Arse rubbing

I had another session with the physiotherapist today.  Unfortunately, there's a tube strike in London, so I had to cycle the seven miles from my office to get there.  Given that I'm being treated for a shit knee, this is probably not what the doctor ordered.  Are you listening, the ghost of Bob Crow?

Luckily, it's an absolutely tremendous day in the capital, sunny and warm, so it was almost a pleasure to bob and weave in and out of traffic in the Blackfriars underpass.  The only problem with being on two wheels today in fact was the lack of parking spaces.  Everyone who's ever owned a bicycle clambered aboard it.  

There is some shocking cycling to behold on London's roads at the moment.  The combination of moderate heat, men in shorts and crowded streets is an accident waiting to happen.  Sometimes I look on, slack-jawed, at some of the antics middle-aged men get up to on bikes.  To look at most offenders, you'd have to assume that they are otherwise extremely conservative by instinct - the kind who wouldn't buy a lawnmower without having read Which Magazine cover-to-cover first.  But as soon as they hurl their thin white legs over a bike, they become freed from fear or self-doubt.  

They really take chances.  I sometimes want to applaud when one of them narrowly escapes coma-free from another altercation, and shout over "Well done.  The best that could have come out of that particular piece of high slapstick was your not ending-up in a wheelchair and having to be fed with a funnel for the rest of your days.  So, hats off."

And when you consider that most of them are en route to jobs they loathe when dicing with death like this, it really beggars belief.  I don't know how, or indeed why women put up with most men.  Bunch of facking idiots, if you ask me.

Tea break's over. Back on your heads

Mrs O and I have been in Belgium for a long weekend.  Ah, what bliss was it to be alive.  We watched a bike race, drank some vee fine Belgian beers and ate a pizza géante.  Our enjoyment was heightened, I'm ashamed to confess, by the knowledge that the weather in the low countries was considerably better than in Blighty.  I should be bigger and better than this at my age.  The fact that I'm not makes me think I'll never now grow-up fully.  Oh, well, there are worse crosses to bear.

The trouble with joyous weekends away is that it throws the working week into sharp relief.  As you flail away at the keyboard on your first morning back, the dissolute part of your brain keeps reminding you that you're wasting your life.  "Why not live in a hotel in Belgium full-time?  Oh, we'd cope.  Don't be so negative."  I was so tired I almost gave into the rotter today.  Tomorrow will be better.  Yes, yes, I'm sure that's right.

"The sun'll come out tomorrow...betcha bottom dollar etc."

Ambre Solaire and lager

There's another mini-break looming on the horizon this weekend.  The missus and I are off to Belgium tomorrow for a couple of nights.  We're heading east to catch a bike race, Liège-Bastogne-Liège.  I appreciate that this is some (i.e., most) people's idea of hell, and I understand and celebrate that stance on the subject.  Imagine what the world would be like if we all enjoyed the same things: that's right, even duller than it currently is.  I'm all for diversity of opinion.

Anyways, I'm really looking forward to it.  Belgium is the spiritual home of road racing.  It is to them what football is to the English, or rugby to the Kiwis.  Everyone there understands the sport, and has forthright opinions on it.  No such thing as neutral in these matters.  The Scottish pro rider David Millar once observed that he particularly enjoyed racing in Belgium because "it's so damn...well, Belgian."  

I concur.  Yes, Belgium isn't the most beautiful country on Earth, or the most exciting, but it is its own man.  It's happy in its own skin.  It cares not two hoots if you enjoy or even understand its ways. But if you take pains to study the place and understand its people, your efforts will be met with open arms and a winning smile.

It's strange how difference nations hold different opinions of each other.  Apparently the Dutch think the Belgians rather "other" and exotic although they only live about 50 miles away.  For example I was once on a cycling holiday in The Netherlands and spotted a Belgian restaurant.  I couldn't resist a closer look, so that evening Mrs O and I booked a table.  We didn't know what to expect.  I'd never been particularly bowled over by the cuisine in Belgium, save for the hand-wrought chocolates, which are rather good. 

