anti-happy-pill rant, and I'm happy(!) with that.
What interests me is how the context (my knowledge of the singer's mental health) affects my interpretation of the song, and whether I'm then actually responding to the song at all, or whether I'm just responding to what I know of the singer. And does that make it, actually, a really badly written song? For surely a well-written song should actually say something itself rather than rely on other sources to communicate? If I write a song with a lyric that simply repeats the word "naminanu" then it probably wouldn't mean much to you. But if I spread the word that "naminanu" is a word that American soldiers used in Vietnam to describe the moral vacuum they perceived in their intervention in that country, then the song would acquire much more meaning. But it isn't actually the song that has that meaning, in the same way that the song which I listened to while reading about the deaths of 200 people has become a very sad song to me in a way that has nothing to do with the intentions of the people who wrote the song.
The happy song is a simple case but I'm mulling it over to shed light a) on various songs by a band I like which, I realize, are good songs ruined by awfully-written lyrics, and b) on why most chorus writers seem to feel no need to write a decent lyric, and c) on whether my inability to understand or even parse half the lyrics I hear is due to my ineffable ignorance or due to them simply being badly written.
I didn't publish it here, nor anywhere else. Not even a single person has read it because it is so bitter. It rants against what seems to be a fundamental cock-up in the way the world is, or evidence, as Depeche Mode put it, that God has a sick sense of humour. I don't even know that it should have been written down. Writing things down often, for me at least, clarifies them and helps me see whether they are reasonable or risible. But this time it's left me in a quandary. What I've written seems reasonable - the evidence of the situation seems fairly clear to me. But if I accept it and act on it then that would require flatly contradicting several other principles that I take as self-evident. If, on the other hand, I'm to keep those principles, then I should suppress these contradictory thoughts. So which is it to be - that which I believe in, or that which my eyes tell me? Put like that I can recognize an age-old dilemma. Well at least that gives me an excuse for not knowing the answer.
It was the scariest book I've ever read. I read a lot of "horror" stuff in my late teens (including, to my shame, Stephen King's complete works up to that point) all of which I just laughed at - the only horror they contained was stylistic. The only thing that came close to being as scary was "How late it was how late" which was truly disturbing. (And brilliant, by the way. Jim Kelman comes across as a complete paranoiac in recent interviews talking of the London intelligentsia's patronizing attitude to anything north of Watford, but when you read that book, and then compare it with all the fuss the press made when it was published about the language, then you see that actually he's talking a lot of sense. And when the paranoids are the ones talking sense ....)
How late is actually a good point of comparison because the book I read those years ago, whose name or author I have no recollection of, was about a deaf lad. What felt really significant was this lad had the same name as me. I have always had a problem of identifying too strongly with protagonists in novels (except in those books which are so 1-dimensional as to prevent a 3-dimensional person getting inside any of their characters' heads). That's great for getting an emotional punch from a book, but not good for one's sanity. Anyway, somehow the isonymous protagonist made the book more uncomfortable for me than otherwise - it felt like the book had become a prophecy - the idea of a deaf me was inescapable.
I could cling on to the objective facts that I wasn't deaf, but they offered just as little comfort as the idea that when on a precipice I need not jump - objective and factual possibly, but meaningless and pathetic nevertheless.
And now that I have deficient hearing I find that book coming back to haunt me. I don't know if my hearing is going downhill - it may just be a result of all the gigs I went to in my late teens (see, I did something worthwhile with my time back then (well, okay, don't ask me what gigs I went to - I need to look after what little street-cred I may still have)), and it may just be that I'm noticing it now more than I used to, or even just that I'm less in denial about it than I was. Or it may be that it's getting progressively worse and that that prophecy is coming true. That's not a nice thought, but I wonder if this interim stage is actually worse. It's really quite silly, but I'm realizing that a major concern of mine is how stupid I must seem to people, because quite often my responses to what they say don't make much sense at all, or sound like I'm not all there. Whereas it's simply that I haven't been able to discern what they actually said. After you've asked people to repeat themselves once or twice, and especially if you haven't had the nerve to ask in the first place, and you can't understand, then what do you do? My answer, which is certainly not a great one, is you fumble. You mutter something inaudible, or vague, or you smile vacantly. That, at least, comes quite naturally to me.
Either way you get yet more confirmation of your feeling that you're not connecting with people, that you're isolated, that loneliness is closing in on you even in the times when you're surrounded by friends. And you end up feeling that John Donne was quite wrong.
Truth is important to me. I prefer to be honest, partly because I can't cope with the chess games of inventing a plausible lie and then making sure that everything else I say consistently fits with that lie, and partly because I struggle to tell when other people are lying. In fact I mostly get round that problem using quantum mechanics. Just as Schrodinger's cat could be simultaneously alive and dead so, when certain people tell me something, my brain bifurcates and holds two conflicting notions - the one that I've been told, and the logical negation of that. If I ask person A who ate my cake, and they say it was person B, then my brain seems quite happy to hold on to both the idea that B ate it, and the idea that A is lying and so probably A ate it. Experience gives me a balance of probabilities to assign to these two outcomes - for some people I have a 90% expectation of being lied to, for others it's a 90% chance of them telling the truth. And, just as in physics, sometimes the probabilities collapse and the truth is established. But often it's not, and I just go on not knowing. I suppose that not knowing has become a very familiar state to me and I seem to cope with it very well. (Or maybe not - maybe this permanent dissonance is why I'm completely screwed up. I don't know, so I'll go on considering both options and their relative probabilities).
