Thursday 23rd February

I seem to have slipped into a phase of having the same recurring dream.  Not the same dream every night, but within each single night a different but still recurring dream.  This has been going on for weeks now, or is it months maybe; recurring weeks and recurring months.  And it is so debilitating, I wake up more tired than I was when my head hit the pillow.  I have tried various remedies, a few drops of oil of primrose on my pillow, a small nightlight, avoiding my habitual late night coffee, even trying drinking chocolate with its sickly sweet taste – all to no avail.  I wake up at intervals throughout the night, sometimes as early as an hour after drifting off, and there I am stuck in the dream, and I know I will still be dreaming this when I wake again in an hours’ time and in the morning too.  I try to think other thoughts, change the direction of my dreams but wake again slap bang at the same pointless point in the same pointless repetitive dream.  And it is so real, I am really there in it, living out every senseless repeated action, or saying the same stupid things, or worse still seeing the same figures and numbers on the page in front of me. Five minutes after properly waking and I cannot remember the actual dream, only the recurring nature of it. I wonder if I am anxious about something under my blanket of calm, or if there is something important I have forgotten which the dream is trying to nudge me into remembering.  And my life is spinning away and past me like a ball of wool that has fallen to the floor, and the faster I try to pull the strand I am holding, the faster it unwinds and the further out of reach the ball rolls from my grasp.  My life too has drifted into a recurring dream that try as I might I just cannot shake myself out of.

Wednesday 22nd February

And yet again the BBC has produced another incredible natural history series, this time about the evolution of the planet itself, ‘How to Grow a Planet’  It is a remarkable discovery of how the earth we know became just that, and the changes it went through to get there.  Most of the changes were driven by plants, not animals.  And the changes in animals came about largely through changes in plant life too.  We take plants so much for granted that we assume they must have always been here, and they have been here far longer than the animals, but they too have evolved over the ages from ferns to trees to flowers to grasses, and their evolution has triggered massive changes in the planet.  The presenter is Iain Stewart, a Scottish professor who has that sort of enthusiasm and authority which captivates and educates at the same time.  His Scottish brogue is rather sexy too.  The photography is beautiful, as you would expect from the BBC, but it brings together so much; geology, astrophysics, chemistry and biology to enlighten us.  The final surprise was how a single genetic mutation in a wild wheat plant meant that mankind for the first time started to farm and discovered how to make bread and settled in established communities, the end of the few million years of being hunter gatherers.   Amazingly this was only twelve thousand years ago.  And everything that we humans have achieved since then stems from that single plant mutation.  Makes you wonder if that hadn’t happened how we might have evolved, or not.  It actually makes Frozen Planet seem a bit boring.  I wish it had lasted longer and cannot wait for it to be repeated.

Tuesday 21st February

It looks as if the latest crisis has just about been avoided, or should we say postponed.  For how long is anyone’s guess, but the consensus is that the sand is fast running out of the hourglass.  The main problem is really that the medicine administered so far is in danger of killing the patient.  This is all being dictated by Germany who perceive the Greeks as lazy and overspending, unlike the thrifty and hardworking Germans of course. The Greek economy is going backwards so fast that it is almost in freefall, and the unemployment and cuts in wages are feeding on themselves in an ever decreasing downward spiral.  In the same way that the arguments against increased immigration where the idea that there are only so many jobs to go around is demolished by the simple fact that the more people who are working, the more money they have and the more taxes they pay  simply creates more work for everyone else; the reverse is also true, if you make people unemployed and cut even the minimum wage, everyone is poorer, has less money to spend, pays less tax and even more people are unemployed.  So, Mr. Osborne watch carefully and make sure we don’t fall into the same trap.  As part of the jigsaw current holders of Greek debt will have to accept a swap of much longer term debt of about thirty percent of the value of the bonds they currently hold.  This is called a Greek haircut.  Well, if the bond holders are having a Greek haircut, all I can conclude is that the Greeks themselves are having a German scalping.

