A place to park those random thoughts, stolen images, hidden conversations and incoherent babble from beyond the wall of sleep. Odd bits of music and so-called worldly wisdom may creep in from time to time. Don't expect too much and you won't feel let down.
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So what does anything in this have to do with the decorations, paintings and frescoes in the Sistine Chapel? Not much really, I just had a idle thought that perhaps the apprentices and assistants who worked on the project with Michelangelo and the other "name" artists just might have been bored from time to time. The routine and tedium in their daily working life, fetching, carrying, cleaning, filling in spaces with washes of paint, mixing the fresh plaster etc. as the years of decorative work passed by, and yet to their credit they were involved in something that is regarded as one of the greatest artistic accomplishments in human civilization.
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The world often seems like a terrible place. I know I mention that sort of thing from time to time. There are pleasant distractions that we all need to treasure to survive, to understand our lives and the context of the situations that we inhabit day by day. The pleasant, simple experiences of our lives are to be savoured and remembered as a baseline when those darker clouds descend. Anyway here's our cat Bungle, whom I've just disturbed, she was having a sneaky snooze in a gig bag.
P.S. Here's another cat (Georgie) in a guitar case shortly afterwards.
This apparent failure may yet have led on to the rumoured experimental Forth Railway Crossing project that was to combine iron, steel and porridge in what would have been an engineering world's first (pretty exceptional anyway). Little is known about how far the testing and design works got before the plan was shelved due to what were described at the time as "conflicts of ideology" within the team. Clearly the times and the science were not right for such an undertaking.
I also believe that in the 1950s there was a proposal from a cartel of Fife landowners and farmers that the new Scottish motorway system should use porridge as an experimental road finish. They undertook to supply the oats and the know how. There are no records as to how this venture ended however there are known to be stretches of the A90 that are still thought of as legacy porridge surface testing areas by BEAR Scotland.
Of course there's the long standing legend that tells of how William Wallace, had he survived English captivity, intended to build a massive porridge castle on the banks of Loch Lomond to hold the proposed garrison that would have protected the "Road to the Isles". It would also have formed his military HQ and be the seat of his Scottish Government. We can only speculate as to the porridge formula he intended to use, as the recipe and the exact strain of wild oats has been lost due the passage of time and the general illiteracy of the engineers in the 13th century.
Who doesn't love a nice bit of well balanced exceptionalism? It's a very unhealthy characteristic that the British people have been hung up on for a little too long. It's not exclusive to the Brits either, plenty of other nations, tribes, ideologies and families suffer from it. A common human problem. Yes, it's the cancerous, deluded and incestuous blind spot of exceptionalism. Baseless and incompetent exceptionalism I should say. When you just can't deliver. Ever.
I was thinking about the HS2 debacle, a fine example of a country actually over reaching in trying to resolve an infrastructure problem by simply throwing money and grand designs at it. Maybe we don't need really fast trains like the Japanese, maybe we just need safe, clean, reliable and well run trains that actually get to their destinations. I'm pretty sure most people would also settle for a railway system that had reasonably priced fares and comfortable rolling stock and systems manned by professional and competent staff.
During Covid the idiot PM bragged about the UK having a "world beating track and trace system". As if, at that time being a world leader in that was important. We just wanted something that actually worked; it was of course never delivered. "World beating" trades deals were bound to follow on from Brexit they said. We've seen nothing like that nor any of the exceptional and five star outcomes that were promised by those bubble headed liars. But enough people bought into that nonsense, the undeliverable promises of privileged clowns who don't actually understand how anything (other than self promotion) works in the real world.
So spare us from the overblown and exceptional. Just gives us things that work. Fix the roads and railways to a reasonable standard, invest in teachers and education, build decent homes, make the legal system fair for all, give people the chance of healthy lifestyles and support the NHS, sort out corporate fraud and fix pensions and benefits, make efforts to curtail environmental damage and look after critical infrastructure, try to help the people who need it, wherever they come from.