I don't know if my dislike of lies dates back to this occurrence, or whether it was already present then, but there must be some strong connection, because this experience is so firmly etched in my mind. I'd done something silly and, to cover up, I'd lied to my mum about it. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, she'd been told the truth by someone else. So she challenged me, albeit half-heartedly I think. For various reasons I lied again - I said the other person must have been lying. So far, so depressingly mundane and so mundanely depressing. Now I don't really know what my mum thought - maybe she believed me (and don't mothers usually want to believe their own offspring?) or maybe she knew better. I'll never know for sure now, but at the time I was certain that she didn't believe me. So I knew my lie wasn't convincing her, and yet I felt it was important for me to keep up my pretence. Somehow it seemed important for me to maintain the lie even though she knew I was lying, and I knew she knew I was lying. I remember feeling that very strongly, even though I couldn't remotely understand why, and still can't.
Perhaps it's that incomprehension that's why I'm still concerned about that occasion. But perhaps it's the dissonance between what both parties believed and what they said. I often feel like I'm on the receiving end of that sort of thing - there were many times in my childhood where my brother would lie, either to my face or to my parents, and I would know that he was lying and that he knew it. And even when it was just me, if I told him I knew he was lying he would deny it. He knew, I knew, and he knew that I knew, but he would deny it. Of course he was sensible (in a way) to deny it: by doing so there was a chance he could convince me, but also it was a way he could achieve the usual fraternal aim of destroying his sibling. By creating such a clear cognitive dissonance he could mess with my head. After all, maybe that's why I'm so screwed up now.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately not just because of searching for the reasons for why I'm in such a mess, but also because someone is lying quite vehemently to me at the moment. But unlike those earlier occasions, this time I know the liar is actually deluded. Which, I suppose, means he's not actually lying. Hmm, as I write this I can see a further layer of irony to it all. As I said, I tend to interpret what people say to me in a quantum way, holding contradictory assertions in my head, just with different probabilities. That being the case, what would I say if you asked me who ate my cake? I'm not sure, but it seems quite possible that I'd give one answer one minute, and an opposite answer shortly afterwards, because I will have mulled things over in between times and quite possible adjusted the probabilities for each in the light of that mulling. Which is what I've observed my deluded friend to do quite often: many times I've seen him say two flatly contradictory things to different people within the space of about 10 minutes. And the thing is he's actually something of an expert in quantum mechanics, so it's really quite likely that he has the same approach to believing what he's told as I do. So not only do my childhood's experiences confirm the horrible thought that I am like (and as bad as) my brother, but I can't escape the fact that I am also like my deluded friend.
As I said above, truth is important to me. And that is, of course, what any good liar tends to say.
More specifically, I read the album title "tapes & tapes" and interpreted the first word as a synonym of cassette, and the second as the Catalan form of the Castillian word tapas. I was intrigued by the suggested mix of music and food until I realized that this was undoubtedly not the intended meaning. Am I the only person capable of reading the same word in the same sentence in my own native language and misinterpreting it so obscurely?
At least I still think I was. We had been asked to write something, the details of which now escape me, perhaps it was a dictation although that doesn't seem likely. Anyway, we had been asked to write something, and now we were asked to swap with the person next to us, and mark their work. So I marked the stuff my pal Sam had written. (At this point it seems worth pondering the fact that Sam was the only non-caucasian in the class and he was my best mate. At the time I thought nothing of that, but some years later, when I realized how unbelievably racist my parents are, I wondered at the seeming paradox that by being so pally with Sam I seem to have not inherited any of my parents bigotry. Maybe it really is a paradox (albeit one admitting a simple explanation, namely that racism isn't genetic). Or maybe my parents aren't actually as bad as I perceive them to be. Or maybe just racism is subtler than I'm giving it credit for. I suppose the typical racist holds that people of other races are generally bad (in racially-specific ways), but that there can be exceptions, and meeting one individual of a different race, getting to know them and like them and seeing that they are genuinely good, is entirely compatible with maintaining the view that their race are generally all bad. In other words maybe I'm just as unbearably racist as my parents.) So, I marked Sam's work. And in one sentence he had written "slooped" where, clearly, it should have been "stooped". The t hadn't been crossed, so I put a red cross by it and docked a mark. That should have been the end of the story, but later when the teacher checked our marking she saw what I'd done and told me off, because I'd put a cross where Sam had correctly written "stooped". I don't suppose I'd remember this at all if it weren't for the overwhelming sense of injustice I felt - injustice seems to be a fantastic aide-memoire. I was absolutely certain that the word had been "slooped" when I'd marked it, and either my memory was completely unreliable (a concept that, frankly, is way too hard to grasp for a primary school kid) or someone had surreptitiously crossed that t after I'd marked it wrong. It was such an easy error to correct, with no trace detectable, that I was pretty sure at the time that this is what had happened. And I think I still am. I think.
The trouble is that I've had this experience repeated in different variants fairly often in the intervening decades. I've had an absolute certain recollection of something which has later been contradicted by the facts. In that first instance there was another explanation (the t being crossed after I'd marked it), but in many of the subsequent times there was no such get-out. My memory was simply wrong. Somebody would ask me who did a particular job and I'd say it was Bob, because I know that it was. And then some incontrovertible evidence would appear to show that it was actually Fred. It's not that I can't remember - it's simply that I remember wrong. It's not an erasure in my memory, it's a corruption. My memory supplies the answer with absolute 100% waterproof confidence. And it's wrong.
I guess themes in my thinking at the moment are trust, and how to handle situations where you can't trust people or things, and memory, and how memories can dominate for good or bad. So what happens when you can't trust your memory, when it lies to you? Essentially memory covers everything I've done, everything I've learnt, everything I've experienced, everything I know and consequently, more or less, everything I am. And I can't trust it. It's not a nice feeling.
