Jumpy Hilly Downers

They're young and fit. The fabulous Big Air boys and girls. Flying across the blue Winter Limp-Pig skies in Cortina (once famous for it's tin worm cars). Braver than the Hulk or Thor. They are either very stupid or simply superior humans who will eventually live on Mars untroubled. Their future is bright. Mostly (rich?) white kids and the odd fully formed adult trying to beat some long standing injury, they rule the air with their crazy dreams and tricks. A cooler than cool elite little set. 

Everything, every stunt, every move is "HUGE!" or "MASSIVE!" according to the wannabe teenage sounding commentary team. It's over in seconds too, blink and you lose the plot. Just don't have the camera drone collide with your helmet as you race down the mountain. I'll miss it all when it's gone, or until the next hyped up media distraction comes along.

China, Japan, USA, Canada and all the snowy/mountainy European counties are the top dogs. There's a few flyboy/girl smatterings from elsewhere but I find it odd, and it's across a range of Olympic winter sports this year, that I just can't root for the USA in anything right now. I don't hate Americans or wish them ill, far from it. But with the current toxic regime looking to capitalize on and brag about anything that you can wave a flag over, I don't want them to have a chance to do that with these competitions. See the athlete and their performance, not the country should be the rule. But ... it's tough to see past those other American idiots.

Linked In or Left Out?

You can read this on Substack with a simple click on the pic. I can't be arsed publishing it here because there's just too much clutter.

A Song About Syd

 

 

Did "Shine on" ever shine and why am I dredging up this old and worn out material? I don't know, other than that I've hit an age where having some of my random thoughts placed into order and catching them in a bucket seems important. Household objects on a shelf in a row. Photographs set on a timeline. I know this imagery isn't really helping, but it's the best I've got.

I could write about things that are deeper and more meaningful, but I'm not so well connected. Not this time anyway. There are a lot of songs about Syd Barrett out there. Some well-intentioned, some cashing in, some just "influenced by", and so on. Rock music loves the disturbed and the dead. They're the subjects that won't kick back or complain as their myths and legends fade, grow or mutate.

The most famous song about Syd is, of course, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” from Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. This album directly followed The Dark Side of the Moon and, as you'd imagine, audience expectations were high and unrealistic. A tough challenge for any band. There's over two years between the albums. A long time in rock music. For the title and main theme, they took on the subject of their own recent evolution from Syd's influence. A thing that many bands have done with lost or missing creators. Write about what you know, I guess. Common experiences.

The multi-layered piece is meant to be an undead eulogy for Syd Barrett, a man who was still alive at the time but not present (apart from the "incident"). It wants to be tender. It wants to be noble. But wanting isn’t the same as being. What it delivers has a brutal feel and a distance about it, like a cold monument built from the polished stone of prog rock. The man it honours was, at his pop peak, all quicksilver and slippery nerve. A madcap laughing but heading down the drain. I can't really listen to his post Floyd solo efforts these days. Crazy; unkindly, yes. Diamond; not so sure.

The lyrics are blunt and weak. “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.” It sounds grand. It sounds important. But it doesn’t say much. There are awkward religious overtones. The phrases drift by in big, cloudy symbols leading into black holes, steel breezes, diamonds in the sky. They gesture towards tragedy without ever cutting in closer to the bone. Barrett once was sharp, strange, playful. Dangerous and destructive. His early work with Pink Floyd had bite and colour. Here, he’s reduced to a fallen star. It’s neat. It’s tidy. It’s not a good fit.

Musically, the song sprawls over the album, divided into pretentious parts like a medical textbook. Long stretches of synth-heavy atmosphere. Slow builds that promise revelation but can't quite deliver it. David Gilmour’s guitar lines, always silky smooth and controlled, as we've come to expect. Roger Waters using the solemn weight of his writing, but the weight never provides emotional heat. The iconic four note motif is strong the first time. With multiple listenings, it can feel like an idea stretched thin. There is craft here. There is polish. What’s missing is connection.