The food was fairly workaday if I'm honest: fine but not brilliant, but the decor of the restaurant was a work of art.  It was kitted-out in dark wood panelling, heavy 19th century furniture and doilies, billions of doilies.  It was like being inside the drawer of a giant Welsh dresser.  This is at odds with the prevailing Dutch aesthetic, which is functional and easy-wide.  This contrast in visual sensibilities and the tradition of dangerous monastic beer gave the Belgians a romantic and wild-eyed quality that the Dutch felt they rather lacked.  I couldn't see it, myself.  

I suppose we're all guilty of this to some extent.  The English tend to think of the west of Ireland as a cross between Middle Earth and Cornwall.  The truth, I can tell you from family experience, is rather more prosaic: ill-fitting jeans on ill-fitting buttocks, sat in Hiace vans outside supermarkets, and drizzle...plenty of drizzle.

When the going gets stuffed

The pressure's on chez-work at the mo.  One of my junior colleagues has gone on a pre-nuptial bender with six-dozen of his closest male friends.  They've jetted off to eastern Europe for this sojourn - naturally.  Haven't the huddled masses of Slovakia suffered enough ferrkrissakes?  So while he's away chugging rubbing alcohol and getting his chin tattooed, I'm having to perform his duties.

As is always the case with office work these days, his work is exacting and emetically tiresome.  It's a real test of character getting through eight solid hours of nip-picking when you have total responsibility but zero power.  The very best that can happen is that you're ignored by the great and the good around the office.  That means your mistakes are sufficiently meagre to have escaped their notice.  It's like being a toaster; the only time anyone pays it any heed to it is when they're beating it with a pool cue for having carbonised a breakfast muffin.  Other than that it goes about its duties invisible and unmolested.

The trouble with nooks in the corporate cliff-face like this one are that it requires a Herculean effort to move upwards.  You're beavering away full-bore just to get through the days; this leaves scant energy for weaselling your way into the affections of anyone powerful.  It also means you leave the office every night with a cracking headache and a desire for self-immolation.

The wise junior functionary placed in a thankless situation like this self-medicates to get through it.  The ones that refuse to (Mammys' boys or health nuts for example) end up taking hostages, or obsessively filling their homes with newspapers and perishing in the inevitable and tragic inferno that follows.

I've managed to bypass becoming the office Aunt Sally by being silent and sarcastic.  Bosses tend to mistake this as a sign of prodigious native intelligence and give me plenty of slack as a result.  The upshot of all this is that I'm left to my own devices for the most part, and have managed to carve out a pivotal role that I can perform standing on my noggin, but which to the untutored eye looks impossibly technical and demanding.  Onwards and sideways!

Mustn't grumble

There's a chap who works in my office who habitually looks under so much pressure that the expression on his face alone is enough to give me fantom shooting pains up my arms.  He's very ruddy of jowl too and some 14 stones overweight.  

His job requires a lot of travel, and he's never without his trusty Samsonite wheeled suitcase by his side, least he be sent to South Georgia on business at a moment's notice.  It's like a faithful hound, this case.  It's even stands guard when he's at the urinal in the executive washroom.  I dread the day I see him without it, for fear it might have been run over or put down by the council for having attacked a Lollipop Lady, and he bursts into tears telling me.

The strange thing is that despite all the effing-about he's forced to do, and the manifest damage this is dishing out to his chassis and psychological well-being, he really appears to enjoy his job.  It just serves to illustrate the truth of the old adage that pain and pleasure are but two sides of the same coin.

Bike Riced

Mrs O and I went for a weekend away en vélo over Easter.  We popped our folding bikes on the train and trundled up to Cambridge on Good Friday to commune with the hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists who had made the trip also.  It actually wasn't so bad in Cantab.  The students are at home (the normal ones, at any rate), which helped a bit.  We steeled ourselves by spending the night there and heading off the following morning, a massive complimentary buffet breakfast to the good.