The problem was that none of them were words. And none of them would allow themselves to be formed into sentences or even coherent thoughts. And unfortunately it's still like that. My head is a jumble, a blur, a London-sized congestion of confused notions trying to fly around but just bumping into each other and getting nowhere. Partly as a result of the muddle and partly as a result of loads of other things that I can't seem to articulate, I'm feeling pretty down most days, but unable to ever explain why. If you're down, and someone, someone who you actually care about enough to admit how you're feeling to, asks why, then just saying you're head is muddled or you can't explain tends to be a bit inadequate. And even if I can't explain to anyone else I guess I'd like to have a clearer idea for myself why I'm feeling like this.
I guess I've developed an over-reliance on articulation. Some weeks ago I was trying to understand a bad situation I'd got myself into and spent some time on my own going over the details, even writing down a timeline of what had happened, in the expectation that it would clarify things, help me understand and, most importantly, get me out of the hole and stop me falling in it again. In the past that kind of thing has worked for me. But this time I just ended up with a page full of notes jotted down that made no connection, bits of a jigsaw that didn't go together, parts for which the sum total was considerably less than the individual components. In short it got me nowhere. So, is that another symptom or a cause? I have no idea.
I thought it for a very, very long time and only realized that it was London not Llandudno when I saw a printed copy of the words a couple of years ago. I don't think it even occurred to me before then that I might have been mis-hearing the name. It did seem a strange place to mention, but then there's plenty else that's strange (at least to a 10 year old's ears) in that song, so why not Llandudno?
More recently I've been trying to understand why I didn't hear the word London. And I think it's at least partly because I have such a strange relationship with that place. And to some extent it's that it simply doesn't exist for me, in the same way that if you talk to someone from one particular village and ask them about their county, then they'll struggle to answer because the county is not a homogeneous or coherent entity to them - it comprises lots of different parts each with quite different characteristics.
But this morning it came to me that actually my mis-hearing Llandudno in place of London just sums me up perfectly. It's a perfect example of how I never understand anything anyone ever says to me because instead of the perfectly obvious and natural meaning that they intend, I hear some obscure variant that, with enough shoehorns, does actually fit to the words they've said. Just like the syllables of Llandudno do, if you try and make them, fit what is sung in that song. I guess it's a kind of deafness (which reminds me of another story, for another day) and similarly infuriating, probably for the speaker who I'm misinterpreting and certainly for me. It's difficult to understand where it's come from, and very difficult to see how to shake it off. Any suggestions?
It's kind of a national sport isn't it - complaining about the newspapers and the TV news reports. How they create scare stories and distort the facts to make things more interesting. Terrible really, but it's inevitable because they're just giving us what we, in our basest and most honest moments, want. Well, to be more precise, they put in what will sell. Mundane reassuring stories don't sell as well as crises and dramas. If you've a lot of faith in human nature then you make demands that the media raise their standards and refrain from such market-driven journalism. If, on the other hand, you're like me and somewhat pessimistic about human nature, then you'll look to re-shape the conditions that make the media behave like this. And those conditions are, primarily, that we buy newspapers and, indirectly, TV news, forcing the media to make themselves more sellable. In other words, the fact that newspapers etc are businesses, and thus legally obliged to try to make money, directly causes the sensationalism that we moan about.
Put like that you can start to realize how good our news services actually are. After all, if they're businesses, then to be fair we should be comparing their performance with other businesses. Such as Tescos, to pick one particularly prominent business. How would you feel about buying the Tesco Gazette, or the Enron Times say? What standard of journalism would you expect from it? As I say, put like that you can start to realize how good our media actually is.
Besides, what is the alternative - state-controlled media? Like the perfect two-word argument that Paddy Ashdown found (or maybe just promoted) against republicanism: President Thatcher, so there is a one-word argument against state-controlled newspapers: Pravda. Isn't that how state-controlled media inevitably end up? If that is too remote then try looking at the `newspapers' that local councils produce - full of inane babbling about how the £1bn they've just spent relaying the pavement on High St is the best investment ever and makes them the most wonderful council you've ever had. So our experience of state-controlled media is just as bad as the worst that the private sector can produce.
Or is it? Hang on a minute - isn't there another example of state-controlled media that isn't quite so bad? One that actually has quite a good reputation and standards to match? Yes, the BBC. By typical British fluke the powers-that-were decades ago found a model that enabled the corporation to be free of commercial pressures and yet sufficiently independent of the government to actually serve a useful purpose. And ever since then it has, despite the odd blip, provided broadcasting services of an incredibly high standard. Long may it continue to do so.
Some of these reminiscences come with a distinct date stamp; such and such event happened at exactly 11:23 on this particular day in that decade. Others are rather more vague. And this one particularly so, because I suppose I'm really talking about the slow-dawning realization of my place in life. At some point it crystallized that I am a clown; my self-chosen purpose is to make people laugh, often at me, too often not.
It's not a role I'm particularly embarrassed by, and especially with small kids around it's a useful one. It helped me get over my natural fear of youngsters, and it saves me having to interact with the even-more-scary adults. But it's also been a source of trouble. Nearly all of the nastiest things I've ever said have been said with the intention of provoking a laugh. Sometimes it's worked and the saying has indeed been funny, but that was probably the worse outcome since it meant the nastiness was made more memorable and more lasting. Slur someone in a humorous way and the slur will stay much longer in people's memories. Other times the jokes did not work at all. That was worse for me in the short term, since I just ended up looking like someone who was being cruel just for the sake of it (which is probably not all that inaccurate) and so rather than getting the unpleasant message across it will have made people aware that I was not someone whose words should be trusted. That would explain why so many who have had to put up with a lot of my company no longer listen to me. It should also mean it doesn't bother me. Should. If only.
