Willie At Ninety

On his 75th birthday
Willie Nelson ruefully said
'I have outlived my pecker',
I wonder, whither Willie,
fifteen years later,
as he approaches being 90?

He remains a prolific
performer and recording artist
-98 studio albums and counting- 
how does he find the humour? 
The grace? And the intelligence to survive?
However he douses now he will do it better
for having something new to seek,
and different tools and support to seek it with.

Burned!

This blog has been faltering of late,
more new entries have been based
on anniversaries and birthdays
than has been the case in the past.

This reliance on nostalgia
for the recent past  has been
my only way of navigating
how appalling and predictable
'the news' has become.

So many criminals don't get caught,
and those that face the courts
get let off lightly. Leaders loot
the countries they meant to lead,
and undermine their opposition.

Living longer and healthier
does not mean living better
it means seeing more abuse. 

The best thing to do is live cheaply
and put less store by social status
and more store that nature
will benignly do away with us all.    

The Fear Of Wages*

I was fourteen and attending a school for dunces,
when in the real world more children left school
than there were jobs and training for them to do.
Adult male unemployment kept rising, too.
Such that the government was rather shy
about sharing it's workings out the sums 
it had to do to explain unemployment.

They were even shier about explaining
to parents that their children were staying
in school two years longer, even though
there was nothing more for them to learn.    

Meanwhile in the classroom my maths teacher,
Mr Jackson, decided to teach me subtraction,
which I already knew how to do. ,

He wanted to ready me for the subject,
as an exam style question, a 'real life' example.
'If a man earns £20 a week and his deductions
are £18 then what does he have left?'
I wanted to say 'An inept government',
but we were never taught civics as a subject.

I was reminded of my dad,
the only working man I knew,
thinking that £18 was his deductions
and £2 was his wage I felt frightened
-at what point would he decline
to pay for the household expenses?
When would he disown his children? Me.

With a wage and deductions like that
I was the one subtracted from my family.
I forget how the discussion with Mr Jackson ended.

*This phrase was first used as the title of an episode
of the surreal comedy radio programme 'The Goon Show',
find a link to the programme here first broadcast Mar 1956.
That title was itself a reversal of the 1953 film title
'The Wages of Fear', which was itself an adaption
of St Paul's phrase 'For the wages of sin is death' (Romans Ch 6 V 23).   

Short Verse For Earth Day

Birdsong in a graveyard on a sunny day;
In the midst of the past, and death,
there is life, with more life to come.  

Mahler Symphonies-A Guide

Because the memory of the music we enjoy
can be as easily lost as it is gained.    

 

Don't Say Anything But....

The major aspect of secrecy
for those who live with others
who kept secrets from them
is how alike different secrets seem,
such that as the secret keeper hides
what their secrets are about, the clearer
it will seem that something is hidden.

So if you want to hide some facts of life
from somebody else, say your children,
then make sure they can't confuse
what your different secrets are about.

You could accidentally reveal
what you are trying to hide
when there is too much of it.

The Selective Subconscious

As described by the father of psychiatry
is one where if a child describes
an adult sexually assaulting them 
then the child is describing a fantasy.
It did not actually happen. 

Even though of the two,
child and adult, the latter
has more of an awareness of a choice
of behaviour, and will decide for both,
what both of them will say and do,
and what would be admitted to, after.

Whereas when a teenage boy yearns
for the sense of space, the freedom to act,
that he sees in the property owning adults
around him, who he is the property of
and they own the space they act in,
and he expresses that yearning as power
-the death of his father,
and sex-the rape of his mother
then he explores them in Oedipal terms. 

Because Oedipus was the fictional character
who could not recognise the distance
his parents intentionally kept from him,
fearing the curse that had been cast on him
when he was an infant. 

Is every child that adults keep
at such a distance from them so cursed?
Discuss..... 

