No Fleas on Betty.

Every month we have to administer Frontline flea treatment to our four cats. Dom and Dave are no trouble, Britney is disdainful and Betty, the smallest, is a nightmare. She moves quicker than your eyeballs can and has a sixth sense better than my eyesight. You only have to think about it and she’s slinking away, and any sign of intention she’s out the cat flap. This is how it went this evening. Mothermouse leaves the room, “I’m just going to make a hot chocolate.” “OK darling,” No that’s not believable I’d never say that ever, “OK. Oh look at the dirt on this table.” She returns, “It’s quite warm out.” “Really, that’s nice, I’ll just get up and adjust my slippers.” “Good idea.” “and go over here by the window.” I lunge at Betty sleeping peacefully on a chair. As my hands clasp the warm air of where she’s been she explodes vertically and, using my empty hands as purchase, travels up my arm over my shoulder across the room and behind the settee. Our element of surprise is well and truly lost. Mothermouse calls her from one end of the settee and she duly exits the other where I’m waiting hands akimbo. As they close around where she briefly was she’s round the table, past Mothermouse and back behind the settee. I meanwhile have slithered on the carpet, banged my knee on the table and fallen on the settee. This happens one more time and Betty is now mewing like she’s in front of a firing squad pleading for her life, behind the settee. We decide to reverse the procedure. I make a grab for her tail and Mothermouse collects her at the other end, and I do the administration. I swear when Mouthermouse finally let her go neither of us even saw where she went. But at least there’ll be no fleas on Betty for another month.

Working From Home.

What if the corporate and financial sectors jointly invented a new country or maybe bought an island that became their very own nation state. It needn’t be large, just a few square miles where they could gather together to make new rules on taxation, their own legal system and so on. Corporatia as it might be called would then join the ranks of world trading nations. Its corporation tax could be zero%, courts could favour corporations and judges appointed from the ranks of corporate lawyers. As all their transactions whether through ebay, Google, Amazon or even domestic coffee shops were transacted from Corporatia they would be subject to Corporatia’s taxes and financial rules, and as those taxes and rules were so favourable to large multinationals they would soon find themselves transacting business from within its shores. Corporatia itself being small, isolated and far too hot would have little need of a human population except for a few IT engineers and maintenance staff and all other aspects of production, sales and admin etc would be located wherever they proved cheapest. Corporatia would then set about making trade agreements with other countries who could not afford to be disconnected with the new hub of world business even if Corporatia’s secrecy policy didn’t allow them to see the actual text of the agreement and it would decimate their own government’s taxation revenues. And if governments complained they would have little hope of winning their case under Corporatia’s legal system under which if they opted out or in any way failed to comply with the legal system’s requirements would be subject to many billion-dollar penalties. This fable, as far fetched as anything Jonathan Swift might imagine, is a close approximation to the new TPP free trade agreement shortly to supersede America’s much objected to existing NAFTA free trade agreement. It’s truly gobsmacking in its implications and may already be one of the root causes of the current European and UK deficits. And as Corporatia has little need of human beings it cares little for poverty, starvation, the outsourcing of jobs, legislation protecting workers, human rights, food safety, low cost medicines and the environment. Just thought you’d like to know.

Restoration Age.

I wonder if, nearing seventy, I’m reaching an age where, though I can finally afford new things, I prefer to restore old ones. It’s probably a subconscious urge to be restored oneself. No longer needed in the universal wealth creation process I seem to be struggling to find some use in the retirement home for things. So far this year I’ve already restored a hospitalised Sitar from the multiple injuries of the musical instrument equivalent of a car crash, though its ten year wait for surgery makes the NHS look positively speedy. I have a Yamaha SRX600 Sports Single in the shed and a Mercedes in our concrete front garden that I can’t bring myself to the over egging exaggeration of calling it a drive. Both are tired but lovely and worth nothing however much I might polish them up. The analogy to self becomes even clearer. Today I continued restoring an old flamenco guitar I bought second hand in Granada in 1965. It befriended me through love-loss, art school and beyond before it was superseded by a classical from Barcelona, a Gibson SG copy and children. Almost forgotten I lent it to a young lad to learn on, the son of a fellow guitarist friend who died. It came back with a crack in the heal of the neck tastefully filled but not mended. With the vagaries of atoms and time it broke in two catastrophically, the neck taking the fingerboard and chunks of the soundboard and hole decoration with it. I’d already glued that lot back together and today I glued the loose ribs on the underside of the front soundboard, a job that makes scratching one’s right shoulder with one’s left foot with your eyes closed seem plausible. It consists of loading a paintbrush with boiling glue, inserting brush, hand and wrist into the sound hole and, guided only by imagination, applying glue to anything that sticks up and might possibly be a rib. There were four loose and after cleaning up I found the bridge was rattling and the front was close but not glued to the side round the upper bout. More boiling glue and it is now rattle free. I’ve made a new nut and lowered the bridge saddle because my neck gluing was a tad off so it’s ready for new strings. OK its front has bellied out like mine and I may be not a moment younger but my friend will play again.

A Short Ghost Story.