I was walking home from the railway station late in the evening having had a long day mostly spent travelling. Walking through deserted city streets late at night I feel mostly safe but am aware that there is a risk, and that it's not, fundamentally, something that normal, sensible people do. Which is perhaps what reminded me very much of a similar walk, albeit in a completely different city, almost exactly two decades before. Then I'd spent a weekend travelling home and back, including buying my first proper guitar, so the weekend was a good one, but still left me with a long walk home from the station very late in the evening. Doing such things is fine as a student; it's almost compulsory to do slightly silly things like that. But twenty years later, oughtn't I to have got out of the habit?
But what are the alternatives? I suppose I should have driven myself home (because sensible people don't walk anywhere do they - they drive and then wonder why they get fat or have to go to the gym to get the exercise they otherwise avoid). Failing that I should have got a taxi. But both of those are troublesome to my mind and, at heart, I just like walking. I'd say that I prefer to walk and chose that of my own free will. But I'm also aware that I've inherited a penny-pinching genetic legacy; my upbringing tells me I should go hungry rather than pay for food, and walk rather than pay for a taxi, and maybe I need to accept that I'm not making any decisions of my own free will - all my choices are decided for me by my genes.
Whatever the reasons, there I was walking home. At least, now, I was not overloaded with ill-packed luggage, not carrying a box with precious cassette tapes spilling out. Some things improve. And it occurred to me that I'm in a kind of spiral. Round and round, repeating myself, but with subtle changes and, hopefully, improvements. Like the fact that while sat on the train, speeding through the blacked-out countryside, I was listening to Orgone Accumulator, just like twenty years before, but this time on CD instead of tape. Then again, I was now listening to something 35 years remote in time, as opposed to 15 years remote. And I was listening with rather more jaded ears than I did before. In fact I'm not really sure I was listening much at all. I suspect I was just thinking back. For a long time it was a ritual for me to listen to that stuff while travelling through the space-like dark. So many memories are overlaid on each other, but all of them good. And I suppose the music isn't actually essential - nocturnal train-travelling is quite evocative in itself. Or perhaps that just me - I have done probably more than my fair share of it. I still remember, like it was yesterday, the lime green carriage in which I discussed the delights of Motherwell at maybe 3 in the morning with a young couple who were amazed at someone half their age off on his own doing essentially the same stuff as them. (And they were nowhere near as amazed as I was). And I remember the trip with my dad where we had to change trains at 4 in the morning, waiting for one of these odd trains at the crack of dawn that delivers the newspapers and post along its route. And I remember the chill a few years later when that same train crossed a bridge that had been washed away, killing the people sitting exactly where I had been. Statistically I suppose that sort of thing is likely to happen if you travel enough, but it was chilling all the same.
It was a fairly minor theft, concerning only small amounts of money. The accusation this person made was that I was charging people for something that somebody other than me was paying for. The accusation was simply false - I was paying for the stuff and then charging people to recoup the money I'd spent, all very dull but above board and correct. So I was quite annoyed to be accused of such a crime.
But what quickly became clear was that the accuser didn't think of it as much of a crime - he considered it entirely normal, and the sort of thing that everyone does. In fact he took my defence to be the sort of tongue in cheek cover-up that one makes when found committing a totally trivial misdemeanour. `What, me, spill water on the carpet? No, never.'
It was utterly impossible to get him to accept that I was genuinely denying the accusation or that I viewed it rather more seriously than he did. To him such theft was normal and he couldn't believe anybody else would think otherwise. At the time I thought this marked him out as utterly immoral and unprincipled (which, to be fair, he'd shown himself to be on numerous other occasions). And I bridled at his casual assumption that I was as low as him. But I realize now that it is going to be a rare person who commits crimes while acknowledging and accepting that they are crimes. Most people do what they do because they think it is normal. A burglar views his thefts as the normal way of getting what he needs. Someone who attempts to murder people by driving above the speed limit views that as an entirely commonplace and legitimate activity. One who kills people for a living thinks he is normal if not noble in doing so.
How do you convince someone otherwise? Actually as I write this I'm watching just such a discussion going on electronically where one person has acknowledged performing one act which he states as normal behaviour. Dozens of people are now responding with their views that his behaviour is absolutely not normal, nor acceptable. I don't know if he'll be persuaded, but it seems the only chance. Only when the silent majority get up and say clearly that something is unacceptable will the message get through. And silent majorities tend, by their nature, not to speak up.
I suppose when you start looking for them you start to see them everywhere, but this was a rather different ghost to those I encountered a few weeks before. When Cambuslang first went to school there was a girl in his class whose mother was a single parent. And she struggled with bringing up her daughter, particularly because of her own childhood spent in foster homes feeling unloved and unlovable. Her daughter was to be her proof that she could rise above that and provide a real family home. She absolutely loved that little girl. Unfortunately those demons weren't so easy to beat and whether it was mental health or substance abuse, she sometimes lost control. Being found in town, drunk in charge of a young child, is something many people find hard to forgive. And, of course, once you've decided it's unforgivable then, well, that saves you the bother of having to understand it, doesn't it. From the mother's point of view it was very easily understood. Not accepted, not condoned, but understood. Probably not forgiven either, which brings its own problems, but there you go.
We tried to do our best to support both mother and daughter as we would any other friends. It was hard, because the mother was understandably determined to show how she could stand on her own two feet, and because she didn't want anybody else meddling with her precious daughter. But we did what we could.