It seems banal to ascribe
'double standards' to the reasoning
that justifies the detachment of the adults
who own everything there is to be owned
which also bars intelligent children
from the partial self knowledge
of identifying how to grow out
of 'being cared for'.

Children who have no choice
but to be disbelieved
make thoroughly disbelieving adults.

How Ready Am I To Meet My Replacement ?

I was a teenager in 1980 when first read 'Future Shock', first published in 1970. Like many a teenager trapped in the culture of television I thought I was clever for being able to read books. But I was not as clever as I projected myself as being, and I was slow to appreciate that reading is different from understanding and contextualising what you read.

  I had no helpers to help me appreciate the difference between understanding something and thinking I was clever. My family did not read books, they confined their reading to the red top, tabloid, press. Even now-well over thirty years on from being confined by the values of my family I have been slow to recognise what their values were, as expressed via their choice of newspaper.

  But I will explain afresh what a tabloid newspaper is. In every class in every school, with the exception of physical education class time, the class will organise itself into a hierarchy where the most earnest and intelligent pupils will flatter the teacher in the hope of learning more, and receiving more praise than other pupils. The least interested in learning will form a clique where the more distracted and inattentive they can be of their surroundings, the safer they feel. The Tabloid Press are the written equivalent of that clique. With every headline what matters more than it's veracity is how excruciating the pun in it is. Headlines were never meant to inform, if they did they were thought of as failures. My  choice of news in my parents house was like their choice for my schooling, it came from the dunces corner and it delighted in it's own opacity towards and about itself. 

  I don't know how I coped with wanting more of something that I had to imagine what it was in the first place, when I could not see what I wanted around me. My wanting always brought me into ritual disagreements with dad, where because he paid for everything in the house then, however differently the world thought. he was always right. His money being the only money we were meant to acknowledge made him right. There was no point in inferring that he might be wrong or saying that his way of skewing the facts was 'the love of money' via how information was seen. He dismissed The Bible, where the phrase 'the love of money is the root of evil' comes from, as much as he dismissed everything he did not want to know about, because for him how he bought and owned anything he wanted trumped everything outside of him, excluding the weak jokes that daily formed the headlines in the tabloid press.

  Fast forward over forty years and I know what the tabloid press is good for, starter material for lighting fires with. But to reverse back to when I was struggling to know better. When I first read 'Future Shock' I was slow to realise that I might in some way live out what the book predicted. The back story in the book was how the technology of the industrial revolution simplified and replaced a lot of hard physical labour that if it was poorly paid at least gave the people that performed it a life, even if it was a hard life, with less choice than it promised to offer.

  The factory my dad worked in closed when I was a teenager. It had been at it's most fully developed sixty years earlier, during WW1. Before the hangars for air planes were built and air flight was popular it was the largest covered space in Europe, perhaps the world. It was built before the era of electricity being delivered everywhere, so it had tall windows for the space inside to be lit by, underneath high ceilings. The acoustics of the building when all the machines in it were working must have been appalling. The height of the building, coupled with it's proximity to the workers houses, made it so imposing a structure that even when it was useless, and nothing was happening inside, the local reaction to it as building was to feel frozen by it. 

  If there were buildings in other places in the world that were white elephants, useless gifts to the populations they were meant to serve, then such buildings were at least decorative, palaces, cathedrals and other designs of buildings that combined awe and wealth, then the locals could convert the buildings into museums for tourists to visit. This structure was a living example of future shock, a past that was clearly redundant in the present, where nobody could say so. Back when it was first closed the explanation for it's closure was that the latest attempt to make the space produce something where there was a clear profit from what the space produced, thus justifying it in terms of profit and loss, had been a financial failure. It was at least the third, and maybe the fifth, financial and industrial major relaunch in ten years. 

  What Toffler was writing about was happening around us, we were part of rustbelt England. As long as the way it was described flattered the locals and was written up in terms of the latest relaunch, as THE WAY FORWARD, then it seemed rude and lacking in deference to point out the previous failed relaunches, as rude as pointing out to a woman who thought she was attractive the obviousness of her latest adventures in plastic surgery.