The first few miles were great; well-appointed cycle paths take you right out into the mercifully-flat Cambridgeshire countryside.  It's quite dull, the landscape here, but good for low-octane cyclisme.  The trouble only starts when you get to Essex.

The physical geography of Essex is the absolute inverse of Cambridgeshire's.  The whole county appears to have been corrugated by a malevolent god.  It was massively hard going.  Mrs O had planned this first day to be 35 miles of bucolic bike jollies.  Five and half hours later, we pitched-up in Great Dunmow, utterly broken.  We must have cycled closer to 55 miles, what with the peaks and troughs.  As a consequence of this unforeseen extra effort, we spent the evening eating and drinking with abandon.  That's the quid pro quo of arduous cycling, and one of the pasttime's joys of course.  

After a mighty chug of Chenin Blanc and a slap-up Vietnamese dinner, we both slept like sedated babies, and lept out of bed, ready for the miles ahead.  Unfortunately, the weather undid us.  Literally as we were leaving the carpark of our hotel, Mrs O detected a spot of rain.  It then opened-up for ooh, let's see, the next nine hours solid.

The plan had been to ride all the way home, but by the time we reached the quaint end of the Central Line, I hoisted the white flag.  We jumped on a tube and headed to my sister's house, which is nearby.  We threw ourselves on her mercy.  She did the needful and filled us up with tea and hot cross buns.  She popped the tin hat on it by then offering us a lift home.

Easter time, mistletoe and wine

Today is Maundy Thursday.  It should be a solemn time of course, what with the Jesus stuff soon to go down, but in fact most of us can barely wipe the grins from our chops.  Easter means two 4-day weeks.  Woo and indeed hoo.

The weather is still rather fine in these parts, which means the pubs will be carnage this evening.  People (educated, otherwise genteel people, mind you) will be sucking and champing at tumblers of fine wine like piglets on the teat.  I'll be there too of course, to monitor events and scowl.

Tomorrow it's off to Cambridge, that poor man's Oxford.  There's a rather nice hotel in Cambridge.  It's part of an American chain that Mrs O and I have had some dealings with in the Ud Ss of A.  As well as being comfortable, this chain has a couple of winning customs that we both enjoy.  Upon checking-in you get presented with a giant chocolate chip cookie each, in a brown paper bag.  I don't even like CCCs much, but it's a nice gesture.  I give mine to la wife.  She's finds them most compelling company.

The other service they provide is a pancake-making machine as part of the breakfast buffet.  I'd never seen one until we visited the States.  They're quite lumpy, about three feet long by two high.  They also give off a tremendous noise.  You pour batter in one end and 90 seconds later out pops a fresh pancake.  Well, as fresh as a pancake can be, that is.

If I'm honest, the process is more fun than the result, but I don't like to see average food go to waste, so I normally eat about two dozen before I'm done.

Char, relax, have a jam sandwich etc...

I had an impromptu day off yesterday.  It's great, the old random weekday chez-vous.  Yesterday was particularly nice as the weather at pres is superb.  I threw open the french windows and beheld the lawn.

It's in rare mid-season form, the lawn.  The grass is lush and a very pleasing deep green, and it's interspersed with brilliant wild flowers of purple and yellow.  It looks, even to my jaundiced urbanite's eye, extraordinary.  If the colours were any more vivid, they'd be three dimensional.  

I suppose from a technical perspective the grass could use a trim, but it would break my heart in two to mow down those blooms.  Thank God some artist's sensibility still resides deep inside me.

Tempus Fugit

We had drinks in the office last evening.  It was to mark the fact that one of our number had notched up 50 years' continuous service.  You heard me right, friend - 50 (five-o) years.  He's a charming chap, our demi-centurion, so it was a well-attended gathering.  The powers-that laid on food and strong drink in our boardroom, and a dozen or so  of us went at it.