But, unfortunately, things didn't go as well as they could. The drunken exploits still seemed to continue and the local authorities stepped in and placed the daughter with another family, firstly as a temporary measure, and later on a more permanent basis. To begin with we still saw the daughter at school, and she still seemed her same bright and bubbly self. Always a smile on her face, always pleased to see you. That was good and reassuring, but I kept worrying about the mother. I bet she wasn't bright or bubbly, and I was pretty confident that it wouldn't be a smile on her face. Her daughter was her reason for living, her motivation for conquering her past. Without her what could be the point of going on? Well, I'm aware that perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto the mother here, but I suspect not, going by the sort of things she said.
After a while the daughter moved school (possibly because she'd moved family, or maybe just because the family moved her to a school nearer to them) and I haven't seen her for months now. And I hadn't seen the mother for much longer, since the initial separation. Until a few days ago. And, to be fair, I was wrong - she did have something of a smile on her face. She was pleased to see us, or at least pretended to be. But she couldn't stop; she was clearly very uncomfortable. My guess is that the smile was a response to meeting people she knew, but that it vanished very quickly as we reminded her of her daughter - she only knew us because of her daughter and we only ever saw her with her daughter.
I don't know if she ever manages to put her daughter out of her mind (and I don't know how she survives if she can't, sometimes, manage that), but it seemed clear that our presence had reminded her of a very painful absence. I can't imagine what that absence must feel like - I hope I never know. I just wished we hadn't met that day.
That's overstating it, to be fair, but the brief exchange cut me very deep. I was with Cambuslang, him riding his bike, in our local park. Passing the children's play area we noticed a couple of his classmates dangling on the climbing frame. And they both shouted in chorus that Cambuslang still had stabilizers on his bike, and one of them said "and my bike is much better than yours". Yes, to be fair, Cambuslang does still have stabilizers, and some of his classmates don't need them any more. So I suppose at least now I have a more serious incentive to work on his balance and take the stabilizers off the bike. But the "my bike is better than yours" comment really pulled me up short.
My first reaction was the rationalists' one, to think what sort of bike this classmate had, and to objectively judge Cambuslang's bike. And then to wonder on what grounds one could say that the other kid's bike was better. At which point I realized the futility and the missing-the-point-ness of this line of thought. We could have gone to every shop in town and chosen the swankiest, coolest, funkiest and most expensive bike in the entire universe. And still that turd would have said that his bike was better. Because it's nothing to do with the bike. It's another of those damnable confidence tricks. That little sod has the confidence to say "mine's better than yours" without thinking, without it even entering his tiny mind to consider, how his bike might actually and factually compare with Cambuslang's.
It's a rhetorical device (after all, what can you respond - "no it's not" is a rather pathetic reply) borne out of an excess of confidence. Yes, it's also designed to knock the other person down emotionally, and you could argue that that displays a lack of confidence - people with genuine self esteem don't need to bully others - but that's only half the story. It really displays a confidence and is ultimately one of those pointless taunts "I'm taller than you" that makes a virtue out of something beyond the control of either participant. Because of that it shouldn't bother us - why should such an absurd boast/taunt have any effect on us? But it does.
I think what really depressed me about the whole event was the realization that I'd been kidding myself. Kidding myself that Cambuslang needn't have as miserable a childhood as mine, needn't spend his whole time at school trying to avoid the bullies, that the folk around him would be nicer than those around me at school, that he would be better equipped and better able to cope with what difficulties his schoolmates would throw at him. That he might even, dare I say it, enjoy some of his childhood? In those brief moments in the park all those delusions fell away, and I was faced with the responsibility for him suffering just what I had. The responsibility for blindly leading him into a series of traps when I should have been looking out for them and taking avoiding action.
Most of the time we can safely consider murderers to be completely different, mentally, from us. We can separate them and feel smug that "I would never do that". Child-murderers are even more repugnant but, consequently, even more safely distant from us - we're nothing like them - they're nothing like us. In the sleep-deprived 2a.m.s of a child's first months a parent might learn that actually the wall separating "them" from "us" is paper thin. When the child has been crying for hours on end and nothing will stop the wailing, when the parent cannot remember the last proper sleep they had, at that point the thought might enter the parent's head that there is one sure way of finally stopping the wailing. That would be a hideous moment for the parent, and usually the realization of what they had just thought would provoke a flood of love for the child. That flood will wash away those evil thoughts and help the parent to get through the rest of the night. But they'll know those thoughts were there, and they'll be that much more ready to think "there but for the grace of God go I" when reading of parents who murder their children. And similarly when your child suffers, and a vision opens up of a life for that child containing almost endless suffering, then you just might find your mind entertaining the thought of murder and suicide. And then, when you next read of parents who kill themselves and their children, you might read with just a little more humility, understanding and, just a hint, possibly, of forgiveness. And possibly alongside the forgiveness for others you'll feel a fear of yourself, and an earnest prayer for forgiveness for yourself.
I've got 1 ii 2, and 2 of Us, 3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds and 4th time around, I've got 5 more minutes and 6 gnossiennes, and 7 by 7 and 9th and Hennepin, as well as a 10 pound float and 11 mustachioed daughters, and I've even got 12 x u and 13 valleys. After that it gets a bit patchy although an apostrophical highlight is '39 followed by 40 and 40'. I quite like the way 1000 umbrellas are followed by 2000 miles although sandwiched inbetween are 1951, 1963, 1995 and 1999 which disrupts the pattern but provides an interesting detour along the way. But what, most notably, I lack, is an 8. Any recommendations?
Schools are quite impressive these days and seem to teach kids more interesting stuff than I ever learnt and at much earlier stages than I remember. So I was expecting my nearlyfive-year-old Airdrie to go on to tell me about the different states of carbon, and about rocks getting squashed over millenia etc etc. I was wondering if the curriculum had become a bit more adventurous in its vocational approach and was setting the kids up to rival de Beers before they hit GCSE level. So when she said "I know how to make diamonds" I just had to ask: "How?"