  From memory what Toffler wrote was not party-political in the sense of 'left' and 'right'. He was  neither anti-union or pro-union, anti-boss or pro-boss. But he observed how the newer the technology was the more it would be inherently pro-boss, because it saved more physical labour and cut into, and divided, the cohesive-ness of what remained of work force. The replacement for my dads space in space in the factory in which he changed roles many time was going to be an empty space, a ghost because the machines he and hundreds of other labourers once worked were going to be removed,

  What was I going to do, with no footsteps to follow except to the dole office? Nothing to 'inherit', no place of work to continue to be part of, even if as tradition went, such a tradition was invented? Everyone I might have asked avoided that question. They knew that the money that once flowed through the town because the factory my father worked was producing something, even at a loss, was going to flow a different direction in future. There was no obvious means of attracting the old money back.      

  My generation was the generation who became useless with their hands, as technology and the money with which to be skilled was withheld made them idle. I became subservient to whoever thought the least of youth in general, as long, as governments paid them as bosses to make youths like me appear to be useful, whilst making sure we became useless and lost all confidence in ourselves. Anyone who lacks confidence can be manipulated into the imitation of being useful, and conmen and manipulative people like people who are half-useful, they can manipulate half-useful people for some secondary advantage those they manipulate don't understand.

  I remain unsure that Toffler meant the lesson from his book to be that bitter. But one of the qualities I value most now is the faith I have that I have the strength to outlive the bitterness and evasiveness of the world that I was brought up in, which I now recognise it with rueful hindsight. If any machine wants to replace me as a writer the way machinery replaced my father's job, then let it imitate my personal history of being half-educated and then displaced on the jobs market or replaced by technology. 

  Such a machine had better be ready to defend itself in the world, against the machine that will want to replace it, before the attempted takeover happens.

What Will We Be Extremists For?

On this date in 1963 Martin Luther King
wrote a letter from his prison cell
in Birmingham, Alabama.

He was responding to criticism aimed at him
from unnamed white church leaders who said
his peaceable campaign for colour blind parity
was 'untimely and unwise'.

The letter was called
'Letter From a Birmingham Jail',
and it is proof of how scripture,
as it says it is, was meant to be used
to provide constructive rebukes
when a people fall into error.

It is also a short history lecture. 

It is forty paragraphs long,
here is a link to the whole text,
here is a link to Dr King reading it out.
The gist of it is contained in one phrase.

'The question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be.
Will we be extremists for hate or love?'    

Triggers Seem To Be Everywhere Nowadays

Some are metaphorical, as in literature
which the young seem to need warnings
about what they encounter on the page,
as if reading were some risky activity
where words are weapons that have
to have safety catches put on them.

Other triggers are invisible,
and have been left hidden,
how well I remember my parents
used television as a child minder
and not knowing what I watched,
that I mistook for 'mature adult viewing'.

But the triggers that most need
a safety catch on them are those
on guns, in 'the land of the free'
where 'the right to bear arms'
is not an invite to roll up your sleeves
on sunny days, but the right,
backed by corporate gun sales advocates,
to replace the government when the citizen
wants to believe that gov't needs replacing.

However incompetent government gets
replacing it with gun based anarchy will solve nothing  

Some Rubbish Humour

And the wonder is that it is multi-lingual humour too.

 

The Point About 'The Myth Of Sisyphus'

is that Sisyphus was alone
with the gods of retribution
who so instructed him.

If he had a companion
then between them
they would have changed the story.

Folly, rebellion, and shared punishment
are so much better when they are planned 
or endured with a companion.

Part of the punishment of Sisyphus
was that he was made to suffer alone.
  

When Reading Is Dis/Believing

The trouble with A I is not just
that it consists of computers
that humans have built and programmed 
so that these new computers can repair
and further re-programme themselves,
so that they can process more data
than any human might conceive, 
troubling as that might be.