We sat around the boardroom table and swigged from bottles of ale and swapped war stories.  I was probably in the mid-range of generations represented in the firm currently.  Despite the good humour and nascent drunkenness, I'm certain I detected a certain sadness in the room.  This was I think due to the feeling that 50 years in the service of one company, even one as broadly benign as this one, was probably one of the most unromantic ways in which a man could spend is tenure on Earth.

Now, we all of course will see out our careers in this way, i.e. as jobbing functionaries in uninspiring buildings around the capital.  But one never sees oneself in this role forever.  When one changes jobs every few years, there is always the possibility, albeit a VAGUE one, that something dramatic might intervene - relocation to the tropics perhaps, or retraining as a trapeze artist.  Our colleague's career starkly illustrated to us all that this probably won't happen.  Shit.

I left after an hour, the rest of the room moving on to the pub.  I couldn't face any more.  This morning I awoke to a partially-crushed spirit, so I phoned the office and pulled I sickie.  I didn't lie; I told them I woke up feeling terrible, which is quite true.

I spent the rest of the day painting the chimney breast in the front room, hoping that a romantic seque in life's journey might fall into my lap.  It's 7:30pm now.  The chimney breast is roasted red, but I am as-was, staring down the barrel of another dull day at work tomorrow.  Oh, well, I tried.

"Pass the Quavers, would you?  How 'bout those Gooners, eh?"

Hubba Bubba

Bubba Watson won his second US Masters title yesterday, which pleased me.  I don't know anything about Bubbles and don't especially care for the game of golf either, but he's unusual in the game as he is entirely self-taught.  His victory, therefore, is one in the eye for the golfing purists and equipment nutters.  This is to be welcomed.

As I think I've ranted before in these pages, men treat sporting equipment and technique as a secular religion these days.  It demands absolute blind faith.  Despite the lack of any evidence to show that any of this gear or tuition does anything beneficial, men unthinkingly shell out for  the latest equipment in the mistaken belief that it will afford them perpetual happiness.  If it did, gents, you'd stop buying it, wouldn't you?

Why should it be, I wonder, that women are immune to this particular malady?  They're not adverse to a bit of marketing bullsheight themselves of course (anti-wrinkle cream, anyone?).  Hmm, it must be that they see sport for what it actually is, an ultimately pointless, albeit highly ritualised game of war.

That's why I have some regard for boxing.  It gives the lie to this notion that sport somehow has a noble and transcendent meaning.  Boxing cannot claim to be constructive when its explicit aim is to render the opponent insensible by punching him or her in the face and abdomen.  Yes, one has must use guile and skill to achieve this end, but the same is true of most anything.  I dare say most stranglers look back on their early attempts at throttling as gauche and tactless.  It doesn't make the practise a worthy pursuit for schoolchildren.

The sporting apotheosis of the gear obsession must be fishing.  Fishing is a uniquely male sport, and without laydeez present to argue the case for common sense and restraint, anglers really go to town on equipment. 

The wife and I were down at the coast a couple of weeks ago.  The town we ended-up at had a long Victorian pier, the end of which was overrun with anglers.  The very amount of equipment each was dragging around after him was heartbreaking: rods, nets, spools of different gauge line, floats, flies, harpoons, GPS worms, you-name-it.  And, I understand from a chap in the office who fishes, it's all carbon fibre these days.  Of course it is!  How is 15-stone man supposed to land a 10 ounce Herring with a metal or wooden rod.  Anyway, it's a moot point because there weren't any fish on the pier.  Yes, despite the computer-aided kit, the anglers were being ripped a new one by the kippers and whelks.  Oh, well maybe next year's rod will be the one.

Posh Eastenders

I was delighted to note the other day that Radio 4 are broadcasting yet another Elizabeth Jane Howard adaptation.  As tradition, and latterly legislation, requires, it was narrated by Penelope Wilton, the thinking-man's vocal dominatrix of choice.

If you're not familiar with EJH's oeuvre, her prose concerns itself with the dramatic comings and goings of a cadre of oh-so-posh English men and women, who seem to gad about the place with scant regard for the historical epoch each was born into.  

