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What I did in my holidays, by bowlingatvinny, aged 624.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Travel. Culture. National ‘type’ or character or that thing about how a place feels. Rich but loaded territory. I stumble over it here and waft airily through memories following a break in France and Spain, foolishly crossing over into stuff which we may have to label judgement; knowing it’s not just ludicrous but probably downright wrong to make comparisons between places. It is, however, bloody tempting to try to capture some sense of what was wonderful – what we loved most.

Hey look I’m still cruising down the slope back into the Valley of the Working. Having recently nosed through the Vallée d’Aspe and then gawped at the Pyrenees from both sides, I remain 70-30 (percentage-wise) in the grip of Post Hols Daze-Virus Effort. And I have no raging urge to deny the affliction by deigning to re-enter normal life. Why should I, when so recently we were on Penä Oroel in the balmy heat watching some Aragonese bloke launch a paraglider? Into thermals us West-Walians would poetically-enthusiastically describe as liftin’ with vultures, mun? Why would the everyday exclude or even intrude on that? No, let’s loiter in that memory, please, have tâpas with it and drain the slowest of slow coffees. Until finally we click over into school pick-ups and yaknow, rain.

Yup we went from Wales to France and Spain, flying Stansted-Biarritz and picking up a car to skirt, drift and boot through the mountains to Jaca, Aragon. Critically, we could stay with friends in a tiny hamlet where climbers wipe before entering Los Pirineos; both on a financial level and in terms of accessing local cultural/geographical highlights this helped. In fact it simply made it possible.

Emerging from the likeably tiddly airport at Biarritz, more than faintly disoriented by the cack-handed Megane somebody foolishly hired me, we GET AWAY remarkably. Admittedly I’m looking for the wrong mirror/wrong life-endangering juggernaut but we are unmistakably away and into the drive – into our holiday.

We see some French roads – some Basque roads – and trees and villages. We look at the strangely conflicted words on the signs and fail (consistently) to say half of them. Whilst not quite meandering we draw in some of the local stuff – sweetcorn, mainly – and the colour red and the colour white. And tiles. Then poplars being sentries but maybe the sort that welcome rather than guard. We get in to that French Basque zone, gently… but sure… like tourists. Wondering how San Sebastian can be the same place as Donostia summink-or-other? Maybe searching for some dubious link between Basque and Welsh but ultimately leaving that one be. And just looking.

The flight had been okay. Ryan Air. Meaning a slightly edgy mob of wannabe guitar players, surfers and youngish families, all pretty unashamedly shedding the usual courtesies (here I do mean the passengers more than the staff, who were fine) and unzipping that myth about Brits queuing beautifully. The head stewardbloke – who may in truth have been directing the frenetic activity around him from a position of some Eckle(s)burgian insight – was actually genuinely good value as local prompter and wit, as well as accommodating er …host.

However the incoming flight had been slightly late, meaning an almost worryingly quick turnaround – raising certain perfectly legitimate questions. Like would the pilot need a drink? Or a kip? Would they make sure they had air-in-the-tyres/diesel in the tank/a shammy leather handy to wipe the driver’s window? We were all thinking this, or the aerial equivalent, I know: not just little old ahem plane-phobic me.

No the flight was fine but I’m kindof with Dennis Bergkamp on this. And soon enough, as our drive progressed (and my palms aired) there came to pass a seamless and vacation-appropriate gradation into ease. Bidache; Navarrenx; Oloron-Sainte-Marie. The visual momentum built as we went from countryside with a whiff of the special, to full-on gobsmacking, as we slid, in fact, into the Vallee d’Aspe. Now ’twas proper rip-roaring glacial scenery and proper mountains seen very close up, from the laughably tight valley floor. A brief, syrupy downpour and then tunnels into the guts of all this rock; into Spain.

We’d slithered south-easterly across France and now we plunged north-south just the few tens of kilometres to Jaca, through the area allegedly dotted with ski-resorts. (They are there – around Candanchu – but they simply weren’t on the mission schedule.) With the east-west grain of the Pyrenees at our backs as we ploughed on, we began to recognise gaps or drops into sleeping but boulder-strewn streams and the shoulders of some of the peaks; all this hauled or sprung from the memories of our previous visit, three years ago. We knew something of this place, ‘course we did. And the names now… Sabinanigo, Huesca, Castiello de Jaca. Familiar but still exotic.