No, the trouble starts with the ownership
and application of these hyper-fast machines,
their licenses and regulation in public life,
where millions of citizens come to depend
on machines that create unemployment,
whilst catering for human ease.

Then there is the capacity
of these machines to rewrite history,
which human beings were just as apt at.
But they do it so slowly and leave behind
traces of the original in their reinvention
that a computer will not.

Anyone reading the computerised
reinvention of history would require
strong instincts indeed to know what
to dis/believe of what they read.  

Shock Proof?

One of the phrases I grew up with
that seems to have lost its lustre
was the slightly militaristic,
if not sadistic, 'A short sharp shock'.

It was employed to describe the actions
of any petty bully, boss or 'authority figure'
over others where the authority rhetorically felt
that they were put on this earth
to 'put other people in their place',
somewhere underneath them.

Has UK society so levelled down
that nobody cares what their place is?
Or are we all now so numb to shocks 
that all shock is now too blunt a tool
to have the effect on us it once did?

'Vote For Us And You Will Never Have To Vote Again'

In 1995 on Radio 4's 'From Our Own Correspondent'
I heard the curious phrase 'Vote for us and you will
never have to vote again'. For years I could not find out
who said it, the context, or even where the phrase
was said. Friends said that I had misheard the quote.
It was said by the figure throwing water over his
opponent here, Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946-2022).
A few seconds later in the same clip Zhirinovsky
would hurl the glass the water was in at his 
 opponent, Boris Nemtsov, as well.    

 

   

It was said in the 1995 Russian elections by
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the far right
Liberal Democrat party amid the Russian state
failing in so badly in so many areas of government
that the whole country felt safer with seeing 
Boris Yeltsin being drunk than if he was sober.    

These three stills are from the end of episode six 
of the splendid BBC series 'Trauma Zone; Russia
 1985-1999; what it felt like to live through 
the Collapse of Communism and Democracy.'.
A seven part BBC documentary created by
Adam Curtis. It was released in October 2022.
It can now be found on youtube and is best viewed
slowly, the accretion of all the details of disasters       
and corruption amid the chaos is quite mind bending.
The full quote runs 'Make one last effort, help us,
and you will never have to vote again. These will be
the last elections. The Last.' In a way Zhirinovsky 
was right, no Russian election since 1995 could be
said after that to be 'fair and honestly fought'. 
Thank Adam Curtis for restoring my memory.  

Artifice Of Intelligence

Sarcasm is the insult that likes to hide behind opacity.

 

A Lost Friendship Remembered

Expanded excerpt from Diary, 'Thursday 2nd April 2020. George and John arrived 11.30, I had hurriedly tidied the house and boiled the kettle just before they arrived. I did not really want them to visit, I was feeling weird because of how Covid was filling the news. When they arrived I should have asked them what they wanted to drink. I made them a brew of gunpowder tea, forgetting that in earlier contact they, well George, had specified coffee.

In the media there had been worrying stories, well more unsubstantiated rumours, of the police setting up road blocks on the roads out of Belfast where they stopped all 'unnecessary journeys' by sending the drivers home. The break out of Covid meant obeying multiplying numbers of different regulations to avoid other people where ever possible, and these new regulations were all 'for our own safety'. To get around the two of them potentially being sent back home in the car they two had a shopping list from me. They had been to Sainsburys to prove his journey was 'necessary', just in case they were stopped. £24 worth of shopping was not a lot. With hindsight I think George felt coerced into doing something helpful that he did not want to do when he got me the shopping. I was thankful for the four shopping bags of groceries that they brought in.    