The style is sufficiently literary to convince one that something significant is going on.  This effect is bolstered in the radio dramatisations by Penny W's fruity hectoring vowels.  But actually, when you scrutinise the (ahem) action, Lizzie's stories seem to consist of nothing more than people eating and drinking.

In last night's instalment, for example, one of the identikit ingenues made cheese on toast.  (Phew)  Later she, or possibly one of the others, was forced to ingest a heavy meal at a fraught dinner party, the subsequent indigestion providing the chapter's gripping denouement.

I suspect that Penny's voice could make the most prosaic tale sound compelling.  Ideally I'd like her to read a passage in which Billingsgate Fish Market porters drink snakebites and light and lagers in Browns in Shoreditch.  This should make or break the hypothesis.

Aide de camp

The camping season is looming, and it's time for young men the nation over to nail their courage to the sticking place and get the Trangia and the tent out of mothballs.  Each year camping looks less and less appealing - the cold, the hassle, the inability to bring all your adult toys with you etc.  And yet to decline to go would be an admission of defeat, a kowtowing to the advancing years.  And we can't have that.  Rage rage against the dying of the light.

Unfortunately it's murder trying to book campsites these days as holidaying under canvas has become dead fashionable.  Years ago one could turn up without a reservation and still bag nine pitches and a kennel for the dog.  But now it's like trying to get into Studio 54.  This is only one area of many in which the zeitgeist has chased me down and helped itself to my hobbies.

Over the last five years or so most if not all of my interests or peccadilloes has become the thing for the fashionable young graduate about town.  All men under 40 who aspire to a certain intelligent otherness now wear tweed jackets, ride fixed wheel bikes, drink real ale, go camping of a bank holiday weekend and live in Walthamstow Village.  Yes - I invented that.

Whilst one doesn't wish to appear churlish, where were you lot in 2010?  I don't do these things to make a statement; I do them because I believe them to be pleasurable and/or worthy of my time in some other regard.  I happened across them not because the colour supps suggested I should, but because they appealed to me on a fundamental level.  That's the problem with fashion movements: they broker no dissent.  They don't allow for individual likes and desires.  You throw your lot in with currently fashionable pasttimes etc. whether you like them or not

When I was a boy, I was starstruck by the mod movement.  As soon as I saw a scooter, a sharp suit and a pair of desert boots, I was lost to it.  My little mates and I immediately became mods, and I can honestly say that this period was the most improbably exciting time of my entire life.  I lived being a mod, absolutely lived it.

Sadly for me, during the long summer holidays in 1981, all the former friends decided en bloc to become casuals.  Just like that.  I could not believe it.  I felt betrayed, but they couldn't see the problem.  "Everyone was a mod then, and everyone is a casual now."   The scales fell from mine eyes.  The aesthetics of modism meant no more to them than did the price of sherbet.  It just is what it is now.  We move on.

I resisted the move, and I still affect a certain mod look to this day.  I don't do this to make a statement or stand out.  You cannot choose with whom or with what you fall in love.  It chooses you.

Marketing - a lesson from history

My phone at work rang earlier, which was an unwelcome distraction from the Internet, as always.  Worse still, it was someone who'd been put through to the wrong number.  He wanted to place an order for a digital product, and I had no idea who might be able to help him in his quest.

The reason I was lost at sea like this is because the job titles that my colleagues labour under are at best nebulous, and at worst wilfully obfuscating.  It turned out in this case that the person who deals with digital products was someone I have worked with for five years.  She sits about twenty yards from me, and I would count her as a friend.  And yet, I have no real idea what it is she does to keep the wolf from the fiscal door.  This ignorance isn't aided by her title as vice emperor of strategy parameter facilitation or something.  I checked, incidentally; facilitation isn't an actual word, not in English at any rate.  You may find it in some disreputable dictionaries, but that doesn't mean shit these days, let's face. it.

