Still here!
Yes, I’m still here.
It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t actually posted anything for a while, and indeed I haven’t. So this is something in the nature of a holding post.
I’ve actually been working on an “Epic Poem”. Well, in my head it was going to be an “Epic Poem”. It was going to be a serious poem, full of epic adventure. There was going to be an awesome hero performing deeds of great importance. I saw myself as an aspiring modern-day Homer.
However, when I started writing, it didn’t quite work out that way, despite my best intentions. It features a rather clumsy, idiotic chap by the name of Eric Thane who bumbles through the poem – things generally turn out well by accident rather than design. And it’s in no way going to be “Epic”, either in content or length. Although some of the best poems don’t rhyme, and I think they’re great, I don’t seem to be able to write like that. So it’s taking me ages to get it right, and despite my best efforts it’s turning out rather cheesy. Ho hum.
I’ve managed to write some poems which, though they won’t win any prizes, have made me proud of the achievement. However, telling an actual story using words which rhyme and lines which scan is a lot harder than it looks.
So, part one of my Epic Poem coming soon, though it’s likely to be more Pam Ayres than Homer.
2093
The year is 2093
Tommy’s never seen a tree
He knows they’re tall and brown and green
But not a sight he’s ever seen.
People say it’s such a pity
All the world’s become a city
Trees and grass and bubbling brooks
Can only now be found in books.
No horses, cows or dogs or cats
All the food is grown in vats
People crammed in tiny spaces
Life’s a drudge, no happy faces.
The older ones think “Such a shame”
Wondering just who’s to blame
No more trilling sparrow’s song
Nature’s time has long since gone.
Life, the Universe and the Nature of Time
The answer to the Ultimate Question. And my age.
Forty-two. According to the late great Douglas Adams in his amazing “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, this is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
It’s also my age, as from today (Happy Birthday to me)! As my age is now the answer to the Ultimate Question, I’m expecting great things from the coming year. Everything’s going to fall into place, oh yes.
The nature of time
So that got me thinking about time. It’s an established scientific fact that time moves more slowly when you’re waiting for something to happen, as evidenced by Clive Giggletrousers’ “boiling kettle experiment” of 1975 (no link available).
Half an hour later, still not boiled!
Widely televised, the kettle failed to boil during the eight hour show, due, it has been proposed, to the sheer number of people watching. Further anecdotal evidence has been reported in the case of terminally lazy Mirabelle Jiff of Milton Keynes, UK, who, according to witnesses, waited for something to happen to her for so long she lived to the grand old age of 723 (unsubstantiated).
However, little has been reported regarding an increased rate of the passing of time. Recently, I discovered this phenomenon in my own life! It was the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor which brought it home to me. The news reader mentioned “the death of Michael Jackson in June 2009”.
2009? 2009?
Blimey. I thought it was just a few months ago. So, with the aid of a calculator, I estimate that time for me is running at around six times “normal”. This is a bit worrying, to be honest. Even if I live until I’m eighty (is that even possible on a diet of pizza, ice cream and Marmite sandwiches?), I’ll be dead by fifty. Yoinks! Maybe if I speak nicely to my pension company, I can cash it in early.
So, please join me next year for my 70th birthday and I’ll let you know how I’m getting on.
When I grow up
Grad Ball 1992 - young and full of hope
“When I grow up, I want to be a train driver.”
That was my number one choice when I was little. Every year we went to Scotland on holiday to stay with my gran, and we went by train. The MotorRail to be exact. That’s the one where they put the car on a trailer at the back of the train. And I really wanted to drive that train.
Then, for a brief period, I wanted to be a football (soccer) player. Well, which little boy didn’t? Unfortunately, I had no talent. I sat on the sidelines, watched the game and helped with the half-time oranges.
“School days are the best days of your life”, they say. Who are “they”? People who never went to school, evidently. Because it’s bullshit. I hated school. University’s where it’s at. Now that was fun. Sometimes I wish I could go back and do it all over again. Meeting friends in the Students’ Union for a couple of pints, rushing around to friends in the middle of the night to get help on an assignment…
Well, now those days are gone – time to grow up.