About three hours all told to get from Biarritz to our stony, amiably street-dog-friendly village. Clunk the doors and look at the mountains – the foothills actually – Los Pirineos now being a few klicks to our north. Feel the hard, Spanish sun; the heat. A quick shuftie at the map confirms we’re at about Snowdon-height, looking up to between six and seven thousand feet; Snowdon times two, pretty much. Visau’/Bisaurin away and left, Monte Perdido maybe an hour going right. Hikes immediately – and I do mean immediately – available…

Wow. Must walk up there later – remember that next ridge? We walked it. That do-able on a mountain-bike?

(Answer – no, not for me – I tried it. Constant slippage or wheelies or punishing, pointless effort in near enough 90 degrees. My fitness is decent but we just skated on the gravel, on the dust. To be fair it was crazy steep.)

There followed days of exploring and rediscovering. Trudging then latterly floating up Penä Oroel , part shady yomp, part dreamy alpine meadow, concluding with stunning open views which genuinely (in that inadequate phrase) stirred the soul. Or driving with relentless purpose to blissfully little-known pools – pozas – to launch into deep pockets of sometimes shockingly refreshing mountain water. Then perhaps most memorably of all, trekking the bulk of a day, through, over and onto retreating snowbanks around 6,000 feet, faithfully following cairns in the absence of signage or people, to scale Pico d’Aspe. Looking down on France and the universe and (real) chamois(es?) flitting over the snow.

Mix in a dollop of ice-cream or fried squid in the town (Jaca), twenty minutes of Real Sociedad on the telly in the sports bar, plus a mowsie round the cave-cathedral that is San Juan de la Penä… and there you have it – or a flavour of it. Wonderful things and daft things. Like my daughter blowing all her holiday money on riding at Caballos el Pesebre, where instead of Pembrokeshire Nags there were sub-Arabian beauties. Where she cantered round (almost absurdly but beaming) beneath Los brooding but beautiful Pirineos. And I just sat and watched and read further into Homage to Catalonia!

I can’t pretend we engaged deeply with either the local social or political milieu. I am aware, for example, of the disaster that is youth unemployment in Spain and have views on that. I know that dangerous wee bit about the Spanish Civil War and have some relevant history; some; enough maybe to feel the nearness of Franco and hear the enduring bitterness towards the Guardia Civil. But we were tourists, staying with a family of (fluent Spanish-speaking) non-natives. So what was it, exactly, that made me fall for Spain?

The Pyrenees I find stunning and evocative. I failed, I admit, to entirely separate the view from the heroic defiance, the anarchistic militancy and indeed the sacrifice of the population (as was?) Ground like this is going to foster pride and passion and maybe a little wildness and given the essential local connection between folks and earth through time it makes sense that something preciously approaching a worker’s province could emerge here. I am very close to writing that you can still see that – feel it – the land simply seems worth fighting for.

In the 1930’s a truly remarkable revolutionary fire swept through much of Spain and continued to flicker defiantly here, in the forests and the farmsteads. Partly, no doubt, because the geography is with the rebel, the guerrilla, not the government. Partly, I like to think, because the people are big enough, generous enough to battle in order to share. Standing on a peak in Aragon, looking at a land that could not be mastered – not that gorge, not that Alpine slope! – I got sucked into all that… romance.

It’s a leap from here/there to the following – that I prefer Spain to France – but I will make it, without, on this occasion accounting for the frisson around the subtext. I’ll simply own up to the preference for (imagined) 20th century Spanish defiance over (imagined) French capitulation; that should do it.

There’s a certain deep richness to rural northern Spain which blows me away. Kindof uniquely. There is, in Los Pirineos, this endless slew of mountains, a splendid, inviolable peace; no doubt related to – arising from? – the scope, the scale of the view, the physical realities. But there is something else, beyond, beneath.