The worst department for this is marketing - that renowned refuge for the corporate weasel.  The difference with marketing types, however, is that they actually take these sterling-silver nomenclatures seriously.  It's enough for your average marketing bod to have a grandiose job title and an age-inappropriate wardrobe.  That's why they're content to fill their days guffawing at each other's weak puns and pointing and laughing at the internet's funniest cat movies.

I finally got so I couldn't take it any more, which led to the following poignant exchange recently:

Self: [sidling up to marketing johnnie] What is it you do exactly?  [gesturing to rest of office] We're all intrigued.

marketing johnnie: I facilitate brand purview.

Self: How so?

mj: By creating a nexus of social media...

Self: I'll stop you there if I may.  Specifically, what is it you do?

mj: [doe-eyed sideways glance at marketing colleagues]  We brainstorm below-the-line digital content.

Self: What do you do with the rest of the day?

mj: I...[looks at lap.  silently mouths vowel sounds.  briefly looks up, and immediately returns eyes to lap]...

Self: [sotto voce] I think it would be best for you and for everyone if you took you stuff and wandered off into the night, don't you?

Wind in the pillows

It is windy today.  Wind, as I think I've made clear before now, is dreadful stuff.  The more of it there is, the more miserable life becomes.  Some years ago Mrs O and I visited Tarifa on the southern tip of Spain.  There's a tiny (relatively-speaking) aperture betwixt Tarifa and north Africa where the Atlantic and Med meet.  Anyhoos, for reasons too dull for me to type-up, this confluence of geographical mishaps makes Tarifa the windiest town on Earth, more-or-less.

We had been warned about this, the wife and I, but as soon as we stepped off the coach, we realised we'd made a tremendous Iberian howler.  It was literally impossible to stand upright unsupported.  We hid in a shop doorway to take stock.  I'd assumed that the guide book was laying it on a trifle thick about the gales, but, no - they'd been faithful to the facts.

We stayed in Tarifa for a few days, and it's actually a charming place.  It's a testament to wind's ability of wipe the smile off one's chops then that it still managed to overshadow the stay.  We left with the avowed intention of never returning.  

This being Andalusia, the weather was glorious, so we trundled down to the beach for a gawp.  We were the only people visible for miles, even though it was the middle of the day and 35 degrees in the shade.  The reason for this is that the relentless gusts whip-up the surface layers of sand and fling them off into space at a rare old lick.  Even a grain of sand hurts when it's doing eighty.  In its defence, it is quite exhilarating for a second or two, but then it begins to grate.

So today's lesson: wind - it's shit.

And finally...
Someone on Facebook had the lovely idea of jotting down one's favourite writers and poets.  You simply write down 15 of the blighters in no more than 15 mins.  It's quite enlightening.  I haven't read some of the authors on my list for years, decades in some cases.  And yet - these people have had a huge influence on who I am today...hmm.

Here's my list: 1.Woody Allen 2.Charles Bukowski 3.Enid Blyton 4.John Cooper Clarke 5.Ian Fleming 6.Graham Greene 7.George Orwell 8.Thomas Hardy 9.James Joyce 10.David Lodge 11.John le Carré 12.Philip Larkin 13.Spike Milligan 14.Neil Simon 15.PG Wodehouse

Black sabbath

Sunday's an odd day, isn't it?  You have a day off, unless you're a priest or a work in Homebase that is, but it's not one of unalloyed joy and carefree jollies, is it?  No, there's always the spectre of Monday looming ever larger on the horizon to spoil matters.

I've always hated Sundays.  My earliest memories of this day of alleged rest are of recurring nightmares.  I used to dream I was having an out-of-body experience in the assembly hall of my school.  My...well, spirit, I suppose, would float around for a bit and then shoot up a corner of the rafters and just sit there.  At this point I'd be overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety and wake up in a panic.  I was five years-old.  

Although these nightmares don't sound scary per se (You'd certainly have your work cut out trying to pitch a film treatment of one), I used to dread them.  They were relentless in their regularity.  Looking back now it's rather sad that a child as young as this should have been beset by nightmares.  The upshot of all this is that I developed a phobia about Sunday.  Actually, it's Monday that prompts the real fear, but Sunday is his sinister hand-maiden.  She pretends to be benign, but would betray you at the drop of a fez.