Apparently you take a square and turn it round a bit. Oh well. I guess de Beers are safe for a bit longer.
I suppose it wasn't that many bits that came together at once - just the steady job (that I'd been trying to get for about twelve years), the house (that I'd probably been wanting for even longer), the baby (that I really hadn't been at all sure about until about a year before), and the incredibly good friendship group (that I hadn't wanted because I'd never dreamed such a nice thing was possible) - but it was enough. The other bits of the puzzle were already in place - the steady relationship piece, and maybe others that I'm forgetting.
Either way, in short order the whole jigsaw was there, complete. Pretty much all the major components of what I'd wanted in life, I had. But it's funny how our relation which those tangible things ebbs and flows. If you don't have them (if you're unemployed for example, or recently dumped), then they matter. But if you do have them, well, they so quickly cease to matter, and even turn upside down and become burdens rather than pleasures. Of course all this is well-known, so much so that we forgot how bizarre it is. What crazy creatures we are.
I have a dark secret that I've kept completely hidden because I know it wouldn't go down too well in my circle of friends, at church, amongst my work colleagues, my family, anywhere. But it is me, this dark secret. I've been pretending it's not, and that it's just an aberration, not truly me, but this has been driving me up the wall, and I've finally accepted that it's better not to pretend but to accept myself as I am in my entirety.
My secret is this. I like women. But only ones wearing yellow trousers. I know it's strange and unique. Among all the fetishes documented (and provided for, yeurgh) on the web, of which there is no small number, I've found no mention of this one, but there it is. Does that make it wrong - it's uniqueness? I don't think so, but I'm not very sure. Yes, I am, it's not. It's okay. That's me, and that's how I am. Even more unique, actually, because the women have to have brown hair with touches of grey (but no more than touches, anything more than highlights is grossly off-putting). Moreover they have to be new to me - once I get to know them personally the attraction disappears - it just vanishes completely. Like the morning mist, I'd write if I were trying to be a cheesy poet. They must be fresh, at least fresh to me. And of course I want to sleep with them. So there it is, that's my secret. It feels very shameful to write, but I write in the trust that I have an accepting audience here. I trust I'm not going to get hounded off the wibsite for writing this, although I am still nervous even so. I haven't dared write it before, and certainly haven't dared tell anybody. But finally I feel the time has come to accept myself, who I am, and start the process of dealing with it, and dealing with how everyone else deals with it. I like to sleep with yellow-trousered women I don't know. That's who I am. Sorry, I just have to keep saying it, if only for myself.
I don't really expect acceptance generally. Honestly, though I hope it will be otherwise, I guess I really know that when I go out to the clubs in town looking for women matching those criteria, when I start chatting them up (just enough to get them into bed, not enough to get to know them and lose the spark), I know I will be condemned. When I run into people who know me I understand that if I honestly tell them what I'm doing they'll have no sympathy for me. They'll probably explain why serial monogamy is so wrong. (For that, monogamy, is one of the rules I stick to - I never try to get two women at the same time). They'll quote "enjoy yourself with the wife of your youth" and so on. (Yes, just one casual aside in the old testament is all they can usually find to defend their position). They'll probably find some biblical passage explaining why the pursuit of yellow-legged ladies is wrong. But I've checked: there's no such passage, so I know they'll just be twisting the scriptures for their own ends. So really there's no argument. It's not acceptable to the general populace, but that doesn't make it wrong, does it. That's what I have to keep telling myself to avoid ripping myself to shreds. And I guess I've got to accept myself if I'm to persaude anybody else to accept me. Wish me luck.
This has been happening quite a lot lately in various forms which is why I've been so vague on the date: it seems absurd to pin-point one occasion when there have been so many. But one occasion stands out as the most extreme set of extremes that I've oscillated between.
It began when I started thinking about brushing my teeth. I was probably lying in bed - these things tend to happen while I'm lying in bed wishing I could be asleep. And I just thought of the prospect of having to brush my teeth every day for the rest of my life, and I just couldn't face it. I couldn't bear the thought of doing that tedious little chore every day, every single day, for ever. Somehow it was as if all those little teeth-brushing sessions were piling up on top of me, suffocating me.
And then one morning, quite possibly the very next morning (probably not if this is supposed to be an exact chronological account of a real life but, since it's not, let's say that yes, it was the very next morning) I walked to work through the park. The sun was shining, the kids were cheery when I left, I felt unburdened by pressure or work-stress. And the thought came to me that I could happily do this for the rest of my life. I have a job I enjoy in a very pleasant environment, with an excellent circle of friends both near and far, and with as good a family as I could hope for. I felt unreasonably blessed.
So, I might not be able to face brushing my teeth, but apart from that life felt great.
I've attempted to recognize here that a certain fraternity of walkers will maintain that you haven't actually climbed a hill unless you reach the cairn on the summit, and possibly even added your own rock to those already assembled. I did not, as far as I can tell, reach the summit of Kinder Scout so cannot, by those terms, claim to have climbed it. But I've realized lately that what interests me most about hillwalking is not getting to the highest point, but getting the best views. Often the two coincide, but when they don't, it's the views I'll go for.
Part of me would like to say that I went up that particular hill in that particular year so as to celebrate a famous ascent seventy-five years previously. But to be honest it just happened that that weekend of that year was convenient for me, that that location was convenient, and that on that particular day, that direction seemed more attractive than the alternatives. No grand plan at all.
And when I think about it now I'm not actually sure that the famous trespass is such a great thing to commemorate anyway. To suggest that is, of course, heresy in the walking community, but I was born to question things, and that's often a recipe for being branded a heretic.
