The wind beneath my wings...squawk

I was wandering along a street in Poplar at lunchtime today with my nose buried in The Mayor of Casterbridge when my concentration was disturbed by the unmistakable hue and cry of a domestic budgie.  Despite its winning personality and gregarious nature, the budgerigar is not possessed of a sonorous voice.  Like most members of the parakeet family, it's makes a shrill short squawk in lieu of song.

I assumed initially that the noise was coming from the window of a nearby flat, but it sounded eerily close at hand.  I looked up, and there he was, bright green brer budgie, in the bough of a tree directly above me.  He was looking hither and yon and clambering gingerly up and down, as if looking for his bell or mirror.

I've kept budgies over the years, and, unusually for an avian, they betray their emotions through body language.  This little rotter was fretful.  He was trying to tough it out in front of the sparrows and starlings, but was fooling no-one.

Back-filling the story, I suppose he must have escaped from his owner's home shortly before I spotted him.  It got me to thinking: there must surely be a heavy-handed cod-insightful lesson one can glean from this episode.

And, indeed, there is: the budgie (let's suppose for the moment he's called Ian) had dreamt of escaping the bounds of his known universe and soaring upwards into the chewing-gum grey yonder of The Isle of Dogs since egghood.  His owner (for the purposes of this article, Mrs Carraway) attended to his needs, both material and emotional, as well as any owner could.  But of late she had become increasingly forgetful.  So it was then that she forgot the close the louvres fully before letting Ian out for his afternoon constitutional.

Mrs Carraway popped to the kitchen for moment to fetch some millet and a kitkat.  At that exact moment, Ian spotted the open window and seized his chance.  He shot out, front-crawled furiously across Narrow Street and nestled in the branches of the first tree he happened across. 

His tiny budgie face was flushed from a mixture of effort and excitement.  Then for the first time he was able to draw breath and assess his new environment.  Sweet Jesus, it's huge.  The scope and animation of the outside world overwhelms him for a moment, and he rocks back on his talons.  This was a mistake, he concludes, a big budgie mistake.  No matter though; he can simply fly back.

He tilts his noggin and turns an eye to the low-rise he calls home.  Oh, no!  There are dozens of flats, each one identical to its neighbour.  Which one is Mrs Carraway's?  Chances are Ian will never find out.

So let that be a lesson to you.  It's better to be locked in a cage in a Peabody flat in Poplar than to be twenty foot up in a Silver Birch tree across the road...in Poplar.  Tell your friends.

Mendacious memories and manners

Tony Benn died today.  I remember seeing him at Queen Mary College, London in the early 1990s.  He was everything the thrusting young ideologue about town could have wished for: insightful, fluent, mannered and absolutely devastating on the stump.  

As must always have been the case when he turned up to speak, the room was evenly divided between his implacable political friends and foes.  This meant he was rounded on a times during the evening.  In response to these attacks, he was at his best.  He never lost sight of the essence of the question, or his logically-rigorous rebuttal to it.  Uniquely for a politician, he never meandered or obfuscated.  And the reason for this was that he divorced his work from his ego.  I've always believed that the transcending of the ego that marks out the true artist, and TB was certainly that.  Incidentally, this is why most the YBAs are terrible: they're always so concerned by the esteem of the public and their peers that you can see their thought processes in the work.  It's like leaving the scaffolding on a building.  It's inelegant and unworthy of scrutiny.

Anyhoo, watching TB was exhilarating stuff, like watching a gifted musical improvise.  We won't see his like again, I'm sorry to say.

The Sun Has Got His Fez On

It appears that Spring has finally sprung in the old country this week.  The weather stunned us all by pulling its finger out.  In a massive about turn, it decided it had had enough of sh1tting down stairrods on the wretched inhabitants of the sodden island and would ease off for a bit.  And very welcome it is too, this wanton act of kindness.

The last six months has been bereft of seasons here.  It's just been a relentless one-act Kafkaesque production of warm-ish drizzle and low grey cloud.  The English are no strangers to sheight weather of course, but even they had had a gut full of this stuff by the end of February this year.  People would laugh ever so slightly too hysterically when the subject of the weather came up.  "Ooh, I expect the weekend will be awful" - cue shrill strained giggling and facial ticks.

But all that's behind us now.  One useful outcome of the battering we've all taken over the last few months is that expectations are at an all-time low.  If the weather broke now, and it didn't stop raining until November (think Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Eastenders), people would probably settle for that.  "Remember that week in March," they'd reminisce "when it stopped raining for nearly 95 hours?  Great days..."