There is also an uncomfortable sense that the band projects misplaced guilt and nostalgia onto Barrett rather than engaging honestly with who he was. The tone is reverential but distant, as though the subject has already been turned into some tragic symbol. Hard now to remember the person. He was a writer of naive pop songs that glinted. They darted into off-kilter observation. He was whimsy and melody and nerve. This song turns him into a statue.

For an artist as idiosyncratic and defiantly unconventional as Syd Barrett, whose early work burned bright before falling into disarray, this stately, slow burning lament feels misaligned with his spirit. I wonder if he might have recoiled at such a ponderous, self serious monument. Did he have the capacity to listen from his dark corner?

Mental health problems are not easy for family and friends to deal with. All the love, effort and time taken to try to "help" are often thrown back and rejected. Feelings and loyalty are stretched to their limit if the condition spirals, as Syd's clearly did. It's not some glorious thing. Ultimately the shining part becomes a faded history and the dull reality is of a struggle to just exist without pain. Nothing fills the hollow centre. These are things that are hard to describe and harder to sing about.

In the end, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” feels well meant but incomplete. You could argue it had to be done rather than ignore the story, but as it reaches for the myth, it misses the man. Treating Barrett like a victim when he was a restless talent who thrived on surprise. I can respect the intention. I can admire the sound. But now I don’t feel it. Maybe that's why it doesn't so much fail as simply miss the mark. It's an album I'd choose to avoid listening to. In the end, we all wish that everybody we loved could be here, but that's just not how things are.

Understanding Khruangbin

In the words of Mark Speer, "When we first started the band, we wanted to have a formula,” “It’s like, ‘This is what we do, and we’re not gonna try and go outside the box too much. We’re gonna explore the box we’re in. I’ve always been a big fan of that. I used to be in bands where it was like, ‘Man, we’ve gotta think outside the box!’ And all I’m thinking is: ‘You guys don’t even know.’ Music should never be just for the sake of being experimental. Before you even start, you have to know what you’re experimenting with first.” 

I’ve known about Khruangbin since around 2019. I didn’t go looking for them. I don’t really do that with music. They showed up anyway. Like some stray dog that decides you’re it's person.

The first record I really listened to was Con Todo el Mundo. Before that it was scraps, live clips, YouTube footage, half-paying attention. Once it clicked, it stayed clicked.

You have to admire a few things right away.
One: the brutal simplicity; guitar, bass, drums, nothing extra.
Two: committing fully to a dry, locked on wah tone and never apologizing for it.
Three: the apparent refusal to change guitar strings more than once per tour, if that. There’s discipline in that kind of neglect. It may be a myth.

There are other reasons I like them. The music, obviously. The quiet weirdness that hangs over every performance. Do I understand what they’re doing? No. And I don’t think that matters. Maybe the best way to explain them is to say why a reasonable person might keep listening.

You know it’s Khruangbin in about ten seconds. Earth seconds. No delay. The guitar is thin and sunburned. The bass is elastic and upfront. The drums are loose but never lazy. It feels familiar even when it isn’t, like remembering a place you’ve never been. Deja Vu surf funk.

This is instrumental music that refuses to be wallpaper. There are few vocals, sometimes none, yet it still feels deliberate, emotional, like something is being said. Not supermarket music. Though I have heard them played in a Tesco, which felt wrong in a way I can’t quite explain.

The global influences are obvious but never desperate. Thai funk, dub, Middle Eastern scales, soul, surf rock, psychedelia. They don’t steal. They don’t show their work. It just passes through them and comes out clean.

They make perfect music for a certain kind of living. Night driving. Low-stakes work. Sitting still. Substances, if that’s your thing. Hanging out without needing to talk. Zoning out without disappearing. Spanning deserts, wilderness and still, bare rooms.  Khruangbin fits all of it, which is harder than it sounds.

Laura Lee’s bass is the center of the band's gravity. The lines are melodic, confident, loud enough to matter. People come for the bass and stay for everything else. There’s a calm authority in how she holds the band together. No tension. No drama. Just forward motion.