When I as at school we did one of those tests which is supposed to tell you the kind of job you might be suited to. That was one of the most hilarious balls-ups of all time. I decided that it was more important to get on well with co-workers than the work environment, and working outside might be good. The result?
“Youth club leader” or “Pig farmer”.
Picture courtesy of Stephen McKay
Excuse me? Pig farmer? What in the names of the Gods of Olympus were they thinking? I mean, I’m all for pigs but after their conversion to bacon, thank you very much indeed.
There’s nothing wrong with pig farming, it’s just not for me. I’m more of the academic type. So these tests should be taken with a pinch of salt.
So I spent some time as a laser physicist and now I’m a website programmer. A job which didn’t even exist when I was at school. There was no web until well into my university life.
So, thank you for inventing the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Without you, I’d be coming home every night smelling of pig poopies.
Interview With The draliman
Interviewer: We’re here today with draliman, to see if we can find out what makes him tick.
draliman: I’m not clockwork. I’m a real boy, with real feelings.
Interviewer: Just a turn of phrase.
draliman: Oh. Continue.
Interviewer: Thank you. So, half full or half empty?
draliman: Excuse me?
Interviewer: Do you see the glass as being half full or half empty?
draliman: Oh, I see. Work your way up to the heavy stuff, why don’t you. Half empty.
Interviewer: So you would describe yourself as a pessimist?
draliman: I see it as “disappointment management”.
Interviewer: Right. Cornetto or Magnum?
draliman: Ice cream or a hand gun?
Interviewer: Magnum the ice cream.
draliman: Oh. That depends on my mood. If I go for Magnum, I like to eat the chocolate off and then suck the yummy ice cream off the stick. Cornetto’s good for biting into.
Interviewer: Town or Country?
draliman: Country. All open and quiet. Lovely. I’m not a fan of being squashed in with too many people.
Interviewer: Cats or dogs?
draliman: Definitely cats. They pretty much look after themselves, and I’m lazy. I had a bad experience with a dog when I was tiny. I was on the beach and a dog ran off with my underpants. Stop laughing.
Interviewer: Sorry. It must have been very traumatic.
draliman: It was.
Interviewer: Well, I think we have enough for now.
draliman: What? That’s it? I drove miles to get here. Aren’t you even going to take my picture?
Interviewer: Um… no. I don’t think that would be a very good idea.
draliman: Huh? Hey, come back! What about my petrol money? Hello? Hello?
Sounds wrong, tastes great!
Ah, lovely!
This is my tribute to the spread known as Marmite…
“You love it or hate it”. That’s been the crux of the advertising campaign for Marmite for a good while. In case you’re not familiar with this wonderful spread (clearly I’m in the “love it” camp), it’s basically yeast extract with added vitamins and minerals. And it’s brown. Doesn’t sounds very appetising, does it? Well, I find it delicious.
Marmite saw me through university, and is one of my staples even today (spot the bachelor). Years ago I discovered that cheese and Marmite sandwiches were really great, although the combination doesn’t immediately present itself as the best of ideas (although Marmite is marketed in combination with a number of foodstuffs). The solidness of the cheese plus the tang of the Marmite – lovely!
It’s not for everyone. The “love it or hate it” advertising campaign is bang on. Marmite has such a strong taste, there really isn’t a halfway position. Years ago, when I was living in Stuttgart, we managed to get hold of some. There was an “English shop” on the other side of the city – it was run by an English couple who imported such delicacies as Prawn Cocktail flavour crisps and, yes, Marmite. We gave some to a German friend, who, seeing its brown colour, leapt to the immediate conclusion that it must be chocolate and dove straight in. What a baby! Screaming, cursing, clawing at his mouth. He came down on the “hate it” side.
If you’re on the “love it” side of the fence, I’ve discovered a new variation for my sandwiches. Four words – egg mayonnaise sandwich filler. There’s something about the solidness of the cheese, the tang of the Marmite and the, well, the “egginess” of the egg which just – works. I suggested it to fellow Marmite and cheese lovers and they turned up their noses, but promised to try it. We’ll see, but to my palate – lovely!