Outside I had also lined up a bag of early rhubarb for them to take and some kindling and logs of wood for their open fire. I served tea and cake and we talked. George did what to him was his main reason for being there; he handed over to me his old fancy smartphone as a gift to me since he had got a new smartphone from John. George then went out and toured the garden, leaving John and I to take the backs of both old mobile phone and the new smartphone to try fit my old sim card in the new smart phone. My sim card was a larger size to the card that was meant to fit in the new 'smart phone'. We stopped. I was happy to shelve all further thought about the phone. Who was I going to ring anyway? I did not know why the gifting me his old phone was that important to George. He remained outside 'inspecting the garden'. I sensed that he was peeved and tense, but I could not fathom why. My brain was in a fog from the last few days news, but the fog was clear enough for me to know that asking him why he was tense was a bad idea. From experience I knew he was quite capable of being both unstoppably irrational and jealous. I had felt him being possessive towards me before and tried to keep my distance from his possessiveness whilst avoiding pointing out to him how transparently 'grabby' he was being. I did not want to think that he was trying to 'buy my loyalty' with the gift of the phone but the thought was inescapable.  

George and John packed the car and left 12.30. I felt alone and relieved with them leaving. I wanted to be alone to look back on the life I had forty years ago when I had youth, I had energy, I had choice even though I did not know what my choices consisted of, and I did not know myself by my limits as well as I do now.'.

I rarely spoke with John on his own. George did not give John much chance of that, but John was always civil towards me and had been of some help to me with a laptop I owned in the past. It mattered little if John said and wrote nothing to me ever again. But it felt different when from that day on, after nineteen years of us knowing each other on and off, George never spoke to me again. He left me with two mildly disparaging emails by which to remember him. I defended myself against the substance of his emails with quite reasonable replies, but to no effect.

For several years, when he knew I was home, he habitually rang me at around 7 pm and telling what had filled his day that day. I tried to make a presentation of the little that had happened to me in return, my days had less to share in them than his did. He always got maximum drama out of what he experienced, and made me seem like a wallflower. At first when he did not ring me up to talk through 'The Archers' of an evening it seemed both odd and a relief. I could get back to my favourite radio soap opera, rather dull as it became whilst it was recorded under Covid isolation conditions. As time stretched out, so the Covid crises extended, and so did George's silence. I let the time and silence expand. I did not start it and I felt that whatever my mistakes had been with the visit, they should be easy enough to forgive given the grander scale of the weirdness that was treading the world via Covid regulations which made people frantic to turn the radio off when the news came on.   

I reflected on how George and I first met, nineteen years earlier. He and I had both spent the afternoon in the then recently opened 'gay sauna', a first for Belfast, in 2001. As we walked away from the building that Sunday afternoon so we talked together since we were walking in the same direction. I  was walking towards one bus stop, he was walking towards another. We found that we both knew of people that had recently met each other in the hope of being friends, or something sustainable, and the evening had not gone as expected. His life partner was one of them. My life partner was the other, me and my life partner had been together for eight years at that point, and the emotional component was strong. It needed to be at times with me since I needed a firm human anchor to be tied to, even as I might go to places like 'the gay sauna' to have my sexual needs safely met. Nobody I knew saw anything wrong with this. After all heterosexual married men had been making discreet arrangements for sex outside their supposedly monogamous marriages, based on their personal wealth, for thousands of years. 

I was new to the idea of saunas, as, well, play spaces for male adults. In a previous life in a different city the play space, and area where gay men discovered that other men were gay, was in certain public toilets. I'd had many adventures in those places, some of them good, most of them rather forgettable, but for a few times the experiences were life-changing. The life changing experiences had taken me away from 'cottaging' as visiting these places was  known and became part of a wider process where I sought public acceptance as a gay man. Gay men, whether they were married to women or single, were often seen to be dubious characters because the understanding of their sexuality was shunned by heterosexual society which assumed to shut down what it was careless about comprehending. Thus 'cottaging', sex in public toilets became the sexual outlet for gay men because they were 'closeted' by a heterosexual society, and the closeting-their identity being hidden or ignored-reinforced the anonymity of the sex they chose. 