Donald Johnson (DJ) makes restraint look easy. It isn’t. The grooves are precise, stripped down, unforgiving. No showing off. No wasted hits. Space everywhere, and that space is where the music actually lives.

They’re relaxed without being dull. The songs don’t sprawl or collapse. There’s always swing underneath, small shifts, quiet momentum. You feel it more than you hear it.

The look matters too. The peculiar wig thing image. The stage clothes. The album art. The stillness playing live. It’s cohesive and strange and memorable. It felt important at the start. I don’t know where it goes next, or how much it really matters in the long run. There’s a fine line between icon and costume.

They reward repeat listening. I'm not bored with them, but I don’t binge either. Too much would ruin it. Each listen reveals something small; a fill, a tone change, a rhythmic turn. The music deepens instead of wearing out.

Most of all, they feel sincere. No irony. No smirking distance. No contempt for the listener. Just three musicians locked in, enjoying the sound they’re making. That kind of honesty is rare, it spreads.

Where are they going next?
I don’t know.
That’s fine by me.

Great Ideas

A picture says more than a blank page: The apples that didn't quite make it. A sad day for the apples and also our many and elabourate apple based dreams. No but yes it does little harm to be guided by voices from time to time. I suppose that the obvious exceptions would be when buying a used car that has "classic" status or bidding for a "rare" guitar on eBay. There are other examples ...

Also some cats from Korea on a fridge magnet.

Don't forget the magpies.

In some cultures magpies are known as "sky cats".

Cats are also known as "land birds".

Not sure how any of that works.

👇

Meddle: Obscured by the Dark Side

 

It's Friday the 13th but I'm not really superstitious these days so I'll just walk under a ladder and head out onto a limb and launch this little piece: People, well most people (to be honest I’ve not actually spoken to all that many) often treat Dark Side of the Moon as Pink Floyd’s unquestionable, statistically and plaudit winning high spot. Number one album for x amount of weeks etc. I can understand why, it's all true. That’s simply because it’s their most popular, polished and arguably commercial bit of work done within an album format. Maybe just not their most inspired. I think that Meddle is the record in which Pink Floyd actually comes together with their best mix of material. It’s the perfect one side of shorter pieces and the flip side being the single longer work, “Echoes,” that sets it out as my model for listening perfection.

Meddle is Floyd’s alternative take on the then still developing prog rock landscape, where their drifting experimentation finally locks into something more advanced without losing the eccentric edge that always made them one of the most interesting bands of their time. They arguably created their own genre here and built the album around it. If Dark Side brings together the philosophy, the message, and the soundscapes; Meddle invents and test-pilots them.*

The clearest evidence is the track “Echoes” itself. Nothing on Dark Side comes close to its ambition or tonal range. It isn’t just a long track, it’s a journey, moving from calm to disorientation to something almost spiritual without ever feeling contrived or forced. Dark Side is full of brilliant songs that link together to illustrate a set of concepts, but none of them travel quite as far as “Echoes” does. If albums are judged by their highest peak, Meddle wins outright.

There’s also a difference in how the two albums feel. Dark Side is immaculate, but that perfection can feel stylized and cold. Meddle breathes. Tracks like “A Pillow of Winds,” “One of These Days,” and “Fearless” are lived in rather than engineered, as if the band is discovering the music as it unfolds instead of executing some master plan. That looseness gives the album a warmth and humanity Dark Side sometimes sacrifices for its precision.

Thematically, Dark Side aims for universality and some ultimate explanation of things: time, money, madness, death. No explanation ever comes; it just is. It’s profound and disturbing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Meddle’s message is quieter, more measured, and more inward. It doesn’t explain itself or push a message; it only invites you to go along with it. That makes it less immediately accessible but far more rewarding in the longer term. I’m never bored with any of the Meddle material, after a whole lot of listens across decades.

