UKIP And Cats.

My views on immigration are reasonably middle of the road; liberal tinged with self-preservation. But sometimes a line must be drawn. We have four cats, Dave, Domino, Betty and Britney, which considering this is a mouse household shows an admirable appreciation for diversity, but it seems four happy, well-fed cats tend to attract others. There’s Cocky Black Cat, a stray who despite biting lumps out of Dave and costing us £70 at the vets on antibiotics and pain killers, is slowly playing on our sympathy, and Pretty Cat who’s obviously owned but lonely and just comes round for the crack. And then there’s Pip an asylum seeker from Royston who wants to come on compassionate grounds seeing as Martynmouse doesn’t let him in the house since ??? moved out to live with the lovely Asian couple across the road because he pees everywhere. That would be seven and definite grounds for me voting for Nigel Farage in the upcoming MEP elections. I mean they’re all unemployed, our NHS budget wouldn’t stretch to the vet bills, none of them speak English and we already buy cat food by the hundredweight. Fright quankly Mothermouse already complains when Domino chooses to bless our favourite possessions with the mark of his own territory. Nope I’m applying zero tolerance to our immigration policy; from now on it’s one out, one in. 

Lansarote 2014.

Doncaster is undoubtedly the best airport in the world. I flashed my Thompson flight tickets and we were off. Granted I had to assume a sort of dismembered arms lotus position for four hours but even that added to the play value of consuming the in-flight meal. We landed at Alicanti and all was going swimmingly. As it wasn’t a Thompson holiday the rep didn’t want to know, and as I hadn’t printed out our holiday details I only had my fast fading memories of booking it to go by. It was a Late ‘something’ holiday in, I seem to remember, Costa Tegese and location ‘something with a Sol in it.’ No one including Mothermouse was impressed with this information. She being a lovely person suppressed thoughts of mutilation and opted for making me fully aware that going on holiday with just a boarding pass was the action of a really stupid person, and when that really stupid person is your own husband it could, if one wasn’t supremely kind and understanding, drive one to being very angry indeed. I asked various rushing-about-people to no avail. I went back to the Thompson rep who remained detached. Luckily a young chubby chap next to her, who I’d previously dismissed as just there for a convenient oxygen supply, offered me the magic key, “that desk over there does that sort of thing.”  The woman Spanish, tanned but somehow ugly was terse. “Low what?” “Lowcost (or was it Last Minute?) holidays.com.” She looked at me tersely questioning the one fragment of information I was pinning my hopes on. “Name?” With the euphoria to match the recent birth of my first grandchild she found me on her list. “Outside and wait on the left.” Though this was excellent news ‘waiting’ still seemed fraught with the possibility of dying lost and alone. Did her list truly have the power to save us from package holiday extinction? It did. “Bay 6.” I glimpsed ‘Sol Apartments’ on her flailing document as she pointed to somewhere over there. Another travel save! If Mothermouse knew my travel history she wouldn’t have left me to book it; it doesn’t read well. She later pointed out it was Ariccefe not Alicanti, “Alicanti’s in Portugal.” 

I owe my mental health to Barry Bucknell.

I owe my mental health to Barry Bucknell. He was the guy who did DIY programs on TV in the fifties. If you ever had a real wood door covered in sheets of hardboard that’s down to him. He would explain each project and have all the bits cut to size, shaped and pre-drilled so he could build a wardrobe in seconds. I was too young to do them back then but it’s how I’ve approach life to this day. Think, plan, draw, measure and bingo a futon base. I wonder where that went? But it’s not just projects. There’s something about his approach that seems to weld the ‘now’ firmly between the past and the future. The past is the one I made earlier, the future is the one I’m going to make, and the now is where I put it together. It pre dates Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’ but is a practical example of it. It does two things to elevate one from the ravages of destructive emotions. One, it occupies the brain with practicalities and two it avoids mewling over one’s history or the imponderable anxieties of the future. The past wardrobe is evidence of my capacity to be successful and the future wardrobe is solely dependant on putting it together in the now. All that remains is to get on with it. If it goes to plan I can enjoy my positive emotions and if it doesn’t I’m not a failure it’s just something I overlooked in the planning stage. If after several attempts I prove it was just the wrong thing in the first place and I feel sad there’s always a set of Ikea Snorku shelving units to get me going again. I don’t get depressed because there’s always something to achieve and always the now to achieve it in. And if all that fails I can get pissed. What could be simpler? OK so I might have mild asperger’s but hell nobody’s perfect.

Crimea River.

The Crimea to Ukraine is not unlike the Isle of White to the UK, almost an island off its southern coast. Its land connection with Ukraine is less than five miles wide and its eastern tip is the same distance from Russia by sea. Khrushchev gave it as a present to Ukraine from Russia when the USSR was a happy family. Ukraine itself is larger than Germany, Switzerland and Belgium put together and on the west borders six Eurovision contestants. Whilst currently its history is changing daily the run of it is classic. There seems an inevitability to the escalating conflict. At one level presidential rhetoric lays claim to their country’s interests in the guise of what’s best for Ukraine. At another their paid unnamed forces flex their muscles. At yet another powerful Ukrainian individuals thrust forward to represent partisan factions. And at the lowest level voiceless citizens wait to endure their fate. Polarisation occurs and some form of attrition begins, be it counted in lives, limbs, cost or social welfare. After sufficient loss it will end. Such is the lesson of history, yet the game is played again. In this primeval primate dance the stressed zeitgeist factionalises into multiple animosities. The alpha male’s whoops direct their secondaries into mindless action as the females and their young cower in a dance of genes, the alphas to proliferate, the secondaries to emulate and the females to protect. It’s as if genes power a persona that is at odds with personhood in a role-play as much aggrandisement as it is fictional. There currently seems to be three world epidemics, poverty, poor mental health and countries in conflict. It’s easy to see the link between poverty and mental health in the poor but not so easy when it comes to the rich and powerful. Is there a corollary between being frightened by too little and empowered by too much? How might we evaluate and identify the mental health issues of this elite? It’s for sure not on anyone’s clinical agenda. And imagine how difficult it would be to implement its findings in the face of the alpha genes. No it’s probably best we stay as primates and have a war. It’ll settle things like it always has. 