I was thankful that in the times of the life-changing experiences there were several high profile actors and musicians who had 'come out' as gay, Ian McKellen among them. Their stance-that 'being out [of the closet]' made them more whole as human beings and better actors etc had improved public perceptions of homosexuality.

But to fast-forward to when I first met George, when I attempted to be a friend to him. He taught me a lot that my life partner shrank from telling me. I was glad that I'd found my own way of finding out without my partner's help, it took some pressure off the relationship. When I first met George I had been volunteering on the gay helpline in Belfast for six years, I thought I knew most of what I needed to know because I had the talent sufficient to make the callers who rang the service feel less alone and keep them up to date with information about where there was to go to meet other gay men socially-the pubs, clubs, and the very few non-alcohol based meet-ups that there were.

George was an experienced attendee of saunas. He had gone to saunas in Manchester and other cities across the midlands of England when he lived in Manchester. He knew the etiquette for how to get on in these places, the hierarchy of how people there presented themselves, the labels they used, and what those present expected of others. My life partner was somewhat older than me and had missed all that. George was roughly the same age as me and showed me how to adapt in situations I had never adapted in before. 

The deal between us seemed simple enough. It would sound grandiose for me to say that you have to be the change you want to see in the world, so I am not saying that. But I did want to show George the consistency of some sort of friend because I knew that firm friendship was difficult to find in the gay milieu, arguments where feuds happened often and seemingly randomly. In return he would be some sort of guide to the areas of 'the modern gay life' that so far I had missed without realising that they might have something to show me that I would be better for knowing.

I have resisted describing George, he was six foot two, or three, tall, weighed something under twenty stone, and often said that he was 'trying to lose weight'. He rarely changed in what he said and what he weighed. Only when he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes did have to change. He had to stop smoking and be more selective about what he ate, and even there he would play hide and seek with himself, or with John, over what he said ate and what he actually ate. He spoke with a soft County Antrim brogue and used a lot of expressions local to where he grew up, but he always spoke them too fast for me to catch the expression and write it down. He considered himself to be alpha male/'a top' socially where as I felt that social hierarchies always depended on something contrary to the expression of them for the hierarchies to continue. He kept his beard and hair short, when his beard turned grey he shaved it off. I am five foot ten tall, twelve stone plus and I kept my beard long even when it thinned and went grey, whilst keeping my greying hair cropped short. 

I only ever lived at one address in all the time I knew him, deep in rural County Down, Northern Ireland. He and John rented whilst claiming state benefits at at least five different addresses in Belfast, minimum, and they probably rented at several more addresses that I have forgotten. For him the first problem was often that if the house was what he wanted then the rent was close to his limit, financially. But then he would find fault with the landlord-either that they were mean with money or not-so-quietly homophobic. It did not take much to make him want to move, or fall out with places that up till recently had been supportive of him. In the last place he lived that I knew of his landlord was gay so there was no homophobia there, but equally his gay landlord could be an inconsistent and contrary character. I maintained with him that the key to a successful long term tenancy is being able to trust the landlord even as you live at a distance from him, that he (it usually will be a he) will do what is right by the property and you.  

To live anywhere even half comfortably George would have to be worn down to settle into the place, to end his restlessness. George and I both became teenagers in the 1970s, we both grew up in working class homes where our mental health as we grew up became a problem to our families. We both experienced that strange limbo when what was wrong got attributed solely to us, but what was wrong was between every member of the family. To confuse matters further the label applied solely to us was a non-technical term that was euphemistic at best, where the experts kept the long words, the technical terms, to themselves. So we were both labelled and for both of us the label was deceptive and inaccurate, sometimes malignly so. Second to last we were both raised on values of thrift which were more short term than they were admitted to be. Finally as adults we had to cope with the dishonest amnesia, often combined with a working class homophobia, among our relatives that we had ever been labelled and 'been difficult' when we were younger. I don't know now what acronym or mental health term I might apply to myself now. But I certainly know that if George ever found the mental health label that fitted his symptoms then he would have fought the acceptance of the label as if it were the plague, until he saw some wider gain to him in accepting it.

