Other people's Poo.

The animals waste quite a lot of hay dropping it on the ground while they’re eating it. I used to thing OK they’re just dumb animals, what do you expect, but we sell cups of grass pellets to feed goats, donkeys etc for £1 and today I spent an hour scraping up a mud of dropped pellets from outside their pens. Probably about £20 worth. So much for human superiority. In fact all of them are showmen; I’ve been watching them work the crowd. No food, no interest. “Move along if you’ve not got pellets; cup carriers only thank you.” If you’ve got a cup they’re as cute as hell but cupless, bugger off. Time and time again today people have come up going, “Oh look at the baby goat’s poking their heads under the fence to feed off the ground.” Don’t believe it, it’s a con! It’s just another cute ploy. Their parents tell them to do it so they’re clear to eat what comes over the fence, and basically you can’t fill up a goat. They may look bony but they can digest food quicker than you can feed them. All they do is shit more, which is why I was in with them all afternoon. In fact I’m getting quite resentful. There I am cleaning up after the bloody things and all these young mothers can do, some of which are quite tasty, is go all gooey over the stupid shitting grass eaters. What about me! I’m not only intellectually superior, good looking and roughly the same species as them, I’m knee deep in goat excrement out of the goodness of my heart! No ‘oh look at the cute farmer man, what are you doing after work?’ No, I’m the one covered in poo. Well it’s not mine!

Blind to Reality.

I just showed Bethmouse some onboard bike footage from the TT. I find it scary verging on incredible. She had no reaction, none whatsoever. It was as if I’d shown her an invisible tadpole swimming in ink, or a small piece of unused blotting paper. I found it amazing that having no experience of what she was looking at made her almost unable to see it. It reminded me of a story that South American tribes couldn’t see the ships of their conquerors approaching because they had no reference for what they were seeing; also that 80% of our vision is cognitive postproduction. I experience something similar when I watch Glee or the Gilmore Girls, programs that Bethmouse can see in incredible detail. I am visually aware of something happening but I don’t have the postproduction to see it. So I can hardly blame Bethmouse for not having ridden a motorcycle. But that approaches my concern. When one has a highly developed postproduction capability to ‘see’ platitudinous drama on TV and relatively poor capacity to ‘see’ the real world, will the real world become invisible? OK one will see movement, discern faces, hear sounds but will one make any sense of them? Will one feel any inclination to be involved with it? It is after all dangerous, smelly, ugly and boring compared with America’s Next Top Model: One’s Citroen Picasso will never be a match for the cars they trash on Top Gear. The saving grace used to be having to mend the bloody things when penniless but they’re not even mendable now. One can only tow it into traffic and hope someone rights it off on the insurance, and watch Formula 1 while you’re waiting for the cheque to come through. Any necessity to come face to face with reality is departing as all roads lead back to the sensory equivalent of video editing. So maybe The Day of the Triffids was right. We will all go blind together. But only to reality.

The TT.