Dark Side of the Moon fully deserves its reputation; the sales and the numbers are crazy, but reputation isn’t the same as greatness. It is Pink Floyd at their most perfect, and it will never be repeated. Meddle is Pink Floyd probably at their most freely creative and adventurous, before the big bucks, big stages, and bigger disagreements came along. If what you value is risk, atmosphere, and genuine exploration rather than flawless execution, Meddle isn’t just better, it’s the album that made everything that followed it possible.

Please note I’m not saying it’s been downhill for Floyd all the way since Meddle; that would be nonsense. Their subsequent work has produced great and lasting material; a lot of heat and a few duffers, but… Meddle wins it for me.

* For clarity, I should add that one album sits squarely between Meddle and Dark Side, that being Obscured by Clouds, which came out in 1972. As it’s a soundtrack album, some might say it doesn’t really count as part of their progressive and creative lineage. I’d disagree with that, it’s an album I always quite liked, though it can be seen as a bit of a sidestep. That might also be said of More, another soundtrack album, but again, well worth a listen.

I Might Redo This

Everyone struggles with Captain Beefheart because they expect music to behave. They also expect other people to behave at funerals, to back away when they lose and arguement and for mayo never to be seen on top of mashed potato. It's a "follow the yellow brick road" reaction. The thing is that music does not behave, it can be wonderful and disturbing at times. Maybe at the same time but not so often at conventional funerals where music serves a more reflective purpose. Nothing to do with our Don though or his hat size.

Click the picture above and you can go on to read this in a more agreeable font, depending on your taste.

Most listeners want a tune to give comfort or order. They want to tap on the steering wheel at the lights. Beefheart refused this. He broke songs apart and left the pieces where they fell. These were recorded eventually. There is some melody, but it limps. There is rhythm, but it fights against itself and the listener's expectations. This can make people uneasy. 

Audiences might need to unlearn a few things. Would that be useful? They feel the ground move whilst standing on an earthquake free (for the time being) continent and do not like it. Horses are spooked. The mind hears chaos and tries to reject it, but we were all born into chaos. The ear looks for a handrail and finds none. Unsighted at the top of a long staircase. Listeners may be simple people with heavy loans and outgoings. Weight in the wrong places is such a bad sandwich.

His voice does not try to please. It growls and shouts. It speaks like an animal that learned words with its tongue but kept all it's spikey teeth. Like being uncomfortable and drunk at a stranger's wedding, one your partner casually brought you along to. I doubt it's true that he had a tin trumpet that he would use to communicate with the dead. That was probably someone else.

The band (the Magic Band in various forms) always sounded loose, but it was not loose. It was controlled and hard. Let's not talk about the actual process involved. That's now chewed up history and TV talk show content. We know history loves warfare and abuse more than detail. Man's inhumanity etc. This situation was not at all perfect and it's the survivors right to tell their story or at least make it interesting and fanciful while people are alive enough to still care. I for one was almost 5164 miles away at the time.

Sometimes people value a delivered gift more than a personal visit. That just might explain his wordiness and lyrics.

To enjoy Beefheart you must stop asking if it could ever be pretty or easy. You must listen the way you look at rough countryside, derelict buildings, or bad weather. You accept it. It exists. Then you may begin to like it. After a while, you wonder if you could live there.

Some Beefheart tracks like these below might make this whole process run more easily:

“Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” is gentle and sad and almost kindly.
“Clear Spot” has a groove you can sup with a honey straw.
“Big Eyed Beans from Venus” swings, even while it mutters. Has lunar influences.
“Electricity” is strange but hypnotic. Like the real thing.
“Nowadays a Woman’s Gotta Hit a Man” has humour and bite without losing the plot.

These are places to start. They give you a door instead of a wall. Having said that, walls are important parts of construction theory. Tap or lean on one today to test this out. Use an orange claw hammer.

In the end, or the ending, Don Van Vliet, aka Cpt. Beefheart, is not for everyone. That is part of his strength. He did not ask to be liked. He had a conditional condition and only asks that you listen and walk away if you have to. This kind of applies to all music and the wider world of artistic efforts in general because sometimes the coffee jar is too deep for the spoon.

