"No wonder them Injuns are fighting so hard to keep this country!"

Whiling away a Sunday afternoon watching a whimsical romantic comedy set in a time of ethnic cleansing.

Calamity Jane

Hollywood...

Reality (scrubbed up)...


Black Hills of Dakota

1972

A few days before my sixth birthday we moved from Crowthorne in Berkshire to Penarth in South Wales.

Whether these are real memories or stuff I think I remember but don't at all but my mind has coloured in some stories I've been told - or it is just stuff I made up I don't know.

It was late Autumn, wintery and dark. When we got to the new house half the downstairs floors were missing - and bizarely half the stairs too. I imagine half or all of the light bulbs were missing - but I don't know for sure. I think my parents went out and bought us chips for dinner. This would have been a good thing.

Even better things to be discovered were:-

1)A old style gramaphone with a bakelite horn thing and, wind up handle and chest full of 72rpm records.
2)A big, heavy safe - like the Ant Hill Mob would make off with.
3)A stone trough in the middle of the back garden that weighed about a ton. Some years later my father moved it about twenty feet so that it would collect water from the roof of the garage. I think his method may have been inspired by speculation about the origins of Stonehenge.

Down at the dentist's

I went to see my dentist today. For the first time in years and years and years. Now my teeth are all white and spangly and fresh and not hidden oral horrors any more, at all.

My dentist is a very diligent note-taker. I don't mean my dental records. He has a fistful of cards on which there is other stuff. He seems to know all the jobs I have had for the last sixteen years and makes pleasant small talk about my life experiences - possibly to distract me from whatever dentistry related worries I may be having. I had one or two things I wanted to ask him but all I could utter was 'glub' and 'splurp'. Some people are just difficult to get a word in edgeways with. Dentists have a distinct advantage here.

If I were to have left his surgery and had a near death experience - the 'life before my eyes' moment would have been a little better prepared than it would have been otherwise.

The only thing I know about my dentist outside of his dentistry - is that I think he is (or was) something of a patron of the musical arts. I base this solely on the facts that some sixteen years ago I had guitar lessons in a room under his surgery and also, at around that time there was a tiny, very quirky guitar shop next door to the surgery (where once I went, drunk, the day before a long sea voyage, the man in the shop played some music for me, and I bought it to take on the voyage). I have always assumed that the guitar teacher and the guitar shop man rented their space from my dentist. I never found out for sure. I haven't played my guitar in years.

Hares at home

Hares at home
Originally uploaded by space adventures.

Good for you, sister!

Today when I had a spare two minutes I switched on my radio. It was Radio Two. I assume it was 'Pause for Thought'. A priestly sounding voice was telling me that the people he admires the most are people who do things for the sake of doing them. People who just get on with it and don't expect any praise. I think the focus of his Godly talk was the recent Brit Awards ceremony. I felt guilty when I listened to this. When I do things, I want something out of it, be it money or respect. Preferably both. Especially money. Perhaps I am a bad person, I thought. I only heard a few words of what the man on the radio had to say. Perhaps I took it out of context but I had had enough of him and I turned the radio over to Radio 4. A woman was being interviewed who had been a nun but had decided to stop being a nun and so wasn't a nun anymore. Whilst being a nun she had gone to university to study English so she could go back to her convent and teach. She had found that even though the university was far from a 'worldly' place, the encouragement she had been given to think for herself and to analyse and question the thoughts of the authors she studied changed her view of the world fundamentally. When she went back to the convent, the regime of unquestioning faith was intolerable to her. She had a small nervous breakdown and subsequently left the convent.

I felt bad that the nun had had a breakdown - but I liked the ex-nun's story. The Radio 2 guy may have gone on to qualify what I'd heard and I had got him completely wrong, but the nun had cheered me up and I thought about what a grim place the world would be full of the Radio 2 guy's chums.

Edit: Later I looked in 'Radio Times' and found that the above mentioned were probably 1) Rev Chris Morley and 2)Karen Armstrong.

Here i am.

I spent a large part of today (or yesterday because it is so late now) fannying around with a forum I vaingloriously set up here. But after all of that effort I have decided that I just must have one of these blog things too.

All of this fun. It is such a shame that I need to sleep!