There's A Light

Surely somewhere in the world somebody is having their driest year ever in 2012? We here in England are having our wettest for decades. It stands to reason therefore that, if the scientists are right when they say that there’s a finite amount of water in the earth’s seas, rivers, lakes and atmosphere, somebody somewhere must be having a terrible drought.

If they could give me a call, I have some buckets for them.

Similarly, I only ever hear on the news this year about how much my country owes to other countries. Then I hear that those other countries all have huge debts of their own. Looking at various economic reports I’m hard pressed to find a country that isn’t making repayments to others. So surely there’s a way of cancelling some of these circuitous contra-debts? They just seem to go round and round gathering interest, on and on forever.

One thing that doesn’t go on and on forever (see what I did there?) is the humble light bulb. The average life of the old fashioned (to us in Europe, that is) incandescent bulbs was supposed to be around a thousand hours. The newer, energy efficient bulbs are much more expensive than their incandescent ancestors but their makers claim that they can last ten times longer or more. Keep in mind though that these are the same makers who included ‘planned obsolescence’ into the filament design meaning that the bulbs had an artificially shortened lifespans. Allegedly.

I bring this up because I had to change a bulb this week. I turned the light at the top of my stairs on and *poof* it blinked out. I didn’t really enjoy standing on a wobbly chair at the top of the stairs (especially as it was on precisely the part with the uneven floorboards) but hey, some things just have to be done.

It was quite a sad event actually as this bulb had become something of a talking point, almost an old friend. We’ve lived in our house for well over twenty years now and he’s been there, shining brightly with a slight green tint (can you even get tinted bulbs any more?) for all that time – and presumably for quite some time before. I can’t imagine that the previous owners would have put new light bulbs in just before selling up. He cast a slightly sickly glow but we've become used to it, almost attached to it over the decades. But now he shines in a better place.

Now I know it’s not in the same league as a bulb that’s been shining almost non-stop in a San Francisco fire station since 1908 but still, I was pretty impressed by its longevity. And by its matching pair which is still working fine at the other end of my first floor landing. That one’s been there for the same length of time too and is still going strong. So now part of my landing lit sickly green, the other a slow-to-awaken bright cream glow of new eco-brilliance. Hmmm….

In memory of the dear departed illuminator I thought I’d close this week with my Beloved’s favourite joke. It’s old and it’s not the best in the world but she loves it. A bit like me, really.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb.

A: Fish.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

The Mutants Are Coming

How do you fancy making a snowman that looks like Sir Alex Ferguson this winter?

Assuming that – unlike last year – we actually have enough snow to make the job viable, it’ll be easy. All you need to do is make a regular snowman and then, when it’s time for putting his nose in place, pop down to any good grocers. I went to my local Asda. Those of you who are posh can go to a farmers market and those who aren’t pricked by a social conscience might find Tesco is good too. They should all sell what you want though.

Buy a purple carrot, that’ll do the trick nicely.

We got a pack of mixed carrots this week. There were some normal-looking orange ones and some that were pale yellow, the colour of turnips. The white ones looked more like parsnips than carrots yet tasted disappointingly normal, but by far the most interesting were the purple ones. They weren’t purple as in ‘slightly tinted’ but purple like the colour of boiled beetroot. Proper purple. They even discoloured the water when we boiled them too. The best bit was when we cut one open though. Through its centre were points of a much more carroty orange, like a starburst all the way through it. It was like a carrot in disguise but with bits of it’s true self peeking through. Beautiful.

And this got me thinking. What else is there that the general public don’t know about? Orange cauliflowers, black apricots, yellow and red striped tomatoes. Big tomatoes that are square so they fit onto sandwiches better when sliced. These all exist and so do many others. We should try them out I guess. My philosophy is to try everything twice: once to see if you like it and again just to make sure that you weren’t just unlucky with a bad batch the first time. But not garlic of any kind, of course. That would be just plain wrong, like iced coffee.