Don't act as if you're still at primary school and have to brag about the size of your father's business or your trust fund's resilience. Don't try to have the biggest boat, weapons, ceremonial swords and royal family gatherings. Don't try to piss further than the USA, China or Russia; clearly that wont end well. Don't mock nations that are growing and struggling to resolve their own internal problems. Don't strut like Mussolini was your drunk uncle, believing God's always on your side somehow. Just don't be dickheads. Be competent and do ordinary things to the required standards.
Sorry, just another itchy thing I had to get out of my system.
The cosmic rain falls and the surprise pull of gravity that comes from Jupiter flexing his muscles just as my star was about to ascend. It all left me baffled. A knock on the door from a lost delivery driver or a wasp caught up in a spiders web just outside the kitchen window. Leaves thrown into a whirlpool of wind that gathers them and then scatters them across the autumn garden's battered public face. A sudden drop in temperature as something unknown and unseen enters a room you can never leave.
Closing your eyes in a warm cat nap and losing track of time and being unsure quite where you might be sitting when you awake. Looking into a cluttered cupboard but for what exactly? A distant burglar alarm, chain saw motors revving up in the woods, car doors slamming, a helicopter hovers ominously out of sight as crows cackle and argue in the Burger King car park. Finally after what seems like forever, the storm burns itself out.
So our clutch of shiny new CDs arrived from the USA recently and as we might have expected based on the "special relationship" there was a tax bill to pay (why does everything have to be so cynical and political these days?). But enough of that, we're pretty happy with the outcome of our elaborate, year long writing, recording and design exercise; as a result of which the CD "collection" exists. There is indeed a physical product to own or you can go to the numerous providers and scammers where it can be streamed or downloaded for your listening pleasure and hours of enjoyment, amusement and confusion. Of course these shaky images do not do justice to the magnificent final product ... not quite. Now our razor sharp business minds are trying to figure out the best ways to get rid of these; giving them away for free seems to be the best option.
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Over time my generation grew up and this thinking and the bent theology that goes with it solidified in the hearts and minds of Evangelical Christians all across the world. The Bible tells us there will be trials and tribulations, a shitload of trouble in Israel and the Middle East and then after some climactic battle or event the rapture will take all the (proper) Christians "home". It also lines up nicely with Jewish doomsday scenarios and the coming of their own exclusive Messiah, a kind of alternative Jesus. As you might imagine, in the USA, within Christian groups, this is very much the lens through which all world events are viewed. Help the poor, feed the starving, make the world a better place? Well do a bit if you can but there's no real point because we're all trapped in a Biblical narrative that has only one outcome ... the return of the Messiah and a lot of judgmental and consequential consequences ... err but we'll all be OK in our Baptist Chapels.
If then you've come to believe that we're on the eve of total destruction coupled with the redemption of the faithful there's little point in adhering to what might previously have been considered as "doing the right thing" a few generations ago. So arm the Israelis but also arm the Arabs and anyone else that might have some input into ramping up the tribulations. It's not so far removed from the billionaire based long term futurism that plans to colonize the Moon, Mars and other random planets. No point in helping the people of earth improve their lot, it's all a lost cause whatever religious or philosophical slant you apply. The easy way is simply to get out of it all and hope the species, either in physical or supernatural form survives elsewhere. Everyone else can basically get to fuck; too poor, too dim and just born at a bad time when the planet was over heating.
Funny to think that it all began for my generation with a room full of long haired ex-hippies plunking on guitars and pulling texts and phrases from the Bible to quietly mull over. We had our moments of baseless optimism and disregard for our fellow heathen humans but we honestly thought it would somehow work out favorably. There might be a revival, societal change, the collapse of capitalism and a return to more simplistic values. A brave new acoustic and analogue world filled with rainbows and paperback fantasy novels where Jesus is chief influencer. In reality it turns out that over investing in some twisted theological fairy story coupled with a line of dangerous pipe dreams that seduce the naive, exploit the stupid and empower all the worst people isn't a helpful or constructive way to be. Just take a look around.
So is it still all Larry Norman's fault? Well he's long dead and gone now and unlikely to have made it into heaven by any standards so on balance it probably is.
Below: The work of repairing the harbour wall continues, good progress it seems but what do I really know?