Even allowing for the fact that I was re-reading Homage to Catalonia at the time of our visit and am therefore likely charged with Engaged Lefty Wistfulness, I will dare to suggest that culture, politics, the mix of daily grind and grand philosophical breach – of war, of war, in fact! – breathes into this. In the wonderful, silent greenness of the slopes and the ochre plain I found something very rich and hearty and intoxicating. And though on returning to the French side I was much taken with St Jean de Luz in particular – Spain does it for me.

marathon boy

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

who were we running for or from

when we could run?

who?

in our endless unstockinged feet

with that endless dizzy lope towards the tape –

the tape that drew us and wrapped us like mummies.

who ran alongside?

was it a lifelong friend who carried us through

their heart transporting ours?

or a stranger – or twenty thousand – who twinkled their encouragement?

i can’t remember.

there was the race –

my pop PB-ed, i think

but unconfirmed.

then, before we know it,

tightly, the pull-string

on the rucksack of my heart

is tugged.

and i think

i think a cheer goes up.

i can’t remember.

Stand Down Margaret.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

So she finally did step down from that jewel-encrusted carriage; her head dizzy with accolades, with glorious confusion, the baying crowd perceived as purring kittens to her leonine, English majesty. She descended smoothly, unaided, to some lavender field – it should be stiff with barley? – in that singing niche of her memory that for her, forever, might be if not Ingerland, then Grantham. And as she walks, from that shop, from that street, into the butter-cupped facsimile of that rural idyll, the parting crops do then draw up to attention… and the birds stop… and the limp sun stills above the willow. Because (she thinks, or somebody thinks) something major has happened.

And maybe it has – unless I dreamed it? Maybe there was an event as well as a death. Maybe we have to concede that? And then… in what way do we rejoice?

A rake of us – a simmering multitude with every bit as much gumption and fight and ‘conviction’ as she – many of us recoil from both that faux English idyll and the idolatry, the (in our view) slightly weird, slightly perverse adulation for this woman. A woman we link to some blanched – or maybe that should be scorched? – Englishness. A brutalist and therefore hugely uncultured (opposite of) outlook. A leadenness too; dull and grey and introspective in the worst of ways – bigoted, actually – reeking memorably of contempt for the most fundamental human rights in say… South Africa, as though Apartheid itself was some acceptable province of this Way We Were nation. (Mrs Thatcher, remember, led when it came to propping up the dying racist regime in the pre-rainbow nation. Should we celebrate the memory of that, I wonder?)

Even those of us who happen to be blokes, who think it was kindof great that a woman got to be PM are denied the possibility of respecting this woman. Most of us knew already, pre the coiffured barnet, accent and manner that Thatcher’s obvious bitterness, that vile and one-dimensional and utterly hypocritical (no apology for labouring this one!) ‘conviction’ against the trackie-wearing classes, The Immigrants and The Homosexuals would make many of us squirm with shame or rage. The fact that she blew a historic opportunity for Britwomankind by being an utter and malevolent donkey in the role of PM has almost passed us by, such was the magnitude of her dislocating pomp.

She was sexless and yet quasi-regal, love-fodder for the dumb fawners and the prejudiced. The Mail invented her surely – she must have been pressed out of a centre-page special entitled Ideal Dictators? I can’t explain her any other way. The thought of her (and I know it ain’t jus’ me because we’ve been talking, right?) simply does my head in.

She got at us personally, I suppose, one way or another. In my case, we were yeh… close. Having been born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life in Grimsby, I moved to London to work as a photographer’s assistant in what is atmospherically describable as The Thatcher Era. I had no money and shared a room in a rundown, terraced housing association gaff with one of my brothers. Hilgrove Road. It was great yet completely crappy in a way that we didn’t mind but that made parental visits unthinkable. Stepping outside the door though and walking the couple of hundred yards up to Swiss Cottage was a revelation to this particular smalltown boy. I had never really seen posh motors – Porsches, Jaguars, Rolls Royces – down here it was crawling with them. How did that work?

Now I know this car thing may not stand up as anything other than duff anecdotal opinion but it had real meaning for me, it was true – it became truer, in fact – that there was money here in a way that had never remotely been suggested Up North. Moreover as this admittedly crass osmosis of the divisive character of Elite Southness became better enriched by my experience/observation, so my political and I think philosophical oeuvre cobbled itself together; directed (if cobbling can be directed?) by Thatcherism. It became obvious that the most humungously cynical fix was going on; put simply, that the Tories were fixing it for The South. Because it didn’t matter in terms of votes or constituencies or voices how much mithering The North got up to… the South, under Thatcher won out. A massive and indeed overwhelming number of safe Tory seats in the London area effectively farted in the face of the rest.