So today’s challenge is for us all to look at things in new ways, re-evaluate things that we’ve come to know and have maybe become a little bored of. Like our jobs, our relationships or our homes.

And carrots.

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Ring Out the Bells!

Are you now or have you ever been a man? Have you ever been associated with men in any way, shape or form?

If so, you’ll know what absolute spineless jessies most men can be when it comes to visiting the doctor. They can be the biggest, roughest, toughest manly man ever to walk the earth but when it comes to getting themselves checked out medically they turn to quivering wrecks and go into petulant teenage sulks – ‘I’m not going and you can’t make me, so there’.

I know this because I am a man.

My hearing used to be so good that I could hear the waspy buzz of a Pizza Hut delivery moped half a mile away. I could have poured the beers and got the napkins ready (have I mentioned that I’m posh, for around here at least?) before he’d dinged, let alone donged. And I could certainly hear well enough to work out that I couldn’t hear my Beloved giving me a list of household jobs that needed doing.

But many moons have sailed the sky since then and years of gig going and the onset of middle age have begun to take their toll. I’m losing my hearing but I’m finding other things.

I’m finding that every newsreader in the world mumbles.
I’m finding that I can’t enjoy the fun of screaming abuse at foreign PPI claim salesmen called ‘Steve’ (allegedly) because my phone appears to ring less and less.
I’m finding that modern singers are rubbish because you can’t tell what they’re saying, not like back in my day.

Worst of all I’m finding that Roger Whittaker has taken up residence inside my right ear. There’s a constant whistling in it (young readers, you might want to search out the least-trendy old person you know for an explanation). Or perhaps it’s a high pitched humming. Or maybe it’s the constant ringing of a bell. Whatever it is, it’s damned annoying and it’s called tinnitus.

Some say that I should go to the doctors with it but I’ve been reading on the internet – why should I talk to one G.P. when I have the shared knowledge of the entire world at my fingertips? – and I found that there’s no cure for this particular ailment. Worse still, it’s often linked to hearing loss. Great. So not only will I have what appears to be the world’s only bee that can hum in the G two octaves above middle C stuck in my ear but odds are that I’m going to get deafer too. It’s enough to make a grumpy old man even grumpier.

But still, I should look on the bright side. It’s great for three a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, the time when the local young guns shout their drunken goodbyes down the street. They used to annoy me and keep me awake for hours but now  I can just roll with my good ear to the pillow and zone them out behind the bells and whistles in my right one.

And I wouldn’t mind the ringing in my ear so much if it were some Christmas classic. All together now, “Ding! Dong! Merrily on high….”  –  what, still too early?

© Shaun Finnie 2012

Dedication's What You Need

Lots of brownie points go to anyone who can remember where today’s title comes from.

It’s true though – if you want to be the best and if you want to beat the rest, dedication’s what you need. This summer’s Olympics and Paralympics reinforced that lesson. Those men and women have spent many long years in single-minded devotion to their goal. Credit to all of them, however well or otherwise they did.

There’s an initiative that comes around this time every year. Some go for Movember – the growing of a moustache throughout the month of November to raise funds and awareness for male cancer charities. If anyone that you know is participating in this event then I’d urge you to support him in their worthwhile cause. It’ll make you feel much better when you’re laughing at his feeble attempts at face fur.

I’m not doing the Movember thing though. Whenever I’ve tried to cultivate a moustache it comes up patchy and multi-coloured. It’s like I have a mangy tortoiseshell cat’s tail on my upper lip. Not attractive. Instead I’m taking part in the lesser known and lesser-pronounceable NaNoWriMo; National Novel Writing Month.

