I had a lovely relaxing (sic) time while I was away and I bought a number of books to add to my collection of  ‘Books I will start to read but not finish’

One that I may get through though  is called “100 Plants that won’t Die in your Garden”  I take it with me in the garden  as I survey my efforts  and try to identify what the shrivelled lifeless things that are no longer of any use to me  once were. (I do a similar thing when I’m having a shower…)

I also bought a book of Robert Browning’s poetry and T S Eliot’s work,  Roger Penrose’s The Emporer’s New Mind’ and a couple of books on St Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.  A little light summer reading I’m sure you will agree!

As I was sitting on the Harbourside of my favourite holiday destination  next to people reading the latest John Grisham thriller and Aga sagas by various writers,  I was idly leafing through ‘Theories of Everything’ by John Barrow, a passer by asked me “What book are you reading?”  when I showed them they ran away…

I got to thinking  about ‘The Peter Principle’  does it apply to internal thinking processes as well as to business systems’ because I’m reading books that make my brain hurt and I wonder if I  am reading stuff that is really out of my league.  It’s lLike listening to music from a distant room; I know something is going on but I have to strain my senses to make out what it is!

I can recall the problems I had with Steven Hawkings’ ‘Brief History of Time’  My phone didn’t stop ringing “Eddie,” he  would say,”does this sound right? Can I pass this by you? Can I put this in the book?”  I would reply “Look Stevie just do your best, there’s only you and me that would know if you got it wrong again anyway!”

When I was a lad I used to get learned tomes out from the public library and write in pencil in the margins  things like NO! Think Again! and Check your Calculations! before returning them and wondering what the next reader would make of my annotations.  Such fun!   I still do it to books I give to charity shops and you should see the margin notes I’ve written in my Bible!  I have tried to explain to my wife about her duties and obligations by claiming…”You have to do such and such a thing, it’s written in my bible” and it is, albeit in biro!

I am a firm believer in Anselm’s Ontological Proof of God, partly because it makes sense and partly because I have not found any competent refutations of the Proof, even Bertrand Russel’s prognostications on it are bollocks!

So back to The Peter Principle’  Does it apply to internal thinking processes as well as to business systems?

Think about it!

At my time of life (I’m old) and with my cognitive and physical disabilities  I was  hoping to spend the twilight years of my life gently pottering about in the garden and in my library; growing pretty flowers in the first  and reading pretty books and poetry in the second; maybe writing a whimsical, lighthearted story or two to pass the time…but …and mine is a big But I met with a few ‘obstacles to my plans.

In poetry my problem is that instead of  focussing my efforts  on doggerel and twee poetry as a balm to my aged brain and aching intellect,   I have reconnected with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (GMH)  and I LOVE IT!

O how I wish I could forget that I ever knew his stuff and could concentrate on Patience Strong’s guff instead but I can’t.

GMH wrote such amazing  poetry but in a style that tests the intellect and perseverance of the reader to such an extreme extent in order to understand what he is explaining that  it is not enough just to know the laws of rhyme to appreciate his work.  He deconstructed and rebuilt so many rules of rhyme, metre, language and allegory.

Reading one of his works is  like doing a jigsaw (albeit a  beautiful one!) in your mind, you must understand the shape of the pieces and their relationship to each other and the whole  picture in order to complete it.   Each word, sound, stress and image that GMH uses is he uses with an intent sometimes different from the accepted norms of poetical language and convention but by doing so he produces poetry so beautiful and sublime that it transcends almost all other poets (Yes Mr Shakespeare I’m talking that includes  you!)

If you don’t believe me then get W H Gardener’s book ‘Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ and immerse yourself!

I am struggling to write my book, not because I can’t write but because I have writer’s block…well not a block as such but it  a bottleneck..I have so many ideas and thoughts assembled in my mind thaty I’ve collected through my life about how I want my story to be  that I can’t get them to come out in a sensible coherent order…

I know what I want to write, in fact I’ve written most of it in a  first draft but I can’t decide how it should be constructed and organised…

I shall soldier on…

All Writers Are Vain, Selfish and Lazy – http://www.advicetowriters.com/home/2018/6/17/all-writers-are-vain-selfish-and-lazy.html

I read this quite from Georgia boy and recognised he was taking about me!

I am reading the book  ‘My India’ by Jim Corbett. Jim Corbett was a Big Game Hunter turned benvironmentalist and wildlife photographer who flourished in the first half of the 20th Century.  I already have a copy of his book ‘Maneaters of Kumaon’ detailing  his later exploits of hunting and shooting man eating tigers in India, oth books are wonderfully written and highly enjoyable (if you can leave aside your squeamishness for a while) and if the tales he relates are true they are truly wonderful!