I thought for years that I had an especial and irrational hatred of Sunday, but talking to most seemingly normal adults, it turns out to be a very common malady.  This does rather beg the question what the fcuk are we doing with our lives.  If we all find life by turns boring, dreadful and workaday, then what's the point of continuing?  We should all resign en bloc an take up tightrope walking, or whatever perverted pastime we feel might afford us some fulfilment.

I know it's only rock n roll, but could you turn it down?

I'm off to a friend's 50th birthday party this evening.  It's in a rather nice pub in a rather nice part of town.  That's all good then, 'eh?  The trouble is today is Friday.  That doesn't sound like a major hurdle in black and white, but it is.

I'll level with you: I've reached that stage in a man's affairs when he can no longer sustain a hangover.  Actually, that's not strictly true.  I can tolerate them, but only if they occur at very specific times, on a Friday for example.  I'll quite happily shift a few quarts of Guinness with friends on a Thursday evening if the opportunity to break bread emerges.  It's just a matter of crawling through Friday in the office, which is like a day off in most offices these days anyway.  Everyone turns up in mufti, and mentally everyone's brought his toys along so there's no real work to be done.  It's like the last day of term in an infants' school.

But the very idea of being hungover on a Saturday fills me with dread.  Saturday is sacrosanct.  I rise early, fetch some bread, make the breakfast and then spend 3 hours gnawing it.  This is generally followed by a hundred minutes' noodling on a ukulele.

In the afternoon I potter.  I used to loathe pottering and all it stood for when I was young and callow.  Absolutely hate it.  In those days, had someone invited me to a party on a Friday, I've have been champing at the beer bit by about 11:30am, and would have given full reign to my crapulent instincts once at the bar, getting what PG Wodehouse referred to as "a might polluted" in the process.  Saturday could take care of itself.

On being a better person

Over the breakfast chop and ale this morning I read a very moving and inspirational piece on the BBC web site.  It concerns a remarkable man named Captain Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese UN peacekeeper who, with no thought for his own safety, saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of civilians during the tribal genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

I do recommend you read the whole thing yourself (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_6954/index.html).  It's sad, horrifying and ultimately tragic, but Captain Diagne's extraordinary humanity radiates from the words of those who witnessed his deeds first hand; it lifts you.

What all the more singular about Captain Diagne is his humour.  Everyone reports that he was a genuinely funny man, who delighted in joking and laughing.  I suppose we expect our heroic types to be silent and stolid, a cross between James Bond and Seneca.  Diagne didn't fit the mould.  What most struck people who met him apparently was his infectious gap-toothed smile.  Just looking at the hysterically over-exposed Polaroids of him in uniform is enough to confirm the power of Captain Diagne's smile.  It transcends language, culture, political antipathy, you name it, and grabs the beholder by the lapels.

Captain Diagne at times literally put himself between gunman and civilians to prevent killings.  Can you imagine what super-human courage that takes?  To put yourself in the firing line to spare the life of someone you've never met before?  What saved him in these instances was his joy and humour.  He disarmed and pacified the violent with his innate charm. 

His life was cruelly cut short in a mortar blast in  May 1994.

I felt ashamed when I read of this man's life, ashamed of my petty anger, negativity and trivial preoccupations.  It's time to let the suburban anger go, and to luxuriate in simply being alive.  My hat is off to you, Captain Diagne, you've saved another soul.

Your eyelids have reached critical mass

I had another night of broken sleep last night.  This one was particularly unwelcome as it abutted one of the same on Monday night.  Two days and approximately one hundred minutes' sleep make for an incendiary combination.  It certainly doesn't aid office-based bonhomie.  Anyone who looks twice at me today can expect a head lock for his (or her) trouble.

Shit sleep tends with me to come in intense bursts like this.  I think the whole thing was triggered by a piece I happened across on Chris Evans' Radio2 programme on Monday afternoon.  He had a self-proclaimed sleep expert on.  