If you’re not a diehard motorcyclist or if you’ve never been, how can I describe the TT to you? I have to go somewhere else entirely. It’s a Shakti Gawain book about spirituality. She talks about finding your intuition through meditation and deep imagination, a process of being still and contemplative, and trusting it, knowing and living it. The first time I went to the TT I got a day off work, caught a train from London to Liverpool, an overnight ferry to Douglas (sleeping on deck) and walked to the bottom of Bray Hill in the early morning. I waited. The race was postponed due to mist on the mountain. The course is 37.5 miles and includes a mountain; the two-week event is over a hundred years old. The ‘average’ race speed is 130 mph, which means 160 to 200 mph on most of its narrow country roads. On the middle, ‘Mad’, Sunday the mountain is made one way and open to public ‘racers.’ Doing 70, being overtaken by a guy doing 90 who is being overtaken by a guy doing 120 + on a B road is not an experience I wish to repeat. Anyway I waited, I ate a packed lunch, waited, imagined and caught the ferry and train home. Sitting at a suburban bus stop looking at traffic for 10 hours isn’t an encouraging introduction but that’s the TT. Even when there is racing one has to be able to enjoy contemplation. The roads close 2 hours before racing so you have to be where you want to be, and wait. You have to wait 17 minutes before they come round again, and then you have to wait for the roads to open again. In the midst of this dangerous excitement bees hum, the wind rustles the trees, ants climb your boot, and the grass becomes interesting. In the 6am practice sessions the sound of the bikes begins 4 or 5 miles away building to a tortured mechanical crescendo and a barely visible whoosh of express colour. That’s it, and back to the grass. Now ordinary racing is great. You line up, the flag drops and you enter a funnel of bikes, in my case motocross, into the first corner. The concomitant danger is not uppermost, in fact it is swallowed up by focus. One enters a trajectory of reality that is unbeholden to such considerations, a form of clarity and purpose unknowable by those who haven’t experienced it. One is not afraid but an unconscious drive to survive strikes the anvil of one’s capabilities into life. No fear, no anger, no impatience, no consideration of ‘how’ to ride. One is piloted by intuition. But the TT is not ordinary racing. Each rider sets off alone at ten second intervals so he is racing himself and the road, exploring all the different elements of his own limits. Someone asked me, “is it exciting when you crash?” Der, no!! One is just deeply upset it’s all gone wrong. It’s too fast to even worry about the impending injuries. It just happens, almost serenely. But on the island (Isle of Man) it can be fatal. That’s why tens of thousands of bikers pay yearly homage to the most excellent bravery, a bravery that is worth dying for. Cynics will never be brave enough to know its value. As with the riding the preparation must be nothing short of immaculate. That doesn’t mean polishing the mudguards; it means complete attention to the smallest detail, the emotionless appreciation of every part to the purpose of the whole. What Shakti writes about, these riders live. They’re clear, focused, unphaseable, self-effacing and they love it. Whatever your route to bravery, Shakti’s or the TT, it’s worth the journey. My thoughts go out to the Dobbs family for their loss, to Connor Cummins for a good recovery and to Guy Martin who, thankfully, was not badly hurt.

Responce.

Many years ago my girlfriend and I took a class of Downs syndrome kids to the zoo. She took a group photo of her and her class. Seeing it afterwards I was struck by how I responded to her looking the odd one out. I seemed to have a natural mechanism for singling out and focusing on the odd even in this case where the tables were turned. In a similar way why don’t I see an elephant as grotesque? I mean what’s with the trunk? Is it some giant mutant anteater? Arg arg arg! No it’s an elephant, calm down. I imagine organising a blind date on the phone. She sounds pleasant, amusing, I look forward to it. She appears and is disfigured in some way. I am captivated, and not in a good way, by this one element of her. It is a primitive reaction regenerated every time I look. I can’t see anything without focusing back to the blemish, like seeing a sleek shiny new car in a showroom with a single scratch on the bonnet. ‘It is not as it should be’ screams in my ear. No amount of platitudinous overspeak can overcome this visceral response. I see myself struggling for niceties for, well for anything that doesn’t exhibit my captivation, which I perceive as an ugliness in myself that I don’t want to be seen. In some way my captivation chimes with the internal captivation of my date; that she has become the captive of her disfigurement by a million such encounters. Veins of “I am not as I should be” run deep through her meat. Whether it be by humour, ridicule, niceties or platitudes I have an instinctive wish to distance myself from the different, from the what I perceive as ‘not as it should be.’ It’s as if I, who have average looks, know well this ‘not as it should be’ about myself, and in compensation for my awareness of my own ‘disfigurement’ take comfort in not being as ‘bad’ as you.

Yet a young child might just say, “You’re different”, or as I remember once, “Why has that man got a big lump on his neck mummy?” And we in our adult wisdom said, “Don’t say that sweetheart, it’s not nice.” I can only say what those wiser than me know, that everything is as it should be. It is a sentiment we would do well to share.

I mean should we just remember Einstein for having the worst hairdo in the history?

Nuts.

I broke an exhaust stud. In an idle moment I made a cardinal mistake. Never fit a small socket on the handle that comes with the set. It’s long enough to break anything under 13mm and it’ll mince 10mm without even trying. So now I have three more nuts to undo and a stud to extract. Trepidation. Put socket set away. Phone man who knows everything. Dave does. That’s what he does. He knows the doing of things. OK he supplements doing with books and knows theory but always starts and ends with doing. So Dave knows the real world of exhaust nuts, they’re a bugger. They spend their lives red hot one minute and wet through the next. Mine had lost a good millimetre to rust so spanners were useless. Enter trusty mole. Dave’s advice: Get a nice day, a cup of tea and a fag and just keep worrying them till they give in. Douse liberally with WD40.Get mole on and apply a reasonable force while hitting nut end with a hammer. More WD40. Once you’ve broken the bond just keep working it a bit at a time till it comes off. If that doesn’t work use a propane torch to get it real hot as well. Butane isn’t hot enough but don’t melt aluminium. What’s wonderful about Dave’s advice is it’s forged from practice and failure; it’s real, not theoretical. And it works. No amount of study holds the little details that make for success. There’s no book that says about the tea and fag and a nice day but they’re vital to be in the right frame of mind to be slow and gentle. None that talk about ‘worrying nuts till they give in’ but that says exactly how to approach it. So three nuts off successfully and now a broken stud to extract. Drill out and fit a thread insert. But that’s for another day. If only I hadn’t had that idle moment.