He once tried a course of therapy at a place where I thought he might feel okay, the donations they expected were 'voluntary'. He would have felt safe if he gave them little. But he attended the sessions intermittently and terminated the course well before it was meant to end. He decided that whilst the issue he went to them with was real enough, he wanted to preserve the issue, undealt with, as another convincing bargaining chip for when he next had to renew his claim for state benefits, including housing benefit.  

It wish I could resist more firmly saying plainly that he was bipolar, or resist writing about how he told me how he got medication for being bipolar every month from his doctor, but he refused to to take it. I admit here that his insistence on giving me a smart phone and no help with how to use it, was another of his bipolar outbursts.

I could take the outbursts on subjects where we had something in common, the subject allowed us to differ and respect each others' differences. But on the subject of mobile phones we had nothing in common. 

My first mobile phone was an ordinary Nokia mobile phone with a pay-as-you-go virgin sim card in it. I used it very little. I kept it charged for travel purposes mostly and for telling George where I was when I was on the bus on my way to see him in Belfast to see him. Any serious data processing I kept for my laptop. I could send text messages but I had to remember how to each time I did it. I sent messages that infrequently. If that was over compartmentalising everything then it was also keeping my communications simple, and as direct as possible.

George eventually proved right to try to get me interested in a new phone, but the way he went about it remained irredeemably clumsy and at the time I went through the change of phone I thought he was somehow jinxing me from afar. With the the first lockdown, and life on my own, the silence from George meant that the Nokia phone never rang and I had no cause to ring anyone. The following August I used it for the first time in months when I went abroad to see friends. That was when I got a message from virgin to tell me to request a new sim card as the one in the Nokia was about to expire. I managed to send the message and get them to send the sim card to my home address, whilst I was abroad. Then the phone stopped working. When the new card was sent out to my home address I got it sent to where I was, abroad. If the phone seemed not to work then I trusted that the lack of sim card was the reason why it was not working. But when I put the new sim card in the Nokia phone it still did not work. I could not work it out, and being on holiday and not needing the phone I set it aside to deal with the matter at home, much later. 

Back home it became clear that the old Nokia phone had chosen the time of the change over from the old sim card to the new sim card to pack up altogether. Who would have thought such timing was likely? My adventures with setting up the smartphone to suit me took several odd turns before I simplified it all. The best thing I did to get myself better informed was go to a pawn shop where they sold reconditioned smart phones and get the sales assistant to explain to me what was smart about smartphones, and why some of the smartphones on display in the shop cost more than others. Supported functions was the short answer-the more functions the phone had that were supported remotely by the manufacturer the later generation the phone was, and the more the phone should cost. 

With that explanation everything became easy to understand, the less a smartphone's functions were supported by the manufacturer the nearer the phone got to being a large sized old Nokia and the cheaper it was. Now if I had sat down with John and he had explained all that to me, instead of George behaving like a bull in a china shop.....  But the break between us had to come sometime, and more friendships were to sever after the first wave of Covid, until it became quite easy for me to live at home and for the land line to not ring for days on end, and for me to not hear a live voice from another person address me for a week at a time. 

Not even the live voice of some beleaguered telesales worker for whom English is their third language, and they are trying to make a living by speaking over the noise around them to make me want to buy something reciting a script from a screen which was politely over-familiar with me.

Picture Set Of The Month - April - Guitar Design

English graphic designer Storm Thorgerson
died ten years ago this month.

 

His album cover designs were always distinctive
because he nearly always photographed on location.

 

His cover art must have been used for
rolling out more spliffs (vital for hearing the music)
than anyone could imagine.

Towards the end of his working life
his work rate for creating record covers
slowed down, and most revolved around
Pink Floyd remasters/reissues.  

His last work seems to have been
these guitar designs. Here is his website,
here are his most celebrated album covers.