Monday 20th February

Adrian used to rave on and on about Dylan; it was Dylan this and Dylan that all the time.  I could never see what all the fuss was about; a lot of nasty songs with a whiny tinny voice.  I never bought any of his records and had mostly forgotten about him, his name popping up in the news here and there.  But I saw this album ‘Judy Collins sings Dylan’, on sale actually and I bought it, not for the Dylan but for Judy Collins.  I remember her from the sixties, and as this is a fairly recent record I cannot imagine how old she must be now.  By the way, can you imagine any ‘Artist’ nowadays calling themselves ‘Judy’, those sort of names seem to have disappeared completely. Judy had a beautiful clear voice, almost bell like as the notes rang out, she was one of those artists along with Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte Marie who were in the vanguard of the modern folk revival in the early sixties; the very same movement that Dylan was part of too.

And what a lovely voice Judy has now, much calmer, more rounded and smooth, less range but mellower and I think better.  And the songs were good too, sung by Ms Collins you can actually hear all the words without struggling to work out what on earth Dylan was singing about.  And there is no doubting now what a good songwriter he was, I just wish he had let better singers interpret his words, rather than snarl them out himself.  One line particularly hit me, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.” But the best is a gorgeous love-song titled ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit.’  A meaningless title which does no service to the beautiful lyrics, ‘My love she shines like diamonds, with no ideals of violence, doesn’t have to say she’s faithful, she’s true like ice like fire’  and ends almost sadly with the refrain ‘like a raven with a broken wing’

So maybe Adrian was right all along and that here was one of the great songwriters of the twentieth century, he just needed someone like Judy to sing his songs for him.

Sunday 19th February

My usual and first choice for TV viewing is the news channel;  BBC news 24 in preference to Sky, but in desperation even Al Jazeera will do, or the best cure for insomnia ever invented – The Parliament Channel.  But last night all that was on was Whitney’s funeral.  I did watch for a while, but it went on and on, and in the end just bored me.  Why on earth would anyone want their funeral to be live on TV; but maybe nobody bothered to ask Whitney.  She died quite young so had maybe not considered the question; how many of us seriously do.  We may express a preference for Cremation over Burial, or for a non-religious ceremony, or even a bio-degradable coffin, but all that most of us can hope is that these minimum requirements will be met, and that whatever relatives are in charge actually show some respect for the only person who matters, but is unfortunately not around to lay down the law.  Poor Whitney, I wonder if she would have wanted all this glitz and showbiz singing, even if most of it was very gospel tinged.  Was she in her own quiet thoughts that religious or is it just taken for granted, especially in America, that everyone is a true believer.  I am not sure what is meant to be achieved by all of this posturing and praising not only the Lord, but almost making her out to be a saint for our times it would seem.  Am I alone in believing that this is all so over the top; she was only a singer after all.  But maybe this is a black American thing which us white people, especially this side of the channel, just cannot tap into.  I mean pastors with microphones and all the weeping and wailing seem so overtly melodramatic to me.  But maybe that is part of the Faustian accord you enter into when you become part of the Star-making machine, not only is your private life ripped apart for all to gloat over, but even in death you have to be a star.  I just wonder where Whitney the woman is in all this, the mother, the daughter, the frail and broken star whose comeback last year was almost a joke, with commentators delighted to discover that her voice was in poor shape, and fans were walking out half way through her concerts.  I just wish they would leave her alone.  Maybe it is all a part of a grand marketing strategy to resurrect her, even in death, so that above all else, her records will still sell, and all the vultures can carry on feeding, just like they are doing with Michael Jackson.

Saturday 18th February

I seem to have lived my whole life in quiet reflection.  Not that that on its own makes it any the less valid, I have sat and thought about things while others ran headlong into situations they may have sooner or later regretted.  I have weighed up the options and more often than not rejected the rash and hasty course in favour of a more measured approach.  Only once did I let my senses betray me, and was ruled by my heart rather than my reasoning.  You can read about this in ‘Catherines Story‘, and as Grandma might say, ”Everyone should be allowed one mistake, I suppose.”  Although more and more I am realizing, it was no mistake at all.  Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and besides although my love with Edward was of a much more sober and ultimately rewarding nature than that headlong impulsive all-embracing love affair with Adrian, I am not sure which meant the most to me.  Besides I wouldn’t have had the raw material for the book without it, so on reflection it was good that it happened, the pain and the misery as much as the elation.