Monsignor Willy.

Rome may try to lay claim to Catholicism but for me it’s Ireland. There’s a certain surrealism about the Irish and Catholics that transcends any construct I might fondly apply to the human race. Like the meanderings of dotage or the news from an altered universe I have no idea what they’re going to do next, or for that matter why they’ve just done it. Last evenings dinner was no exception. As a hundred and fifty of us sat down to our meal Kevin introduced our honoured guests, Tony Curry and Monsignor Willy. Unfortunately anything vaguely smutty sets Mothermouse off so the image of a stiff-backed reverential purple robed French penis was too much to bear. Under the table she texts her daughter, “At St Wilfreds do…. The bishop is called Monsignor Willy. I need help” and receives a reply, “There is no way out of it mum you’re trapped in a sitcom episode. Innuendos will only get worse from here. Good luck!” After the meal and Mothermouse shamelessly lusting after our handsome young waiter, who in return gave her an extra helping of bread and butter pudding, we are treated to Tony Curry’s life as a footballer. Tony, as with anyone who’s led an interesting life, was not that interested in talking about it so Kevin, assuming the role of a News of the World reporter, prompted him through the highs and lows of it, extracting anecdotes like teeth. After thirty minutes Mothermouse was playing with her phone, by an hour she was eating it, and when Kevin asked for questions we were both silently shouting, “No, please no questions!!” In response to the third Tony had to explain that after doing a synchronised roly-poly with a teammate they, in post roly-poly exuberance, kissed and that that was how he became a gay icon in Sweden. You can’t write this stuff. We donned our cloaks of invisibility and weedled our way out through the tables. From the foyer we heard Kevin ask if anyone wanted to sing. Pardon? Really? But sure enough two ladies were happy to do their operatic party pieces unaccompanied into the mike. The Catholic mind is a marvel to behold, to be sure.

Quick Change.

 This very morning it’s quiet in the streets of Kiev. President Victor Yanukovych is nowhere to be found, the police have disappeared and the protest leaders are in control. The dramatic images of Independence Square http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/ukraine-whats-happening-and-how-will-it-end-9139199.html (scroll down) have a look of apocalypse about them. I knew seventy or so protesters were killed, the police used live rounds etc but I wasn’t prepared to see an apocalypse. I’m struck by incredibly limited vision of news cameras. Like our own eyes only having a small circle of actual acute vision news photographers are always looking for the best shot to ‘show’ the story, at least the news story they’re focused on. So in a sense the momentum of the news story dictates the focus of their lens. It’s likely in Kiev just a few streets away from Independence Square life, or at least the look of it, is quite normal. What the protesters have created in that square, consciously or not, is a film set for the media. Black smoke from burning tyres smudges the buildings, central monument and protesters into a homogenous acrid grime and makes the clean police uniforms look even more alien and sinister. Somehow like a boy coming in from football covered in mud the look belies the simplicity of a bath to put things right. How this situation will evolve I’ve no idea but I find it interesting that you only need to create the look of devastation the width of a wide-angle lens to tell a story, a story that the media will flock to and that might to even make a president flea. Whatever our technology or status all of us are narrow vision-ed emotional beings: show us the pictures and we will create the narrative. 

Billiard Maths.

When I get down to play a shot I don’t really have a clue what to aim for. Obviously if you want the object ball to go right you hit it on the left side, but by how much? So I thought I’d work it out. Here’s the diagram to instantly improve your game. At the top the object ball (dark) is hit by the white ball (light) to go off at 50*. The large (light) circle shows the centre of the white ball as it hits the object ball. When the white ball approaches from a distance to get a 50* angle between the white and object balls you need to aim its centre line approximately half the radius away from the edge of the object ball. To get 30* you aim for the edge of the object ball. The bottom (dark) object ball and vertical lines show the different distances from its centre to get the angles from zero to 90*. It’s relatively easy to estimate the fractions of radius required but they’re not a simple proportion because we’re dealing with circles. This is fine when the white ball approaches from a distance but when it’s closer you have to take into account the angle between the ball centres and the line of the white ball to hit the object ball off to one side. This gets bigger the closer they are together and the lines of number show what you need to take off from the basic lines at closer distances. So for example where aiming for the edge of the object ball at distance gives 30* at 1 foot it only gives a 25* angle (30 – 5) or at 6 inches 20* (30 – 10). So to use the diagram estimate the angle required and distance, calculate where you need to aim the centre of the white ball centre as a fraction of the object ball radius required. Either that or just hit the bloody thing and hope for the best. I have yet to try this whole thing out.