Thursday 17th May

There are some people who purport not to like the Beatles; they just don’t get it at all.  But what is not to get?  Almost everything they ever committed to tape was of a quality and excellence that has rarely been matched before or since.  Maybe you had to live through the sixties though, to appreciate just what Beatle-Mania was, to have shared with your friends and family the ever-growing love we all had for the four mop-tops.  There exists a certain snobbish belief that high quality and excellence cannot sit in the same sentence as commercial success; that somehow if everyone likes something it cannot be any good.  I must admit that at times I too have held this attitude, which is why I have never read any J K Rowling or seen any of the films, but I know deep down that this may well be because I do not want to end up admitting that they are very good rather than because I know they are rubbish.

The Beatles were (to me, a twelve year old at the time I first heard them) like the older brothers I never had, and we grew up together throughout the sixties, that most creative of decades.  They expressed in song and in their interviews a cheeky insouciance and disregard for the status quo without ever openly rebelling.  They were also at the cutting edge of new music, interpreting and amalgamating all the disparate ideas emerging at the time into their own constantly evolving music.  Say what you like about Madonna or Michael Jackson, but they never really changed music that much; they were very good at what they did but after a certain point of technical proficiency they tended to rest on their laurels.  Just listen to songs from ‘With the Beatles’ or ‘A Hard day’s Night’ and then listen to ‘Hey Jude’ or anything from ‘The White Album’ or ‘Abbey Road’, and it is hard to believe that just four or five years separate them.  And even these later songs, with all the psychedelic sounds and strange melodies were loved by everyone; they seemed to have the knack of carrying us all along with them.

And though their dissolution was bewailed by us all, you cannot deny that they left at the top of their game, before having to resort to constant re-recordings and live albums of their earlier hits as so many others have.

Wednesday 16th May

Will Greece really leave the Euro, as all the commentators are now predicting?  Not necessarily, it may be in both France and Germany’s interests to support Greece and to significantly soften the programme so that Greece can actually recover while still being a member (maybe with special allowances) of the Euro.  They may conclude that the price is worth paying rather than the unknown price of Greece leaving the Euro.   Sometimes in life, when everyone is saying something is a certainty, it isn’t.  A game of bluff relies on someone blinking first, maybe the blinking can be synchronised this time.

And there is a mood of change sweeping across the continent, against austerity.  Of course, in an ideal world countries should not have to borrow and all budgets should be balanced.  The trouble is that there are two sides to the coin, income and expenditure, and the problem with austerity is that while it should reduce expenditure if the price of that is diminishing revenue it may quite soon becomes self-defeating.  Also, it is miserable, with people being thrown on the scrap-heap, living standards eroded and a general lack of self-confidence that is debilitating and can become a self-fulfilling doom machine; as things get worse people expect the future to be bleaker still, and so by their actions it becomes so.

After both World Wars the solution was in effect to create money and debt, and build new infrastructure and in effect subsidise industry until the world economy recovered.  This was also the solution after the great depression of the early 1930’s.    We will see what happens this time, but the Greeks leaving the Euro it is not a foregone conclusion at all.

Tuesday 15th May

Sometimes when I am not aware that I am thinking at all, in some un-selfconscious moment I find myself back in another time and another place.  Usually this is quite unrelated to the here and now situation I am in, so removed in fact that I have no idea what should have triggered these little moments of recollection at all.  It is as if for a moment I am transported and an episode, a little scene which I had no reason to have remembered consciously at the time is replayed in sometimes crystal clear, but sometimes a dream like hazy state.  And then it is gone, and I can sometimes concentrate and bring it back, or if my thoughts are disturbed and I have to attend to something else, I have lost it completely and all I am left with is the vague feeling of unease that for a moment I was back in time, not merely thinking about the past but actually there in it.

Does this happen to everyone?  Is it some sort of short-circuit in our memories filing system, or is it a memory dying to be relived, maybe something I need to be reminded of, something I should never have filed away under ‘useless knowledge – do not disturb’, something I am missing in my life?  Or worse still, did it ever really happen, is it just my imagination playing tricks again.  And because I wasn’t consciously thinking when the time-slip happened, for the life of me I cannot really remember the remembered memory I just had, only that it was real and vivid and I was there reliving it again, if only for a moment before real life, or the life that we call real, the here and now, overtakes me again, and my usual routine is re-established.  Pity, because I think I might actually prefer it if I lived always in those little moments of recollected reflection.

Monday 14th May

Don’t you just hate self-believers; you know, where they are all so sure of themselves, so certain of their ideas, so full of ambition and a desire to succeed, and above all else a burning sense of self-righteousness.  I have heard this expressed above all else in sport, where winning is everything, coming second is losing.  Do they really carry this attitude into all aspects of life; the guy who gets the prettiest girl is king, the rest are schmucks, the man (or less likely – the woman) who get to be CEO is a success, mere heads of division are bums.  But you see, we cannot all be winners, and in that case why should we all strive to be.  And anyway how do you really measure success, is it in the number and quantity of material possessions, is it in the number of sexual conquests you have made, is it in the size of your home, the size of your bank balance, the number of medals you have won, or should we not be looking for something a bit more subtle; how many people really like you, how many people you have helped in all sorts of small ways, how much time you have given to pleasing others, or even less obvious things like how much you have understood the pain of others, how many books you have read and enjoyed, how quietly and unobtrusively you have lived your little life.