I have also read avidly over the years, and if I could but recall all the books and list them, and work out how many hours each took to read, I could work out just how many years I have spent reading the exploits of others from the continental capers of Miss Becky Sharpe through all those long Victorian novels, whisking through the Edwardians with their elegant prose, swept away through the twenties by all the newly liberated female writers like Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, the thirties of Mapp and Lucia and then those forties novels of Daphne Du Maurier and Somerset Maugham, the fifties of Eric Linklater and Nevil Shute, discovering the excitement of life as the sixties new writers came to life, and on and on through all the decades to the new writers like Zadie Smith, I have read so many books.  And all life is there in those pages of close typed text, and I have lived every moment of them just as if it had happened to me.  It has been just as real as my own memories, even if like looking at the surface of a pond I was living it all in reflection, it has been truly wonderful.

Friday 17th February

As usual, in this complicated world, things are not always as they seem.  What appears straightforward is often a blind alley, or a false trail, to deceive us from the real objective.  And I believe that Alex Salmond is doing just that with his famous devolution referendum.  Scotland has been part of a United Kingdom for four hundred years, more or less, and that while I would agree that for the most part this was a conquest in all but name, things are so equal now as to make no difference.  The argument that decisions are taken in London is the same for people in Cornwall as in Kirkcaldy, or even Essex or Hertfordshire come to that; in fact the Scots with their own parliament have far more control over their own destinies than people living in Hull or Newcastle say.  And apart from a very small percentage there is no great sentiment for independence amongst the Scottish people. And on the surface if Alec Salmond campaigns for a yes vote which is rejected he will be in a difficult place politically, after all the Scottish Nationalists whole raison d’etre is for Scotland to be independent, or is it?  If Scotland were a completely separate country who would the ScotNats (and all the other parties come to that) be able to blame for any perceived or real failure of Scotland, compared to England say.  Isn’t the fact that Westminster decides all the really big questions actually very convenient for any Scottish politician?

Apart from all the questions of ownership of infrastructure, armed forces, or resources like the National Grid, the big question would be over the currency.  Surely Scotland would have to have its own currency, and not just those pretty banknotes so distrusted south of the border, but a fully fledged separate currency.  Because if they were independent they would be in charge of fiscal policy, and can you imagine the opportunities for crooked businessmen, let alone smugglers large and small if there were different VAT rates.  And who would rescue Scotland. If like Iceland, it came unstuck.  I don’t really think that Mr. Salmond wants to be completely independent; what he really wants is Devo-Max, that is; the most power that can possibly be exercised in Edinburgh without severing the vital ties of Sovereignty and overall wealth that being a part of the UK brings with it.

Anyway, we will see: the ScotNats are quite uncharacteristically delaying the vote for some time.  If they do succeed in having a third option on the ballot paper it would be very unlikely for any of the three to gain more than 50% of any vote, so again it would only be an opinion poll, and hardly legally binding.  Come to that why should not everyone in the United Kingdom be voting, surely we in England deserve a say in whether we actually want Scotland to be part of us.  Of course, that won’t happen, as there would be a strong possibility of us saying, “Okay, if that’s what you want – Goodbye.”

Thursday 16th February

I was far too early, as usual.  Punctuality is a crime I plead guilty to with no prompting; my train was not until 8.15 in the evening, but I was at Paddington way before 7.  How ridiculous is that, but I had bought one of those cheap advance tickets, which are not exchangeable if you miss your allotted train, so I made sure I was there early, ridiculously early.  I really couldn’t face wandering around the shops, if I went into Smiths I would be bound to buy a book, and I had only just started my new one; I was staying with friends in Wales for a couple of days, so Marks food store was pointless too, that left little more than Tie Rack.  Would someone please tell me who actually shops at Tie Rack, who needs a tie, or a scarf or a pashmina that badly, or do they rely on the bored and stupid for their customer base?