As Henry Hill observed in the opening monologue to Goodfellas "...everybody has to take a beating some time."  Well said, aitch.

T D M

I'm bored today.  It's a much underestimated affliction, boredom.  It really lays one low.  It generally gets short-shrift from high profile head-shrinkers and dramatists because it doesn't come equipped with the usual eye-catching mental and physically flailing normally associated with mental maladies.  But make no mistake - it's a dangerous foe.  It really takes the joy out of life.

I've been a sufferer for as long as I can remember.  Shortly after I learned to speak, I started haranguing my mother.  I would complain incessantly at her about being bored, and demand satisfaction.  I always had this semi-formed notion that they was a clever workaround to avoid it, like paracetamol for the ego.  But apparently there isn't.  That was a lesson hard-learned.

I don't ever remember my little playmates being like this; they all seemed content enough with a combination of Playschool and Fuzzy Felt.  The sufferer becomes an island in situations like this.  You feel divorced from your peers and polite society as a whole.  They seem to be enjoying themselves, which makes them the enemy.  And this just makes the sorry business of getting on with the rotters and with life itself even more tiresome.

The funny thing is I've always held on to that youthful belief that there is a salve for boredom; I just need to continue the quest for it.  I've worked through umpteen hobbies, drugs, careers, body-modifications, religions and esoterica during this fruitless journey through life.  Nothing yet.  If I should happen across something, however, I'll let you know.  Perhaps half a dozen espressos might do it?

A fool and his money will see you now...

There's *hooge* excitement in the office today as it's the first day of The Cheltenham Festival.  For those of you who aren't au fait with National Hunt Racing, perhaps I should explain.  The Chelt Fest is the premier event for fans of horses that can jump.

Racing is divided between those who like their horses to leap and those who believe that had God wanted horses to leave the ground even for an instant, then He'd have give them massive flaps of skin betwixt their fore and aft legs, much like the flying squirrel.

 Kauto Star

The fact that He didn't (they "reason") makes His intent clear.  Racing fans get really het-up about this shit, really het-up.  What does it matter, frankly?

I'll be honest with you - I can't abide horse racing.  Actually, it's not so much the racing itself; it's the human flotsam that hangs around it like a bad smell.  They're so wilfully unfashionable, and yet they revel in it; they ought to be locked-up.  Your average racing fan makes John McCririck look relatively normal.  Think about *that* next time you're walking past a bookies.  Eugh.

What's the biscuit situation?

I'm working from home today, by which I mean of course I'm at home whilst being paid.  For form's sake, I've had to fire off a few emails over the course of the morning.  The joy of WFH is that you can sit in your jimjams and drink tea, but pretend to yourself that you're aiding the country's balance of payments deficit, or something.

I particularly enjoy being at home during the school day because I'm good at it.  I have the mentality of a pensioner.  I fill my day with domestic tasks, and complete them religiously whilst Radio 4 blares in the background.  By lunchtime I always feel as if I've really achieved something, the exact inverse is true of my time in the workplace, which is filled with nebulous meetings and middle-management brouhaha.

Could you do my back for me?

As I've stated before in these pages, I cycle to work.  To avoid upsetting my workplace neighbours, then, I have a shower in the gym in the office prior to beginning my meagre duties.

This morning, as I was running a little late, I spotted a chap whom I hadn't seen before down there.  So far, so ordinaire.  I noticed he was very tanned, as if he'd just stepped off the plane from Gran Canaria or Florida.  As he stripped off to abulute, I noticed he was tanned all over.  But something didn't look quite right.  His tan was a little too good.

He was the colour of builder's tea from head to toe.  The were no tide marks on him at all.  He was covered in nut-brown skin in all directions.  There wasn't an aperture or crevice on his not insubstantial chassis that wasn't tanned right up to the event horizon.  Presumably he'd paid some unfortunate immigrant to intimately apply the creosote for him.  He was a big chap, and didn't look flexible enough to have slapped it on, himself.  

Are people really so impoverished that they have to do things like this for a living?  It's 2014, ferchrissakes.  Also, what's the thinking behind getting your perineum painted brown?  Is it supposed to make one irresistible to women?  Even if it did, they're not the kind of women you want to introduce to you mother, are they?  Great Scott - people died defending this sceptred isle...and for what?  For the liberty to do *THAT* to oneself?  The brain fcuking boggles at times.