That mass trespass of 1932 was supposed to establish that anybody could walk anywhere in the countryside that they wanted to. It was supposed to fight against the restrictions that landowners would place on access to the land. It was supposed to ensure that the poor working classes of Manchester and Sheffield could use what little free time they had to take advantage of the beautiful scenery that was so close and yet, through access restrictions, denied to them.
What the traditional story doesn't really emphasize is that the trespass was driven by the local communist party, and while I'm sure they wanted it to achieve the goals already stated, the c-word should make you realize that they may have had a not-very-ulterior agenda in annoying the land-owners.
Still, mixed motives don't always prevent good outcomes, and goodness knows that pure motives are rare indeed. So perhaps it's best to judge the event by its outcomes.
Okay, at this point I have to plead ignorance. I don't understand the precise subtleties of what land was accessible before and what land is now accessible under recent legislation that is supposed to grant what the trespassers were pushing for decades before. But if you walk around that area one thing will become obvious to you - the pennine way, and the erosion caused by an awful lot of people walking in the same area. That was one of the landowners' defences at the time - let all the hoi polloi out onto the hills and the landscape will be damaged. A pathetic ploy, no doubt, and just an excuse to defend what they really wanted to keep for themselves. But they were right despite that - there is a lot of erosion that is due to the large number of people walking there, and I can't pretend I didn't contribute my little bit to it.
And, moreover, who are the people out walking on the hills where they wouldn't otherwise have been allowed? Is it really the impoverished working classes from the local metropolises? Or is it the rather less impoverished middle classes from all over the country? I wish it weren't so, but the answer seems pretty clear, and whenever I think about this I hear Jarvis Cocker's painful but accurate words "My favourite parks are car parks, grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag". It's a nice dream to think of all those poor workers in the cotton mills sweating from dawn to dusk six days a week but, on their day off, being able to head out to the Peak District, climb some hills and enjoy the views. But it's a deluded middle-class fantasy. Those workers in the 30s would have had a genetic memory of the countryside as being the place their family sweated their brows off trying to earn a living from farming. It wasn't the "great outdoors" - it was the hell they were escaping from with their nice dry factory job. And as that genetic memory faded, they didn't buy into that middle class dream, they bought into a very different sort of escapism as Pulp document very well.
Personally I'm glad I had the opportunity to walk on Kinder Scout. But let's be honest and admit that the mass trespass achieved a lot for only a few. There are many more barriers to those at the bottom of the social ladders than just selfish landowners.
Not literally met, of course, but encountered. My brother had told me about him and said that I was bound to meet him soon and so it was amusing or reassuring, I'm not sure which, to actually encounter him. Anyway, there he was in all his glory, among a load of other people whose names simply haven't stuck with me in the same way, I've no idea why.
And I've no idea why I happened to be thinking about him this morning (edit: actually, now I come to think of it, yes I do know why - I saw some workmen with hi-vis vests stating that they worked for a Mr Honeybun. I'm sorry but I find the idea of a building firm called "Honeybun" just ridiculously amusing. "Hey Honeybun, would you mind moving your bulldozer"... Sorry) but it turned out to be quite ironic, given that today was the day I ended up unintentionally typing rm *.*
Now I could argue that it wasn't my fault, and that I was just doing what I was told, but you'd know and I'd know that that would be a little bit dishonest. Okay, mea culpa. Doh. So, okay, it was a big mistake. I could explain the simple error that led to that more catastrophic error, but that wouldn't me very interesting. So instead I'll just leave you with the smug thought that I have spent all afternoon trying desperately to recover files that I gleefully deleted in a moment of complete insanity. You can be smug that you've never done that. And I dare you to even go so far as to say "I've never done that". And let's see who gets away with tempting fate and who doesn't.
As with many of my realizations it is borne out of a strong conviction that is entirely opposite. I don't, basically, like adverts. It's not that seeing them is painful, it's just that they are so pointless and parasitic. Look, take an industry, say a bunch of different companies making beer. One of them decides to pay a ton of money to advertise their particular beer. Their sales go up. So then every other company decides to pay a similar amount to advertise. Their sales recover from the dip they suffered when the first company advertised. End result: nobody's sales are any higher than they were at the start, but everybody is now paying a wopping sum (a "tax" you might call it because that's effectively what it is) to fund the advertising industry. All those adverts effectively cancel each other out, leaving no net benefit to the beer companies.
Now some clever soul is going to point out that, actually, everybody's sales will be slightly higher than before because of those adverts. Well just expand this model to encompass all industries, not just beer. If beer companies advertise and people end up buying more beer, then that'll be less cider or wine, or maybe books or clothes that they buy. What the beer companies gain somebody else loses - what comes around goes around. If you look at a big enough picture then you'll see that there is no overall benefit from advertising.
That is my background view on advertising and I still basically adhere to it, but possibly only because I haven't fully internalized this new revelation about happiness. Hmm, adverts and happiness - even talk of such a connection seems distasteful, let alone the suggestion that adverts actually create happiness. Yet that really is what I've come to think. Here's why.
