The Chalybeate

Monday 31 December 2007

Resolutions

I haven't made any New year resolutions for a couple of years, so I think I'll do so for 2008.

Here we go, then:

1. Lose my extra Kummerspeck by exercising more and earlier.
2. Pay more attention to politics, and actually participate in some way.
3. Every month, contact someone we haven't or hardly seen for a couple of years.
Adam, Caro, Hess, Conal, Greg, Mike O'Connor, Jess'n'Alan, will do for starters.

4. And improve my culture by either taking up singing or going to the flicks at least quarterly. That's more than at present. Or re-starting the sax. It's languishing in a cupboard at present.

I'll keep an eye upon myself.



:0)

Bloater

A combination of little exercise, two weeks in hotels, Christmas overeating, Winterspeck and Kummerspeck / Schmerzspeck has larded me with an extra five kilos over the last two months. My trousers are tighter and it's noticeably harder to cycle up hills.

It's time for a change to get me back to a sensible size.
Eat less, exercise more, lardarse.

If only.


:0)

Labels:

Friday 28 December 2007

Maté

I've been drinking a lot of maté recently, as a change from tea or coffee and as an alternative to the usual herbals in the cupboard. I'd bought a packet several years ago and had then forgotten about both the drink and its strange effects while it languished at the back of a pile of tins and packets.

For the first couple of weeks, the
maté was just a normal herbal drink with an acceptable slightly astringent flavour, a deep urine-yellow colour and a tendency to stain the mugs bright green. Then the interesting effects started to kick in. Every few cups (I drink perhaps one cup every two days) I would feel as edgy and nervous as if I'd had several coffees, and occasionally I'd become quite disassociated and high, with enhanced colour vision and perceived rapid reactions. The inconsistency and "learned" nature of the reactions are quite cannabis-like, where typically (and certainly in my case) it takes a few social instances of drug-taking to start experiencing the classic effects.

I wouldn't mid if I could predict when the
maté would just act as a soothing drink, and when it would turn into a psychoactive drug, but there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the variability of its effects. So I'll just keep taking it when the flavour appeals, and will risk the fun and games that it plays with me.


:-)

Saturday 22 December 2007

Winter Solstice 2007




The "congregation" from the North perimeter bankment , Avebury.

Silbury Hill from West Kennet long barrow. 11am, 22nd December.


To Avebury for the Solstice sunrise again, another year passed, troubles and joys mixed, willing the best to happen for 2008.
The weather was fairer this year, the short ceremony friendly and informal with a mixture of attendees from as afar afield as Norwich and West Wales. It's not religion, but it is a marker of interdependence on each other and dependence upon the sun and the earth.

A road runs through Avebury. As I turned away from the 6000 year-old stones, a petrol tanker rumbled by, a stinking gross representative of the transient and modern that I am sure will not be here in just 100 years.

After the sunrise we walked from the circle past Silbury Hill to the West Kennet Long Barrow, where candles had been lit in the Bronze Age tomb chambers and then we returned to Avebury for noon. The landscape of Wiltshire is bare at this time of year, grey glassy fields and just a few trees to break the gentle contours surrounding us. It's damp, with the winterbournes flowing full and taking the slow route towards the Thames from this point high upon the watershed of Southern England.


:0)

Friday 21 December 2007

Motto

It is better to have loved and lost, than to live with the psycho for the rest of your life.


;0)

Wednesday 19 December 2007

Reunion & reversion

Last Sunday I went to a reunion of the flatmates and hangers-on from a shared flat in Earl's Court, from the 1973-77 era. Three of the official flatmates were friends of mine from school days, but I was very much on the periphery of their London society since I lived in Bristol and stayed there for only one summer and a series of weekends.

It wasn't a happy time for me. Although I was very busy having a wild social life
both in Bristol and in London and I must have seemed fine on the outside, I wasn't doing well at university and I had been dumped by my girlfriend so I was generally pretty miserable inside. It didn't help, I suppose, that I was fairly immature both physically and emotionally in those days. I felt excluded from the Earl's Court gang to some extent, and not really an integral part of the group.

These days, under normal conditions, I'm a fairly confident, moderately outgoing, ordinary bloke but in the past when I have been together with that particular group again, I feel uncomfortable and revert to being the outsider. I observe without feeling part of it, and it's unpleasant. I go to see the two or three people I like best, and try to ignore (as I am ignored by) the others.