World Cup.

Having just watched the World Cup’s 50 worst moments it’s hard to come to terms with what will steer the emotional roller coaster we are about to embark on. When the whole world will see handballs, blatant dives, off and on sides from multiple camera angles that the ref fails to spot; when games are won and lost on flagrantly unjust penalties; when players are sent off due to the quality of the opposition’s play acting, it will surely be the referees who bring the game into disrepute. When heroes like Cantanar and Zidan can be brought down by nobly responding, as any man worth his salt would, to the jibes of sleazy cheats it’s perhaps worth being as sanguine as our players. But even they who love playing the game on the world stage can be reduced to tears of rage and disappointment by unfairness. They must surely hate it as we do but when the ref can be so easily duped cheating becomes a vital part of the game. The ref has become the major sponsor for the unspoken rule, to cheat if you can get away with it. Same with the FSA. When personal honour becomes the currency of losers, rules become so labyrinthine their relevance can always be avoided, cheats will prosper. I would like to offer one new rule to FIFA. “If, after the match, video evidence is judged by an expert panel to show an infringement, un-sportsman like behaviour or a referee error not brought to his attention by ‘both’ teams disciplinary measures will be taken against the player or team in question.” That might bring back some honour to the game that unites the world. 

Donkeys score from Set Piece.

Imagine pushing a wheelbarrow through a gate. Imagine also a donkey. If you opt for pushing the barrow through the gate from behind there is a moment where the gate is open before the barrow reaches it. If you opt as I did for pulling the barrow through the gate thus able to protect one’s approach there is a moment when the barrow is clear of the gate while it’s still open. There is therefore no foolproof way of getting a barrow through a gate without providing an opportunity of freedom to a donkey. Donkeys know this. So this morning donkey A, which I will henceforth refer to as DonkA, ceased eating hay and followed my barrow through the open gate. I dropped the barrow and clung on. What followed would in football parlance be termed a ‘set piece.’ Donkeys happily trot along with a person on their back and the same can be said of a person clinging round their neck. Donkeys know this but in the moment I was slow to catch on. Thus DonkA carried me way from the open gate leaving it free for DonkB and a wily old pony to also escape. I now had three trotters and even the one I had, albeit firmly by the neck, was pretty free to go wherever it wanted. I was reduced to repeatedly shouting ‘Chris’ who, hearing my pleas immediately stopped what he was doing to watch and enjoy. I must admit I was hoping for a more active response. In fairness though he did manage to get both donkeys in the small yard after a bit of chasing about. That left the wily old pony. This pony was obviously a student of psychology. His body language would exude, “oh alright then, I’m just a dumb animal, I give up, I’ll go where you want”, so inducing a moments euphoria, which he then used to exude, “oh no I’m not”, wheel round and be free again. He managed to outwit five of us for a good ten minutes by this and other ruses, circumnavigating the farm and all its byways several times in the process. Now our two deer are nowhere near the donkeys but by this time the word had got around it was freedom day; a sense of “I have a dream brothers and sisters” was in the air. One deer shot past André while he wasn’t looking; basically the same barrow/gate, gate/barrow situation. But two things were against it. One, deer are very skiddy on tarmac, and two they have a tendency to get over excited and drop down dead. But after another ten minutes of Bambi on Ice everyone was back in place. Break time. After lunch André had to de-louse all the chickens; actually it was a group effort. Four of us, me and three feisty young ladies, caught the chickens while André applied the chemicals. Chickens, especially cockerels, don’t like this idea. They too have wiles, mostly around rapid wing movements causing them to take on a strangely blurred appearance. Five of us chasing five flapping chickens in a small chicken coop provided copious amounts of entertainment. What with all this and last week’s sheep wrestling my volunteering day is beginning to resemble having a season ticket to Alton Towers. Who needs aerial railways of death when you can strap yourself onto a donkey’s neck and hold on to a sheep for dear life? And lets face it; a log flume will never make a delicious roast dinner, will it?