I've been thinking about getting an iPod. This is how I work: I think, and think, and think and think, and maybe a while later (a month in some cases, 10 years in some cases) I'll actually go and buy the thing I've been thinking about. This gives me plenty of time for my snail-paced brain to chew over the pros and cons. Well, in this instance this thinking time enabled somebody to come in and question whether that was really the best use of my money and whether I shouldn't be giving it to support some poor starving orphan in Africa. I wish I wasn't, but I'm someone who takes those sorts of questions seriously. And on one level of course it's a no-brainer - how could I possibly justify buying an iPod and leaving that poor orphan to starve. How could I possibly? I wish I wasn't, but I'm someone who takes those sorts of questions seriously, and tries to find an answer. As an exercise in logic if nothing else, how would I go about justifying buying an iPod instead of giving the money away? Why on earth, in fact, am I even considering buying an iPod? Why do I want one? It'll provide a means of playing music that I already have - the music is on CDs that I can listen to at home, at work, or on my walkman already, so it's just providing an alternative device for listening to stuff I already have. It'll be slightly more convenient in some ways, but that's a minor gain. And then it came to me that it would give me pleasure to own an iPod. Pleasure that is not directly attributable to being able to listen to music in a certain way, nor attributable to the modest extra convenience that the device itself will bring. No, that shiny plastic box will, just by dint of being in my hand or in my pocket, or even just by being on my mantlepiece at home even when I'm not there, just by being mine that box will give me pleasure. I can see it now - that warm feeling I will have by thinking that I own such a thing. I have the same feeling about the last guitar I bought - even though I don't have it here with me as I type, even though it's in its case and out of sight most of the day - I still get pleasure out of knowing that it's mine. It makes me happy. And why do I associate an electronic device for reproducing music with happiness? Yes, because of the adverts. And the point is that those adverts haven't just translated that happiness and moved it from one context to another, no they've created that happiness out of nothing. Without those adverts that iPod wouldn't make me happy. Thanks to them there is some happiness to be had which would not otherwise exist.
Happiness is an elusive thing; we all know that. We know how easily it can evaporate. What we tend to forget (in our negativity) is how magically it can also appear out of nowhere. And what is more magical still is that the advertising industry seemed to have come up with some tools for actually creating it. It isn't an accident that those iPod adverts have created an association of iPods with happiness - that was craft not inspiration. The ability of adverts to create happiness is not quite straightforward or mechanical enough to be called a machine, but you can see how maybe they're heading in that direction. Maybe one day the advertising industry will have matured to the point where they can claim to have a machine for producing happiness. But that's making it sound like I've lost the plot even more than I had at the start of this post, so I'll stop here.
Oh, and in case you're wondering whether I'm going to buy an iPod or not ...... so am I.
Today my newspaper had a long report about gambling. Apparently the number of `problem gamblers' is about the same as it was 8 years ago (about 0.6% of the adult population) when the last comparable survey was carried out. This is obviously not news, so the reporter dug a bit more to find a more interesting angle. Well, apparently amongst gamblers using the internet the proportion of `problem gamblers' is much higher, apparently around 7.4% depending on your definitions. Since 7.4% is clearly much higher than 0.6% (a tenfold rise as the report has it, cunningly using the word "rise" with its implication of increase over time to insinuate a worsening situation) there is obviously a huge problem, which explains the bold headline "Britain's gambling problem multiplies online". Now re-read that first statistic (0.6%, same as last time) and try and reconcile that fact with this headline.
Oh dear, oh dear. On the one hand I despair of such pathetic misuse (I could call it misunderstanding but I'm not feeling so charitable) of statistics. But on the other, and I think more prevalently, I despair of our tendency to want to hear how bad things are and how they are getting much worse. Recent comment on the wibsite and elsewhere has revolved around the prevalence of `lads mags', with their soft-core pornographic content. Well, I'm not a great fan of those magazines, but I recall equivalent magazines being available a quarter of a century ago. Those pornographic magazines are no longer available in most high street shops (which is surely a good thing) and the `new' lads' mags have taken their place (which is, admittedly, not such a good thing). This is no improvement, I agree, but it's no worse, so I really don't think it's a cause for despair.
And so it is with those gambling statistics. When you think for a second about what they could possibly mean you reach the only sensible conclusion which is that problem gamblers tend to use online gambling sites more than non-problem gamblers do. Well, what a surprise! And once you've filtered out that completely unsurprising piece of information you're left with the fact that the internet has not, in any measurable way, led to more gambling than previously. It's not getting worse. On the other hand, there are a number of things that really are getting worse and that we should worry about it. There are many interpretations you could put on this, but whatever the background, it's surely better that we worry about the things that really are worrisome, rather than getting distracted into worrying about things like this that really aren't.
I hadn't really thought of it in those terms when I was arranging my visit. I had started to work out that there was nobody living there as I mentally worked through my list of people I associated with that town and realized that each one of them was now somewhere else. But that left me expecting an empty town, so it was quite a surprise as I walked around the town to be accosted by so many ghosts. Ghosts with very definite, fixed locations. At times it felt like each building I passed had its own ghost who would leap out at me. I passed one house and was accosted by the ghost of the girl I knew for many years and who lived in the hostel based in that house just before she completely lost the plot, grew a beard and lived in a tent on the beach. Then I passed the boarded-up shop where the comic book readers would get their weekly fixes and the ghost of Jim came out at me, reminding me in turn of the funny time when he himself was scared witless by the apparition of a very different sort of ghost. Going down a flight of steps I had to step aside to avoiding tripping over the ghost of a broken student who was sat contemplating what his future might be having just had exam results which seemed to ensure that his university career was over. A little later I walked by another flat and was accosted by the ghost of the girl who spent a couple of weeks seducing me, culminating in her cuddling me in that flat, before she lost interest (probably despairing at the fact that I hadn't remotely noticed what she was up to, but more likely because her approach to relationships was akin to a goldfish's approach to its castle). Some of the happiest days of my life were spent in that town (though definitely not in that flat) and now it's just ghosts. I guess that's a sign of how I've moved on. Those good times did their job - they changed my personality in a very positive way - and now their work is done I don't need to cling onto them any longer.
Living in the past 
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