Upbeat Lo-fi

The Magic Band and Captain Beefheart - colourized somewhat but not by me. Their music is a bit of an acquired taste. A taste that many never do quite acquire and I can fully understand that. I often think I should write something meaningful about this school of strange art and weirder music based on my own observations and listenings, but that's not happened so far. Mainly because the problem describing Beefhart's many erratic works (or Don van Vliet, as he would have preferred) is that in many ways it's all pretty much indescribable.
 

The famous (in my head anyway) wolf and fox moment of almost bonding from "The Fantastic Mr Fox". A book and film I rather like.

A seemingly badly rendered version of Pittenweem's coat of arms. The old style fishing industry is front and centre. My mum's family came from Pittenweem and I know very little about them. 

How feels when you're over seventy and it's bed time. Fortunately I'm not stranded on Mars.

The Greatest Album You’ve Never Heard

"It must have been around 1973 (it was). I was working in an electronics factory for an American company that made medical potentiometers. Music mattered more. I was moon-lighting as a roadie-cum-humper with a band called Ashes, doing pop covers in village halls and small venues across Scotland. Every gig swung between travel monotony and crisis. I even plunked along on bass for a while, but as always happens, everything and everybody moved on ..."

If your interested in reading more about my fevered but honest opinions on Terry Reid (RIP), please click on the image above and journey all the way to the strange and wonderful land of Substack. You could like the post or even choose to leave a comment of some kind. 

Crimson Kinks

Why waste your time listening to King Crimson? 

Petty and ill informed: All you really have to do to read this small but wonderful article and/or opinion piece is click the image above. It's on Substack (I know about their bad press and I apologize up to a point) I ask you, what could be simpler? It's also free, there's no charge, nothing at all. I promise that there's no major ranting or earth shattering truths here, just a few rumbling thoughts that have been released into the wild and it's fully complete, none it has been redacted either, well so far. I can't be sure you'll like the font or the actual content but that's life. You don't know anything until you read it. I'm also thinking of getting the graphic below made into a bumper sticker.

Plus: How about tribute band that do Kinks songs in the style of King Crimson? The Crimson Kinks or Kink Crimson.

Brioche Conflict

Ah, sweet mysteries of life. Why is it that a slightly toasted brioche bun works very well with a beef burger? A great pairing, only discovered in the early but late part of the 21st century (by me, anyway). But the same brioche bun, prepared the same way with a feather-light toasting, does not work at all well when paired with scrambled eggs. (Should there be a question mark here, as this whole thing is just a rambling kind of question?) This just isn't sensible whatsoever, and I’m now worried that my senses of taste and texture are buggered up in some way and I may never fully recover. Now that this view has been aired in the open world of blogland, I can get back to thinking about why I’ve never really liked King Crimson, and that, though I find Robert Fripp interesting, I also think he’s a bit creepy.

Avalon is Better

Just nobody mention Art School Rock ever again, that’s a bad badge to be presented with: Roxy Music’s debut album and Avalon, their final fling, feel like they were made by two different bands who happen to share the same rather fetching name. I know this because, while I’ve chosen not to listen to all their stuff endlessly, too many pithy live albums, I’ve lived with much of it chuntering along in the background. We all have our personal struggles.

The first album is all nervy, jagged-edge pop, married to a kind of blithering chaos. A group of slightly too old glam-rock weirdos shouting, “Why haven’t we made it yet?” as they press various buttons that do nothing. It’s mostly entertaining stuff, but it’s also scrappy and confrontational, all for a calculated purpose. “Creating pictures in your head like nobody else” was the infamous but accurate press tagline they became stuck with.

Songs veer off at odd angles, names are dropped, Eno’s synths gurgle and pop, Ferry sounds like he’s just learning about singing by grinning and sneering, and everything is constantly threatening to stall and tailspin in flames. That rawness is part of their eccentric charm, but it also means the album feels more like a day out from a young offenders’ institution than a sophisticated statement. You admire it for its fun and aural invention, even when it’s a bit exhausting to listen to end to end. Overall, it’s hard work for the listener, like hosting a big party in your small flat.