The idea is that it encourages those of us who lack commitment to a single project or might be easily distracted from our writing to sit down and just get the damned thing written. The goal is to produce at least a first draft of a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That’s about 1,700 words a day, every day. To give you an idea of how much that is, this blog is 576 words long. I can knock these stream-of-consciousness things out quite easily but when it comes to prose with convincing human characters and a satisfying plotline, well they can sometimes be like pulling teeth. My interest starts to wane and I wander off to a web browser in search of obscure research or try do a bit more work on my family tree. Or shoot some virtual zombies. Anything to avoid the intimidating blank page.

I’m usually happy to produce a thousand quality words in a day though; that’s a decent enough amount. But I love a challenge. As they used to say in an office where I once worked, stretch objectives help you to grow. If it stretches me and I think I can have a go at it, even if it’s a little daunting, then just bring it on!

That’s why NaNoWriMo seems to be working for me. I know that I can write 2,000 words in a day, I’ve done it before when the muse has been whispering in my ear and my fingers have been moving in a tippiddy-tap blur over the keyboard. But to keep that up over a month? Well, there’s the challenge. We’ll see.

I’ve had ideas about an adventure thriller set in a theme park for some time now and have made a few aborted stabs at it, but NaNoWriMo seems to be the vehicle I need to kickstart this project. After seven days I have eighteen hundred words in my file, and I’m regularly backing it up just in case. You never know. It would be a shame to lose them because I’m actually quite pleased with not only the quantity but the quality of the words on screen.

Even if some of them are ‘this section needs rewriting’ or ‘expand this bit!’

© Shaun Finnie 2012

The Goose is Getting Fat

I'm a child of the sixties, which means that I spent much of my formative years in the era of that much maligned musical genre, glam rock. I love a bit of Sweet, Mud or T. Rex, but even I have my limits. And I'm not just talking about the social unacceptability of admitting a liking for Gary Glitter's musical output. 

No, much as I love them I don't want to listen to Slade or Wizzard's Christmas classics while some people are still trying to plan their summer holidays. Like the first cuckoo of spring, Christmas can be said to start when Noddy Holder first bellows "It's Chrissssssssssss-maaaaaaaassssss!!!" from behind the Halloween trimmings in Clinton's Cards. This year he started earning his royalties in the middle of September.

The preparation for Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year when kids start emailing Santa the order number for their most coveted toys from the Argos catalogue, but it seems to come around with more frequency too. I could have sworn that it was only ten weeks ago since last Christmas and yet, like Ken Dodd's farewell tours, another one's here already. It seems as though nowhere near a year has passed since the last one.

I have a theory about this. I think that the frequency of Christmases doesn't change as we get older, but the way that we store them in our heads does.

Remember how, when you're very young, summers seem to last forever? The summers in your forties, fifties and beyond go by in the blink of an eye but those when you numbered your age in single figures? They seem to stretch to the horizon and beyond even though logically they can only have lasted the same three months maximum as those of your later years.

I think that it's because our brains only have a finite amount of space in which we can hold 'Summer Memories', like a fixed-size hard drive. So when we're (say) seven years old we can stick massive amounts of detail about the few summers that we can remember in there. We hold on to the smell of a newly painted shed, the lazy drone of a honey bee, the sickly sweet taste of a lollipop. As we age that same hard drive in our brains has to try to hang on to the tiny special memories of tens of summers. It can't do it, so it compresses them, making them all seem the same. A generic summer with just the very special parts standing out. And as they all merge into one big memory then they seem to come around with alarming swiftness.

And, as it is with summer, so with Christmas. An adult lifespan's-worth of them all crammed into a memory box designed for just those magnificent Christmases of childhood when all we had to worry about was how Father Christmas would manage to get into our house since the previous owner had removed the chimney a decade before our birth (don't worry kids; he has a special key).

I tried this theory out on my Beloved. I figured that she'd smile, nod and agree that this must be precisely how our memories work, I must have stumbled upon the reason why we think that there's less time between Christmases now than there used to be.

After all these years together you'd think I'd know better. She just laughed and said, 'No love, they only seem to come around quicker because you're getting old.'

Ah. Maybe that's it.

© Shaun Finnie 2012