Perhaps it was due to the absence of some of the more abrasive members, but this time I felt more confident and at ease. It might have been the presence of a couple of old female friends who hadn't seen us all for years, so their presence might have lubricated and eased the tensions. Or it might have been that the abrasive ones normally had a "gang leader" effect on others, so that guys I can get on with normally would be more off-hand towards me when in his / their presence. Or perhaps we're just older and more relaxed. Whatever the reason, it was easier this time, and I was grateful.

It was one of those female returnees who pointed out the way that we all act to each other as we used to, that we revert to our 30-year old places in the hierarchy. No doubt if we had remained in constant contact these would have changed, or if we had more than a couple of hours together, but as it was, our relationships just didn't seem normal to me.


:-(




Tuesday 18 December 2007

"My" Bomb



Looking around the theatre foyer last week (see my previous post), we browsed among a series of photographs of the Old Vic's previous productions, going back to the 1950's. One of these was from Equus, produced in late 1974. I remembered it well, as I was in the stage crew there, just after leaving University. I kept the brown polo-neck jumper of a costume for years afterwards.

It reminded me that I'm lucky to be here.
1974 was one of the years when the IRA was very active, leaving time-bombs wherever they thought they could be most dangerous, including in nightclubs and pubs. They gave no warning of the bombs, and just let them rip us civilians to shreds.

At that time, I was twenty-one, observant, and a skip-diver. I noticed valuables and not-so-valuables left in skips, in bins, and elsewhere. On the 18th December, at about 7pm, someone from the IRA left a bomb in a sports bag in the foyer of a jeans shop on Park Street, on my route from home to my work in the theatre. I know that under normal circumstances I would have walked past the shop ten minutes later, seen the bag, opened it and blown myself to bits.

It didn't happen. Moonface and I had decided to celebrate the first complete year of our relationship by eating together in a restaurant, so I took the evening off. I remember the restaurant - Floyd's, in The Mall. I remember waking at 3am feeling full and unable to sleep again, burning the rich food off with the fire above my kidneys. I remember learning about the bomb the next morning and feeling anger, and pleasure at being alive.


:0)

Monday 17 December 2007

Blood Wedding

Moonface & I went to the theatre the other night, to see a youth production of Blood Wedding, originally Bodas de Sangre by Lorca, as translated by Ted Hughes. We were persuaded to go by one of the actors' fathers, whom I met in the street a couple of days beforehand. I'm pleased we made the effort. As we often find at the theatre, it took a while to understand the conventions of the scenery and to determine who the characters represented before I could immerse myself in the play, but once I did so, I was hooked.


With a couple of exceptions, the cast was believable and consistent; the props were used wisely and appropriately, and the storytelling worked well.

The drama of the story is predicated upon family feuds held over many generations. Although the story was based upon a C20th event, the principle of the feud seems to have been a feature of Mediterranean culture for centuries: after all, it's the background to Romeo & Juliet, components of Homer and legends beyond.

Is it an exclusively Mediterranean idea, this intense sexual jealousy and familial pride? There don't seem to be stories from northern Europe with a similar motive; instead we have individual emnities which change with personal allegiances from generation to generation. The pathological ideal of fidelity and honour doesn't seem to be such a feature in the north, either. Perhaps this accounts for the cheerful promiscuity of British women throughout history, going back to Saxon times.

Alternatively, perhaps, it's the miserable sang-froid of the British (English?) which means that their blood never boils, their tempers remain even, and that our emotional lives remain as tepid and unexciting as our climate.

I wish.


:o)


Saturday 15 December 2007

Zen

I'm trying to read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" again, after a gap of thirty years of so, and just like the last time, I'm finding it hard going after the first hundred pages. The philosophy I can cope with, but the story telling is turgid and difficult with flashbacks to the author's madness interlaced with the events of his present.

However it's the philosophy that I came for, and that doesn't disappoint. I hadn't realised how much the book has influenced my life and the ways in which I think or act. The core principle which I have extracted from the book is a reinforcement of the Platonic "Good", doing things right, and being in the correct frame of mind to perform them. In presenting the dichotomy between the Classical and Romantic viewpoints upon the world, Pirsig shows how the '60's counterculture started to reject the objective, scientific, verifiable outlook upon the world in favour of one more focussed upon appearances. In that, he forshadowed the current obsession with "designer" goods by more than twenty years.

Nowadays, discussions around good design tend to be centred upon appearance, looks. Designer clothes may have a marketable name and an expensive pricetag, but are frequently made just as shoddily as supermarket specials, and will fall apart just as easily. To take another contemporary example, Apple electronic goods look beautiful and are simplicity itself to operate, yet they have a reputation for unreliability. Pirsig looked beyond appearances to the heart of the matter, whether that matter be people, machinery or scientific method.