Does diffidence count for nothing, does uncertainty not have a place too; do we all have to know unerringly what we want to achieve in life, or can failure (in the worlds eyes) count for nothing.  If one has simply lived one’s life as best one could without causing too many waves, without breaking many hearts, with a touch of kindness, with a propensity to give ground, to defer to those noisier and greedier than one, quietly and unassuming but understanding life and it’s sleights, are these uncertain and hesitant attributes not far more valuable than all the self-confident winners of this world.

So, amidst all the bombastic self-praise and self assertiveness, let’s hear it (or not – if you choose not to) for diffidence, for amidst all the disappointment of those achievers who did not quite reach their goals, neither did we diffident ones, mind you, we never expected to anyway.

Sunday 13th May

After all the rain and cold, thank goodness for a little touch of the sun.  You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief, and not only from the sellers of garden furniture and barbeques, but from just about everyone.  Even the farmers who had been praying for rain are now wondering how they are going to save their drowned crops, standing water in fields is now a common sight.  And how these experts do lie to us; only two or three weeks ago they were insisting that it was the wrong sort of rain, and even a washed-out summer with rain from here to September would leave us still in drought.  Only yesterday the drought was lifted in the South-West and the Midlands, so obviously they had the right sort of rain there.

But enough griping, let us just sit here for a moment longer in the sunshine and warmth, let us soak up just for a day or two the goodness of the sun before the rain starts again.   The simplest and (to date) the cheapest of pleasures; to sit and simply bask for a while in the sun.  Skin cancer causing or vitamin D essential, I really don’t care, all I want is to feel a little touch of the sun on my skin.

Saturday 12th May

Why, of all the animals, of which we are undeniably one, are humans so different.  Why have we, one single species, developed to the extent that we pretend to rule over all the other species.  It may actually be true as some anthropologists claim that there were a few different types of humanoid apes which emerged around the same time, and we, homo-sapiens simply wiped the others out.  Whatever, we were all essentially the same, sentient intelligent and ruthless apes who have developed a sophisticated society and have harnessed natural phenomena like fire and water and metal and electricity to fashion a totally different world for ourselves than any creatures before us.  Was it the larger brain, or the use of a thumb at right angles, giving us such dexterity and hand control, was it the development of language, the articulation of complex thoughts and being able to pass on knowledge to younger members of the species, was it even, as some think, the discovery of cooking, which meant we did not have to spend most of our time looking for food; or was it none or a combination of these things that was the trigger to propel us from just another grunting ape and into being human.

Or was it something else, was it maybe the innate nature of being human that has elevated (or relegated, take your pick) us above the other species.  Was it the development of a consciousness, the fact that we saw ourselves as a species apart, as thinking creatures rather than relying on instinct to get ourselves through life.  Was it our awareness that we could think about the world we saw around us, and to ask questions both of the world and of ourselves that made the difference.  For all of dolphins assumed intelligence there is precious little evidence that they have a view as to the creation of the universe or the meaning of life itself.  Some chimps have been trained to use language to communicate with us, but would they have bothered or even thought about this possibility without the language we have given them.  So it is the nature of being human that is maybe the clue to why we have come so far.  It may also be the reason for our eventual downfall too, so watch this space.

Friday 11th May

We all have dreams and I suppose we all have “dreams”, though why they are described using the same word I have no idea, they are as different as chalk and cheese.  Dreams are those thing you swim through in your sleep, but have no real control of; those sometimes pleasant, sometimes incredibly annoying and occasionally terrifying but usually intensely real situations and experiences which your mind in its crazy filing system throws up for your delectation during the sleeping hours.  So often I wake in a positive sweat and almost shudder to release myself from their grip.  They often leave me feeling so tired too, as if I have run a marathon instead of peacefully resting my brain for eight hours.  It may well be that my dreams, which seem on waking to have been pursuing me all night have only happened as I surfaced from a much longer and blank nothingness, but the white stretches of nothingness I cannot remember, the turbulent indigo of my dreams are throbbing away in my brain as I rub the sleep out of my eyes and try to shake myself awake.

“Dreams” are really daydreams; those fond imaginings of what might be, or in my case more likely what might have been, those ambitions, love affairs, extra abilities, success and fame that might be achieved if only…

And pleasant as they may be, and of course going on in one’s head, they are hardly involuntary and do not recur with the same intensity as nightly dreams do. I always find it amusing on these reality television shows, from ‘X factor’ to ‘Masterchef’ that the contestants/deluded fools always claim that to win whatever contest they have stupidly entered has been their lifetime ‘dream’.  Poor cretins – have they really spent years thinking about and imagining themselves sitting in Alan Sugar’s boardroom or being berated by Simon Cowell in front of millions.  It reminds me of one of my recurring dreams I had mostly as a child but occasionally as an adult of being exposed naked in my back garden with the head-scarved neighbours all looking over the fence and laughing at my all too obvious inadequacy.