Eight miles bike ride today. Not bad for seventy, considering round here you can’t go three miles without rising 200 feet or more and it’s the first ride this year, and well most days being retired I do the same old same old. And even that mostly consists of sitting on my arse, walking to the kitchen and back etc. But I just seem to be able to do it. It’s like I was still fifty or so. Anyway this ghost story. It was when I was late fifties and coming back from a ceremony do near Ripon. I’d done a night out, a vision quest. To be honest the main thing I envisioned was the sunrise. It was bloody cold and my theoretical protective crystal dome didn’t keep the wind out. In the morning I had breakfast packed my tent etc onto my motorcycle and headed home. They said to take it easy after this powerful experience but a bike and a motorway can only mean eighty in the fast lane. It was there I had the weird experience. I knew I could float off the bike, just hover above it. It was all a dream and I could venture out of this so-called realty if I wanted. I had to try hard to resist doing it. I mean I’d have been killed if I did. But I suppose that’s not really about ghosts, just a weird experience. So eight miles, not bad all things considered. In fact people often say I don’t look seventy, not even sixty, then I guess we’re all getting younger these days. But it is true my days are getting more routine, walking to the kitchen and back, sitting at my computer, watching television. It’s like I’m not getting older just more habitual. I mean if anyone sees me that’s what I’ll be doing, walking down the stairs, along the hall and into the kitchen. It’s just what I do these days.

The Great Leap Forwards.

Apparently we British spend 20 hours out of every 24 sitting or lying. Ditto this teenage generation will likely be the most unemployed since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This seems perverse when the retirement age is being pushed back progressively. And at the same time this younger generation is becoming more agitated, not for want of work but in a lack of attention and a certain wildness that suggests a gathering frustration of some inner animus. And and and at this same time the likes of Ken Robinson are railing against the misplaced industrialisation of their education and suggesting an entirely new form of engagement. Is there a nebulous watershed slipping under our feet? One generation wedded to hierarchical ladder climbing successful careers and the next to a flat line of variously interesting scraps. It seems the future may be very different. But what is this engagement Ken talks of? And then along comes Olivia Coleman collecting three BAFTAs. Stay with me. She’s an actress that can’t act with a personality that has no understanding of celebrity. She does her job as easily as breathing and is universally loved for it. In some strange way she makes Tony Robbins look like the dinosaur of the self ages. Where he is a brilliant motivator to achieve oneself, one’s full potential, Olivia has no need of a unique self. She does not act the roles she’s given she inhabits the people she plays. It seems when there is no self to cultivate there is no restriction to inhabiting another one, and another. So might this be the watershed, a move from a self-styled self to a universal one? One in which we are all one. Might the apparent flat lining of this next generation not be the failure my hierarchical mindset suggests but an emergence of a one-self not a oneself? Then again you don’t get three BAFTAs in one night without achieving one’s full potential.

All in a Day's Work.

Do you suffer from a Clark Kent/Super Woman personality dichotomy? Oh just me then. But I mean don’t most people harbour a secret Walter Mitty-esque, ‘I’m really a…’ like a Tyrone Thompson diamond geezer or, for women, Lusty Lawson the kitchen temptress? Somehow, though, my internal super hero is feminine, which actually goes along with the common hypothesis that one’s inner id is the opposite sex. Anyway my inner exuberant self is decidedly gay. I can feel her bending the bars of my rib cage trying to burst out in the wrist gestures of an outrageous thespian queen, but she rarely glimpses true freedom. I mention this because yesterday I signed up for an ad-hock theatrical event where Stan and eight others I’d never met were corralled together by Face Book to create an evening’s entertainment out of a one word text sent to Stan at 1pm that same day by one of the bar staff of the Riverside pub where it was all happening. We had five hours to write, rehearse and polish sketches from the one word; ‘postcard.’ From the off I was one-nil down, the majority of the cast being some forty years younger and full of youthful enthusiasm, fast thoughts and eager voices. By three I was 7-0 behind and waiting for the final whistle. Could my inner Super Woman come to the rescue? In another word, no. I was so demoralised I could hardy pee when necessary. By five the pub lurched to thumps of music reminiscent of the sequenced explosions that probably brought down the twin towers and more testosterone than a bulk tanker. It was packed with tight young flesh in tight young apparel hurtling opinions at each other over a din that would most likely flatten a textile factory in the Punjab. I resorted to the only advantage I had left; age. I concocted a slack jawed ninety year old in a nursing home receiving a postcard, which to be honest wasn’t far off my outer Clark Kent persona by that time. We had a run through at 6pm and Stan sorted a running order. By 7.30 we had an audience of six and were accosting loo goers across the hall offering, if nothing else, to give their ears a rest. From the 200 we got 2 so were almost up to the size of the cast. Was it good? Well yes in parts, the highlight being Mrs Goggins exploding life long lust for Postman Pat, and in the process of their love making, tastefully undertaken behind a trembling curtain, terminally reshaping Pat’s cat flat. That was top of the bill and come to think of it I was second to last, so perhaps Stan liked it. OK I proved I was really good at being old but I could have done with Super woman making an appearance.  Anyway thanks Stan and everyone, a daunting task carried out with considerable aplomb.