It was his attitude to machinery that affected me most of all. Perhaps it's laziness, but i have adopted an attitude that function is the essence of manufactured good, and that if it works, if it's in tolerance and maintainable; appearances don't matter. So my bicycles tend to have components that colour-clash with others, or have effective workarounds to problems which enhance function at the expense of looks. Yet there is no laziness in the way in which I like to see machinery function properly, with (for example) chain-lines true, spoke tension sounding correct, oil-levels where they should be. This spills over into clothing, as well. My favourite trousers are ex-German Army camouflage combat trousers. Nothing fits as well, nothing else has the reinforced pockets which mean I can carry everything I want to. Yet (according to Moonface) they look scruffy, and they certainly aren't suitable for business. But compare their quality of manufacture with some (expensive) "designer" trousers I once bought. The combats have better finish, more belt-loops, better detailing around the pockets. But they don't have a smart label. We are being bamboozled into looking at outward appearance rather than assessing what really works.

Wherein lies the quality?


:o)

Friday 14 December 2007

Nice

One of my favourite souvenirs of a trip to Nice in 2004, is a pirated recipe for Puy lentils.
It's warming, sustaining, simple and capable of infinite variation. Since our trip there in a cold February, I've made this every four-to-five weeks whenever I feel the need for comfort food. After my recent business trip involving ten days of sometimes dubious restaurant food, I felt that need today. It provided warmth on a frozen day, simplicity, and taste.

My version comprises:
250-300g Lentilles de Puy / small brown or green lentils.
2 carrots,
2-3 sticks of celery,
Garlic
Herbs
Dash of soya sauce,
Chunk of offcut ham, cut into pieces.
Chorizo / other meat,
Spoonful of chili sauce,
Anything kicking around the fridge looking sorry for itself.

+++++++++++++

Soak the lentils for upwards of 4 hours.
Drain, place in large saucepan or preferably a pressure cooker, add water / stock to just cover the surface.
Add chunked vegetables (today this included turned mushrooms and shredded cabbage)
Add seasonings
Bring to the boil
Add meats and anything else you fancy
Cook for 40 mins at low heat, or
Pressure cook for 15 mins.

Eat with brown bread and oil or butter, serve with Merlot or brown ale.

And repeat.


:o)

Friday 7 December 2007

Man talk

For some reason, most men that I know don't discuss their emotional or personal issues with other men, but will either bottle things up, or talk to a woman friend. I'm pretty average in this respect, finding it easier to hold heart-to-hearts with women.

The other night, however, after an amazing amount of red wine and lots of greasy food, I found myself in one of those late night putting-the-world-to-rights sessions which ended not long before dawn. There was a small group of us, in which I was the only Brit in a gaggle of Russians and Georgians. That's in the Caucasus, not the southern USA.

"So, Moses, do you drink a lot ?"..."Do you mind me asking? Only in the US, all the interesting personal questions are forbidden. So it makes getting to know Americans very difficult." said the Georgian. So, after we established that I don't mind talking about drink, drugs, politics, women, or (taboo) money, we talked. And talked, and talked.

And the upshot was that we have established that every man needs children and money, a good wife and a broken heart, friends to trust and a distrust of politicians. All of this seems perfectly reasonable to me, even when sober.


:-)

Thursday 6 December 2007

Blood

For some episodes of my life, I have been very prone to nosebleeds. Some of these bleeds have been associated with stress, some with the simple physical causes of colds or thumps on my nose. The strangest set were when I was first at University, hundreds of miles away from my girlfriend, with whom I was very much in love.

We were young and stupid, so we didn't use contraception. She had irregular periods, which tended to be of around four weeks when we hadn't had sex; but six or more weeks if we had. Consequently we lived in a state of semi-permanent anxiety, which I am sure was bad for us both. But strangely, if I had a nosebleed in those days, I would be told immediately afterwards that my girlfriend's period had arrived, and that we were saved from an unwanted pregnancy. This happened several times, until we parted.

Consequently, I impute meaning to unexplained bleeds, such as the one which I suffered this morning, just typing away at my computer. I'm not under stress, I don't have a cold, and there was no obvious reason for it to happen. It's just that suddenly my left nostril started streaming blood, dripping rapidly down upon the desk in front of my keyboard.

So why?

:-]