Dream on.

Thursday 10th May

Amidst the noise and bustle of modern life it is harder and harder to grab a quiet moment to one-self.  Everywhere you go you seem to be bombarded by information and the brain simply cannot cope with all this stuff.  From the constantly breaking news (which isn’t breaking at all) of the news channels and the free newspapers which you know you shouldn’t read but are tempted to anyway, and the internet, which  is plagued with adverts, as too is almost all television, even the BBC seem to delight in advertising even more of their programmes you do not want to watch between the ones you actually do want to see.  And even when one switches off everything, unless the windows are hermetically sealed you can still hear the quiet swish of wet tyres tirelessly roaming the streets like ravenous beasts seeking out innocent prey.

So, a quiet moment to oneself is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity, but one it would seem to be valued less and less in today’s busy world.   If one answers the perennial question “And what have you been up to lately?” with the honest answer, ‘Oh, actually nothing at all, I have been trying to do precisely nothing, and to positively stop doing anything, if only for a moment or two every day,’ then you will get some very strange looks indeed.  But I would like to run a small flag (maybe a pennant) up the flagpole for quietude.  There it is, amongst all the loud and crazy bunting flapping around, a small plea for sanity in this mad mad world.

Wednesday 9th May

I must have first heard the Beach Boys in 1962 or 63, at the time they were just another exciting sound coming from America, if someone had said it was surf-music I wouldn’t have even known what the term meant – I didn’t even know what surfing was, I just loved the sound.  “Help me Rhondda” and then “Barbara Ann” and “California Girls” were wonderful songs but just as the Beatles were changing so too were the Beach Boys and they were coming out with songs such as “Wouldn’t it be nice” and “Sloop John B.”  and “God Only Knows” which I didn’t realise at the time were all from an album called ‘Pet Sounds’, which so impressed the Beatles that they wanted to outdo it with ‘Sgt. Pepper’.  Then came the wonderful “Good Vibrations”, a song almost perfect in every way and which I was in love with in my mid-teens, even arguing with my music teacher that it would last as long as Beethoven.  Maybe not.

It was around this time that Brian Wilson, the main songwriter and creative force behind the Beach Boys had some sort of breakdown.  The Beach Boys struggled for a while to find a new direction.  But in the early seventies they came up with two albums that surpassed all their earlier efforts.  The first was “Surf’s Up”, with Feel Flows, Disney Girls, and the title track; songs of pure wonder and beautifully performed.  Brian was still a sort of member of the band, writing but not playing or singing with them anymore.  This was followed by the even more wonderful “Holland”.  Here they excelled even the heights they had scaled before, especially on ‘California Saga’ and ‘Sail on Sailor’.  But both albums are brilliant and can be played over and over without ever sounding boring.

Brian has now split from the remaining Beach Boys, who still tour the old songs; he has had something of a rehabilitation, and is now knocking out albums as a solo artist.  These are all okay, but listening again neither these nor even those early hits come anywhere near to the perfection of “Surfs Up” or “Holland”.

Tuesday 8th May

As well as the elections in Britain last week, there were also elections in Greece and France.  And it seems that the electorate does not like the people and the parties they elected only a few years ago.  In our case that was just two years ago, after about ten successful years Labour came up against a brick wall, and it is easy to say ‘It was the economy- stupid,” but actually most people had been relatively unaffected by the recession of 2008/2009.   The vast majority of people then, as now, were paying record low interest rates on their mortgages, it was only savers who were suffering, and there are a lot fewer of them than the former.  It was the air of incompetence and a lack of confidence in the persona of Gordon Brown that was the real turning point for Labour.  It was always going to be hard to follow Tony Blair, and just as John Major suffered from a lack of dynamism following the divisive but very charismatic figure of Margaret Thatcher, so too did Gordon Brown appear dull and boring in comparison.  David Cameron, and Nick Clegg to a certain degree, appeared attractive and dynamic at first, but one can hardly call their 2010 election results spectacular.  Neither party nor of course Labour seemed to have either the answers or the confidence of the public, so it is no surprise that they should have fallen even further behind in public opinion.  It seems that like the Greeks and the French we do not much like the leaders we have elected only recently.  Perhaps this is because all political parties are rather constrained as to what they can actually do about things, but it is rather more likely that in fact they are not that good.  Sarkozy promised much but in the end delivered little, and as for the Greeks maybe they are a rather special case anyway.  But what of Mr. Cameron; first indications are that they are simply going to batter on regardless and hope that either an economic miracle rescues them or that people will simply not trust Labour with the country’s finances in future.  A bit of a poor message that “Look, we may not be very good, but at least we aren’t as bad as Labour were.  We underestimated the task and the medicine we applied may not have worked so far, but we have every belief that it will eventually.”   The worst possible result will be that we have more or less a re-run of last time with no party winning well enough to govern on their own.  Would the LibDems even dare to go into coalition with Labour if they were the largest party next time?  Nothing would surprise me.