Sleep experts suffer from the same delusion as economists: if they really did know how to fix things (the economy, insomnia etc.), the problems they address would very quickly cease to exist.  Now despite their claims, I still see plenty in the papers that suggests to me that economists can't control or predict the economic cycle with any more accuracy than a macaque with a tombola.  Ditto sleep experts.  If your treatments worked, insomnia would disappear from the surface of the planet overnight (pun intended).  People aren't thick.  They aren't sticking with insomnia because they fear change, or because they wrongly think it makes them attractive to the opposite sex.

One of the reasons cures for insomnia don't work (in the long term at any rate) is because they draw attention to the act of sleeping.  This is what triggered my current bout.  As soon as I heard this chap on the radio holding forth about the importance of down pillows and flame-proof jimjams and so on, I knew I would struggle to sleep that night.  

When one becomes self-conscious about dropping off, the game's up.  It's like if someone asked to think carefully about all the actions you make whilst driving to Sainsburys of a Saturday morning.  Your car would end up on its roof in a lay by before you got 200 yards.  Sleep systems, therefore, are doomed to failure.  Musicians know all about this; they refer to it as keeping out of your own way.  I suppose it's akin to "the zone" that athletes rattle on about.  Basically, you have to stop thinking about what you're doing.

The only upside to insomnia is that it makes you realise how well you can function with scant shut-eye.  This is quite empowering.  I'm convinced that could I sleep as well as my wife (she could get eight solid hours of dreamless inside a tumble dryer if she had to), I would be running the free world.  Imagine for a moment what a pleasure for everyone that would be.

Jet lag, night sweats and Abednego

I slept fitfully last night, and I lay the blame at the foot of the British Summer Time.  The clocks popped forward to the tune of one hour on Sunday morning, and my body clock has been all to cock since.

When I lay down my weary noggin last night, the old BC looked askance at me and said "It's a bit early, isn't it?"  As far as he was concerned of course it was twenty to eleven, not twenty to midnight.  My body clock, for reasons I don't fully understand, as well as keeping time, has charge of the thermostat.  When I drag him to bed early, he reaps his revenge by turning the heat up until it's impossible to drop off.

So I spent the next 3 or 4 hours sweating, scratching and getting zero nutritional value from my daily rest.  Sleep gurus (you know the sort -  impossibly optimistic life-coaches with no actual friends, only acquaintances who assuage their justified feelings of inadequacy by writing books with titles like "Grin your blubber-free in two weeks") suggest that in situations like this one should get up and creosote the budgie or something.  To which I respectfully say "bollocks".  I won't give in that easily.  Is that what made Britain great?  I shall dig my heels in and may the best man win.

So, anyway, I was catatonic this morning.

In other news, I'm a massive Vivian Stanshall fan.  Yes, he was mental, but in a endearing and very rational way.  Allow me to explain.  Vivian was a precocious child and very quickly realised that that the society he had been born into was at best dull and at worst an asylum run by its inmates.  Anyone who even for a moment take bourgeois mores seriously is not possessed of a rational mind.  

It doesn't matter which particular metaphysic you hang your hat on either.  If you're religious, why would you care about anything on a material plane?  Money, position, the respect of one's peers: they mean nothing.  And if you hold that the universe has no prime mover, and that life is merely a happy confluence of accident and chemical potential, why would you give a shite about the size of your back garden?  You have, by chance, been deposited into a sentient form, and are clinging to the surface of a small planet for what is after all merely a cosmic heartbeat.  You might as well enjoy yourself.  God knows, it'll be over soon enough (no pun intended, Your Highness.)

So, anyways, it turns out that Vivian spent the first 10 years of his remarkable life in a house about 400 yards from my own.  How could I not have know this?  The council in my borough, a shameless and incompetent cabal of vaguely left-wing small businessmen on the make, haven't put a plaque up or thought to mention the fact in their abundant literature.  What an outrageous oversight.