Ten years on, along comes Avalon. It sounds like a band that has nothing left to prove, everything under total control, and a reasonably generous studio budget to play with. Where the debut pushes and pokes at the listener, Avalon is all about seduction. The sound is polished without being cold: crystal guitars, easy bass, soft-focus porn synths, and a sense of space that lets everything breathe. It’s not just better produced; it’s more emotionally confident and it’s the 1980s. All that ’70s shit is so… ’70s.

Ferry’s voice has aged into something warmer and less wounded, and that maturity gives the songs an easy anti-gravity quality that the earlier material didn’t have. Instead of throwing mad ideas at the wall and bickering about musical outcomes, Avalon seems to know exactly what tiny details matter and quietly allows them to shimmer. The bigger the budget, the better the album? I doubt it, but Avalon works nicely as a full set; there’s no obvious filler.

Another thing about what makes Avalon the stronger work is how unified it feels. The first album is thrilling but fragmented, like a precise blend of influences and spikey tones. Avalon is a mood you can sink into from start to finish. Every song feels like it belongs, there in that fictional and poetic twilight world of longing, regret, and misplaced love. There’s a restraint to it that takes producer discipline, knowing when to play less, to add less, and when to let go. Just let the groove spiral or a bass line do the work on its own. That kind of subtlety is much harder to pull off than the slapstick style and wild experimentation in their first recordings. Avalon was something that Roxy could only grow into, and it only took eight studio albums and ten years to get there. Most bands never did do that.

So while the debut is essential to understand the language and quirks of Roxy Music, Avalon is where they finally arrive, fully translated and understood. It distils years of experimentation into something that sounds good today; rich, rewarding, and effortlessly stylish 40+ years later. The first album announces a fascinating band that, frankly, back then I found hard work at times. The Avalon Roxy sounds so much better: shaken, stirred and experienced, with demons duly exorcised and fully aware of their own power, and confident enough to whisper instead of shout.

LIFE

Life can be brutal*. Man is a wonderful but brutal creation. What we create is often brutal. How we act is often brutal. There are many sides to the shapes of things. People can find peculiar beauty in brutalism as a design statement. But nobody wants to live within a brutal regime - unless you're the ruler or have some powerful role in the regime. Then you're a brute. It's a strange world and brutal is a strange word. 

*Photo by TB, Kraków, Poland.

Brutal.

Adjective -

Extremely ruthless or cruel.

Crude or unfeeling in manner or speach.

Harsh; unrelenting.

God is Nowhere

“God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.”

Said by Barry Taylor.

I liked his quotation. I though I'd experiment. So I threw a blanket over an armchair. Then over a vase on a table. Then I put the blanket on my head. I threw the blanket over a cat. The cat ran from under it, as you'd expect. I'm close to getting nowhere. I'd created ghost shapes. The blanket hides and masks the shapes beneath it. Lumps and bumps to stop the dust from building up and then settling down. The same dust that was floating around when the universe began. We're all just tiny space specs. Without a distinct shape. Viewed from a distance. Perhaps.

Egg and Mozzarella Toast

A solitary egg and mozzarella toastie slice prepared by me. Avacado and monkey comic by @BeetleMoses (featuring a left handed monkey or are all monkeys ambidextrous? Or are all monkeys just left handed and that's it - but it's a cartoon and not real life monkey footage unless it was inspired by an actual event seen by the cartoonist and drawn up afterwards.). 

You may think these are unrelated and peculiar images have nothing to do with each other and you would be quite correct other than that I have chosen to put them together. They have no meaning unless you can provide  one. Here's some more...

Another patchwork of observed nonsense: a lovely bunch of roses, our back garden wall and fence in b&w viewed from close range, a mini-rug pattern collage and a Starbuck's Bear cup that just might be worth a sizable sum of money, or not, as the case may be. Supply v demand etc. There are many ways to waste time but you can't really beat looking around you or out of the window now and then.