Now, I have liistened to more than my fair share of bullsh*tters and tall tale tellers relating all sorts of wondrous deeds yet am still inclined to believe this chap because all the liars I have met have spun tales about their own derring do and brushes with death but Jim ta;ks about other peoples deeds and dangers as well as his own which is uncommon for liars and braggarts to do.

He tells of when he was hunting a tiger wth a chap called Har Singh when they were surprised by a tiger. Jim had learnt to climb a tree but Har Singh hadn’t, so while Jim scaled his tree Har Singh was crushed to the trunk of his by the tiger!  The tiger had stretched its arms around the tree and according to Jim’s tale… started to claw big bits of bark and wood off the far side of the tree.  While it was so engaged Har Singh was screaming and the tiger was roaring

Jim frightened off the tiger by firing shots from his rifle into the air and went down to help his friend.

‘He  found that one of the tiger’s claws  had entered his stomach and torn the lning from near his navel to near his backbone away and that all his insides had fallen out.

He wondered whether it would be best to cut off all the insides that were now outside or to put them all back inside.  He chose the latter course so gathered up all the dangling bits and covered as they were with leaves and grass and bits of sticks  put them all back inside, then winding a cloth round Har Singh’s wound and with the man holding the  ‘bandage’ in place they walked the seven miles back to their village when they got near to home they decided it would be better to go a further three miles to the hospital where they could get help.  When they got there the hospital was shut but the doctor who lived close by was awake so with the help of a local shopkeeper who held up a lantern Jim held the two sides of the wound together while the doctor sewed it up.  Har Singh survived and died many years later of old age but as Jim commented ‘it is important that everyone hunting tigers should know how to climb trees; if Har Singh had learnt how to do so he woyuld have saved us all a lot of trouble…

For a number of years I have been composing a novel of EPIC proportions but have now had to concede that the story is not the type of what EPICs are made of so I am having to break it down into a series of short stories and flash fiction episodes to try and retain the reader’s attention.

I’m also having a job in retaining the writer’s attention because it is, deliberately, an unremittingly miserable story about the unremittingly miserable life of an unremittingly miserable man and takes place ovewr a pewriod of 200 years or so (the main character is a ‘vampire’! If you like vampire stories you will hate this one, if you hate vampire stories you will like this one!)

Or I might go easy on myself and change it to story to one about fluffy bunnies playing in fields of green candy by a lemonade fountain!

A Visit and a Surprise

I can still vividly recall the visits that my parents and I made each Saturday to my see my Uncle Bernie and Aunt Elsie who lived . in a terraced council house in Leytonstone in East London.

They weren’t ‘my’ uncle and aunt, they were my mum’s but we had visited them each week since my gran and grandad, my mum’s folks, had moved away to Cornwall and had never been heard of since; family legend was that they had been eaten by cannibals.

My cousin Ferdie lived with Uncle Bern  and Aunt Elsie  the  family legend also said that he had become  a bit touched in the head after he had visited my grandparents in Cornwall and had been to Camborne and seen things there  that no civilised man should witness.

Aunt Elsie kept the house spick and span.  As we got off the Green Line bus  in their road we could  see the net curtains in her front parlour shining  so white and neat that they looked like the wings. Of Angels in the windows.

I had never been in the Front Parlour, the  door to that room  was kept locked and it was only opened on a Sunday after lunch when my uncle and aunt would sit in there for a couple of hours while auntie  did some knitting and uncle read the ‘News of The World’ and on a Thursday morning Aunt Elsie would give the room its weekly hoovering, dusting  and polishing  and in the afternoon it was used to host the Man from the Pru’ when he called for his money.

On a Wednesday the man who brought the pools coupon was entertained in the back room, he was never allowed inside  the Front Parlour,  and on a Friday the Rent Man was dealt with on the doorstep; he was never allowed inside  the house.

Aunt Elsie kept that room sacrosanct and woe betide anyone that dirtied it; I remember Uncle Bernie telling me with guilty excitement how once when Elsie was spending a week at her sister’s in Southend he had crept into the house with a cigarette and blown smoke through the keyhole of the Front Parlour and the next two days sin a blue funk quirting air freshener into it to hide the smell of his fag…luckily his ruse worked and he never smoked in the house again.

Aunt Elsie said she kept the tidy  for special occasions like funerals and the such.  Uncle Bernie told my dad that if Aunt Elsie died first he would have her coffin in the front parlour with an ashtray on it and would sit in there and smoke a whole pack of cigarettes but he died first and Aunt Elsie missed him so much that she discovered there weren’t many joys to widowhood.