Cheese, Marmite and egg mayonnaise – sounds gross, tastes great!
Diversions and Bad Choices
I was driving home around 10pm last night and got a bit caught out. I’d just done my shopping and decided to go home the long way, as I knew there was resurfacing work in town and didn’t want to get caught. Three miles out of town I encountered what I assume was an accident, judging by the police cars. In any case, the road was closed and I had to turn back, forcing me to drive all the way back into town (I say “all the way”, it was actually only a couple of miles, but with my shopping slowly defrosting in the boot of the car, it felt further). Once there, of course, I had to sit at the traffic lights while the road resurfacing crew did their thing.
That reminded me of an (after the fact) amusing incident from many years ago. I was driving home from Surrey to Hampshire (where I was living at the time) on the main road just after dark when I encountered a police diversion, sending a whole queue of us off down a road I’d never seen before. Figuring most of the traffic would be attempting to rejoin the main road, I picked the car ahead and followed it. Now I’m switching to “story mode”, properly overdone and with associated poetic licence…
“Storm clouds gathered ominously overhead as I drove deeper and deeper into the unknown. The queue of cars ahead and behind me began to thin out as the rain began to fall, a few drops at first, then harder and harder until the wipers, frantically sweeping across the windscreen, could no longer cope and visibility fell to almost nothing. Sweat trickled down my brow as I clung to the red rear lights ahead of me. Deeper and deeper into the wilderness we drove, as more and more cars left the queue. A sharp stab of fear shot through me as we passed a sign – “Welcome to West Sussex”. I knew this was all wrong – wrong road, wrong county, wrong night for this. The last of the cars disappeared, leaving only myself and the car ahead – my guide, my last hope. In a sudden flash of lightening my worst fears were realised as the car ahead pulled into a driveway. He was home, I was lost.”
I can’t remember how I got home from there. I guess I kept going until I saw a sign to a town I recognised and followed my nose from there. The moral of the story? Don’t follow a random car in the hopes they’re going the same way as you. Because they’re not.
The Right Thing to Do
Last month riots and looting erupted in London and spread to some other major cities in England. Recent stories have reported that 75% of those arrested were “known to the police”. So what about the rest? Some stories reported arrests of ordinary people with ordinary jobs who thought they’d pop into some of the shops and help themselves.
So why did these people do it? Maybe they were caught up in the “excitement”. Maybe they also did it because they thought there were so many people involved they wouldn’t get caught. So, was fear of getting into trouble the only thing which previously held these people back?
We see this behaviour on a small scale every day. How many times does a car scream past you, slam on the brakes as it approaches a speed camera, then roar away again. They’re not interested in obeying the law, just in not getting caught.
It may be a naive hope, but maybe one day everyone will do the Right Thing simply because it’s the Right Thing To Do.
Hoodies, parkas and a change in perception
Every time I see a group of kids hanging around wearing hoodies, I feel a bit anxious. Why? I don’t know. Mostly, they’re just hanging around, talking and having harmless fun. But it’s not the way we looked when we were kids, I’m sure. And something about that makes me think something sinister’s going on – there’s going to be trouble.
Then I thought back to my childhood days. Yes, we dressed differently to the kids today, but we also dressed differently to the previous generation. And what did that previous generation think of us? The way I remember, we were just mucking about, having fun. Some of us had parkas, some of us those snorkel jackets, those ones where if you zipped up the hood it stuck miles out the front making you look like a reject from Jabba the Hutt’s Tatooine palace. We wore our jackets just by the hoods; they streamed out behind us like capes as we tore around the neighbourhood on our bicycles.
We must have looked like right tearaways, maybe even instilling a little unease. How different were we from the kids of today?
So what’s changed? Me and my perceptions. Before you know it I’ll be prefixing all my complaints with “When I was young…”.
Rain
Promise of morning glory
Stolen
By precious drops of crystal rain.
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