Bringing Highway 61 Back Home

 

Non-exact Replica

After well over fifty years of searching, I’ve finally found a complete though not exact replica of the infamous Andy Warhol and VU banana. I can hardly breathe. I’ve looked everywhere, and lo and behold, it came to me as if in a fever dream, hidden within a rather ordinary bunch of bananas at Lidl in Corstorphine, Edinburghshire. The one that used to be PC World. Strange, I know.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too precise about this discovery, as I may inadvertently trigger some sort of arty fanboy stampede to the store. It was a special moment; singular, fleeting, and quietly profound. Alongside the banana, I also purchased some green salad (is there any other colour?), butter, wine, and cat treats. None of these yielded any artistic content or wider cultural significance, beyond their own status as natural and modest design objects going about their daily business.

Take care out there in the shopping zone. And by the way, I allowed the banana to age gracefully before I ate it. It’s what Andy would have wanted.

Children of Instagram

There is no hiding place. 

No santuary. 

There is no refuge or font of peace. 

Only a quiet anarchy.

But you will  be fine. 

Your truth will prevail. 

Your amusement continues. 

Your contacts still care.

They'll live for your content. 

They'll die for your breath. 

They can't live without you. 

But what's up ahead?

-----:-----

No one is sure.

No thought is pure.

No line is perfect.

No freedom respected.

You'll lose the words. 

And the forms in the text.

Those poor children of Instagram.

They shall be next.*

*To be honest I blame ... well it's everybody.

Ho hum ...

Sometimes

Rainy day: Sometimes the rain just makes you want to do nothing. Maybe nothing more than just watching the droplets run down the window glass and away. Actually doing next to nothing is quite difficult. It needs concentration and focus, both of which are more than nothing. I'm looking at the glass but also looking through the glass. Probably not very good at this. 

 

La Belle Époque

The Beautiful Era.

Was there ever a moment when things were, briefly, as we might think they should be?

Most people can recall a period, sometimes no more than a season, a year, or even a handful of days  when life appeared balanced. Not perfect, but aligned. A time when effort and reward seemed proportionate, when the future felt intelligible, and the present was quietly sufficient.

Is this a common human experience, or a rare and elusive one?

If you have known such a time, you may recognise it only in retrospect. If you have not, you may wonder when or whether it will ever arrive. What conditions are required for such an era to exist? And who, precisely, is permitted to experience it?

For some La Belle Époque is remembered as a personal “Goldilocks moment”, brief, fragile, and easily disrupted. A period that felt unremarkable while it was happening, yet luminous in memory. A time when Camelot was real and not a myth.

But memory is selective. It smooths the surface of the past, sanding away its anxieties and contradictions. What appears serene now may have been sustained only because of other noises, the roar of human traffic, the weight of unplanned events, the demands of survival were temporarily muted. Not everyone heard the silence.

While some reached for this sense of balance, others were occupied elsewhere; with work, with care, with necessity. The daily labour of living can make an era pass unnoticed. You may have lived through the same years as those who later spoke of them with longing, yet somehow missed the moment entirely.

Was La Belle Époque a matter of timing or of privilege?

How did those on the margins experience it? The workers, the peasants, the displaced. Was it ever theirs to begin with? Or is the very idea of a “beautiful era” an illusion available only to those sufficiently insulated from mundane toil?

Can a society, regardless of background or standing, ever share in such a condition? Or does stability for some inevitably depend on instability for others?

If such periods are possible, why is there no government on Earth with a deliberate plan to create them not only for their own citizens, but for humanity at large? If no such plan exists, why not?

What, ultimately, are we organising ourselves to achieve? Much of human effort appears devoted to other ends; growth, competition, exploitation, tribal conquests. Methods change perhaps but often with the same result, the steady exhaustion of resources, both material and human.

And yet, most people tell themselves a story. They insist that it did happen once. There was a time when things were just right. Short, sweet, and now irretrievable. A calm imagined more clearly now than it was ever experienced then. Alive only in memory, preserved as a private myth.

If only, they say, they could put their finger on what tiny change ended it all ... and go back.