I considered settling down in Starbucks, but over an hour with a coffee for company seemed stretching it a bit, in the end I wandered upstairs to a bar which served food, and ordered a glass of dry white wine and a not too filling Ceasar Salad.  I wish I hadn’t, the wine was neither particularly dry, nor even good, it reminded me of those wine boxes which were so popular in the eighties, where the contents invariably tasted of the plastic lining of the cardboard box they had crawled out of.   I am in no way a wine buff, what tastes good is good in my book, and the only thing I do know is a cheap bad wine, I left it practically untouched, a bonus for the staff at least.  The Ceasar Salad was a weak imitation, not cos lettuce but some limp apology for it, possibly iceberg, the most tasteless of salads, the croutons were obviously out of a packet and the ceasar dressing from a bottle, which wouldn’t have mattered had it been Paul Newmans, or a decent make, but it was sharp and bland at the same time if that is at all possible. There was a smidgeon of parmesan, or some hard dry cheese anyway, but so little that one had to almost search for it.  I gave this up as a bad job too, no point in complaining; the staff were all eastern European and probably on minimum wages, I couldn’t see a manager for love nor money.  I know that these places do not rely on return business, and have a captive audience to a degree, but there really is no excuse for such bad fare.

Oh well, my fault for getting there so early I suppose, I wandered down to the Starbucks where I should have come in the first place and continued waiting for my train.

Wednesday 15th February

I have never been really religious, there was a spell in my mid teens when I did think I would pursue some sort of religious studies, but it didn’t last more than a term.  I found the Bible contradictory and frankly rather boring, all those begats, on and on, generation after generation, and all to prove that Adam was the first man, and the ancient Jews who presumably wrote the old testament truly believed it and in order to prove the fact, created this whole litany of family members down to Abraham, and beyond.  Before the emergence of Darwinism and the theory of Evolution one could understand that man’s awe in the face of the multiplicity and beauty of nature felt that the theory of God having created the entire universe in just seven days was sufficient to explain everything.  But their position has shifted with changing scientific discoveries to some sort of fable of God’s creation with the seven days representing eons, or phases of creation.  But now with more and more that is unraveled, not only about the big bang and the beginning of the Universe itself, but discoveries about the evolution of our own planet the creation myth holds less and less credibility.  Almost no scientists now give it any credence at all.  Which makes it all the more surprising that ever-increasing numbers of fundamentalist Christians, especially in the land of the truly gullible, America, are pumping this nonsense into the brains of young children. More frightening perhaps is that some of the Republican presidential wannabe’s even believe in the creation myth too.  Even without the creation myth it is a truly amazing story; the hard part for us humans is to try to understand the why of it all. Because maybe there is no why, there is just is.  This is the way it happened.  Life just evolved, not because anything but because it just did.  The way the whole Universe is, is maybe completely contrary to the logic that humans employ, that there must be a reason behind everything.  The creation myth is a myth simply because there has never been any motivational force at all.

Tuesday 14th February

I may be getting soft in my old age, who knows, but I keep finding myself on the verge of crying.  Tears keep welling up in my eyes over nothing.  On Sunday, at the news that Whitney Houston had died for instance; and I didn’t even like her.  People say she had a beautiful voice, but I am not sure, I never liked it; that awful hanging note on I will always love YOOOOOOOUUUUUU used to set my teeth on edge, the song was played to death on the radio at the time and I really grew to hate it.  And then the poor girl was such a mess, a drug addict, a selfish diva who squandered her talent and loved so unwisely.  But when the news came through that she had died in her bathtub I was in tears, to die floundering, slipping under the water, did she panic, or did she just slide under, in any case it must have been awful.  My heart just went out to her and I couldn’t stop crying.

Stupid that we can cry for those we don’t know at all; Princess Diana; John Lennon; Marilyn or Amy Winehouse, who whether they deserve our tears or not, seem to bring them out in a flood, while we sit stony faced and emotionless as news of yet another earthquake or tsunami comes on the news and the hundreds of dead pile up, or even worse those close to us sometimes leave us tearless; I never cried at Grandma’s funeral.

Is it this lachrymose weather, is it just mid-winter blues, is it just me in my mid-sixties, looking back at a life I could have, and really should have made more of.  Is it that despite being surrounded by friends who maybe do really care, I feel so bloody alone. I cannot even watch a nature film anymore, as the leopard lands on the impala’s back I look away, as the hawk tears flesh from a baby rabbit I have to change channels, and then we are into a press interview and a perfectly ordinary couple are appealing for help for a missing daughter, or just some silly drama on ITV, I am there crying my heart out for them.

But who am I really crying for, Whitney – no, not really.  The world and all its problems, not even that.  And you know tears of self-pity are the saddest tears of all.