The Front Parlour was kept pristine for if the Queen popped in for a cup of tea.  It was Aunt Elsie’s  greatest hope that Her Majesty would call round and   her greatest dread was  that if The Queen  did call in she might want to need  a penny and have to the  outside loo by the backdoor with torn up pages of the Daily Mail (except for any pages with photos of the Royal Family on them) on a nail on the Privy door for use by those people not hardy  enough to risk using  the sheets of Jeyes Medicated paper in a box on the window ledge.   My uncle had worked as a caretaker at the local Community Centre for many years and when he retired the Council gratefully gave him  a gift of a Gold Watch and,  unknowingly, 200 boxes of loo paper which were now stored in my uncle’s airing cupboard!  He’d tried  selling them to his mates down the pub but no one was buying them.

When we visited the house we were taken into the back  room or ‘the Dining Room’ as Auntie Elsie called it.  In this room, apart from the dining table and chairs there was a sideboard on top of  which there was a bowl of sweets from which  I was allowed to have some… as long as I ‘didn’t take too many’,  and inside of which were two bottles of Mackeson that my auntie had bought from the off license that morning;  one each for Uncle Bern and my dad to drink while they watched the football results later in the day.  My dad didn’t like Mackeson but he drank it out of politeness and because it was free; I didn’t like the sweets very much but I ate them out of greed and because they were free.

The other fixtures in the room were a tv showing the wrestling and a sofa on which sat \Mad Cousin Ferdy reading the latest issue of The Hotspur.  As I sat beside him watching  the wrestling he would secretly pass me extra sweets from the bowl and old issues of his comic but he never spoke to me, or, indeed,  anyone else.

Cousin Ferdy was like a piece of furniture, a statue,  that sometimes occasionally moved.

Uncle Bern played a minor part in this weekly drama,  he would spend the day out in the garden digging the soil or turning his compost and if it was raining he would be in the shed chatting to my dad or  ‘Looking at his magazines and polishing his dibber’ as Aunt Elsie often explained.

So as I sat with cousin Ferdy watching tv and ruining my teeth,  my mum would be in the kitchen with Aunt Elsie.  And my dad would be outside with Uncle Bern

The women would be talking about ‘women’s things like knitting and babies and the joys of widowhood and the men would be talking about men’s things like cars and football and Mrs Joy the widow from round the corner.

I wouldn’t see the men until they came in to watch the football scores and drink their stout,  but every so often I would see Aunt Elsie as she broke off discussing  with my mum,  in a voice loud enough that ‘er next door’ could hear, the various shady goings on of ‘er next door’  to stick her head through the serving hatch to see who was on the tv.  Her particular delight was hating the shenanigans of Les Kellett.  She knew the wrestling was all fake but she still hoped someone would wring his neck for being such a naughty little scamp!

Every Tuesday night she went to play Bingo at the Town Hall but she hoped one day to go there and watch the wrestling and sit in the front row and get the chance to hit Jackie Pallow with her umbrella if she saw him cheating.

One afternoon when the wrestling was boring and Ferdy was away in North Africa fighting Rommel, mum was in the kitchen  with Auntie Elsie and my dad had gone to the newsagent to buy Uncle Bernie 20 Capstan Full Strength,  which he loved and Auntie loathed;  there came a gentle tapping on the window; there stood Uncle Bernie beckoning me outside.

‘Come  ere’ he mouthed to me.

I rushed out the kitchen door with Auntie Elsie shouting:

‘mind you wipe your feet when you come in’ at me as I flew past her to join Uncle Bernie in the garden.

“What could he want?”  I wondered, “he’s never spoken to me before!”

With the innocence and trust of a child I walked with him in silence  past the rows of peas and cabbages and potatoes that he lovingly tended,  past the garden shed, his man cave, and down  to the bottom of the garden where Aunt Elsie hung out the washing.

And there, in that secluded sunny spot in the garden where no one could see us,   Uncle Bernie put his hand on my shoulder and said slyly:

“I wanna show you summat boy,  but you mustn’t tell anyone what you’ve seen, it’ll be our little secret.  Promise?”

#I blurted out a ‘yes’.

“Look at these, ain’t they beautiful? They’re your aunt’s bloomers.”

Then he showed me,  in a flowerbed by the clothesline,  the magnificent chrysanthemums that  he had grown to give to his wife on her birthday the next week:

Aunt Elsie’s Big Pink Bloomers!