We all knew that was what was going on. Politicking of the rawest and most unsophisticated kind. Parliament entrapped. Toffs and Tories flicking a superior brand of the V’s, whilst busloads of Home Counties-returning coppers flashed their wage packets at incandescent miners. It was deeply ugly; a legacy I was reminded of last night when a friend, having howled when the subject turned to a possible State Funeral, suggested a burial more appropriate, in her view.

Sling the old witch down a fackin’ mine-shaft. (And yes, for the record, my friend is an Essex girl. And yes, she would be right in wanting me to point out that I AM AWARE poverty and discrimination existed in the South too during this period but I stand by my identification of a very real North-South divide – construct or function though that may have been of a regional and possibly parochial standpoint. And she is with me and I am with her on the notion that Thatcher quite deliberately set us against each other… and incidentally, what does that remind you of?)

Recently (and here I’m not speaking of any reactions to the death – I’m avoiding media on the subject pretty entirely) there appears a rather sickening fashion for appreciating Mrs T’s determination and commitment to things she believed in. I’m not having that. Why credit the prejudices, the immoralities in fact, of a world leader in bulldozing folks apart? My most crucially politically-formative years were spent in a great city-state which barely acknowledged the existence of Another Country out there. Or more exactly knew all about it but didn’t give a toss. Because an allegedly strong woman was making allegedly tough decisions. I came to see her then and over time as a shrill weakling; a brittle, thin-blooded creature who plastered on thick the slap of bravery and ‘conviction’. I never believed a word – and I still don’t.

Bute Park Divers.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I walked that millennium way

My hurry a commonplace in the eye of the border

And the riverbank

My breath in unison with the joggers and the students,

The bud-killing cold some amber glory

But the stands as silent as the fish.

The whistle of that city bustle no doubt stilled

After the game that swallowed him

For no man in its dream of Jonah or of Jaws

Drunk well on its remembering.

I bounced on,

Drawn to the bridges.

The flush of youth is here

Craning for trout, or bikes, or signs

The students in their lycra shoals

Miked up to saccharoidal bliss,

Found within their luminous buzz.

Who is lost amongst the cityfolks?

Distracted, scarfless in the permafrost.

Is it cold, cold in there

Where the tiddlers dream who won?

Not traipsing off to Ely or to Eden

By foot or boozy mini-cab

I flank the water.

I wasn’t close – and yet I was.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Because some dumb people still aren’t getting it…

bowlingatvincent's avatarbowlingatvincent

Encouragingly, this sport thing won’t go away. As both a political argument and a philosophic one it’s stayed present because like some shirt hoisted into a euphorically-stacked crowd, it draws loads of us. Our instincts kick in around it. Essentially, we’ll grab a hold, thank you very much and we’ll pull as hard as we need to establish our part – our ownership maybes.

Young and old, man and woman. Think of those around you, think of the things that animate them, that light them up with either joy or fury or the most hilarious disproportion; probably sport. The lines blurring magically over whom, exactly, is taking part; everything coalescing around some need to play or join or represent.

I know not everyone gets it. (Shame.) At a time when we as a nation have greater need than ever for obesity-reducing running about the place, we can easily side-step fears…

View original post 1,104 more words

Catch.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

That soft sphere clasped in her blind ‘basket’

Those four eyes handling.

The adrenalin shaking out its fur.

She goes again.

Through that matrix of fraught failure,

Dry-lipped and unexpressing

This little girl is nearly smiling.

Again.

Airborne – she and the tiny earth together

Palmed out towards the radar

Of her own blurred universe.

She grabs; it falls.

By now the room is watching.

Again – a hopeful exhortation

From Dan and Jack and Rhodri bach –

Again.

They know this is not rocket science,

They know that it’s not luck

That coaxes or coordinates such things.

But I’m the coach. Not pre-disposed I hope

To seek for epic confirmations, lightning bolts.

A gentle word.

With barely a flicker, she raises hands.

We lend our focus and the ball… lands.

Right over Mid-off.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 3 Comments

Under a stony sky on that scuffed pitch

Flecked with the memory of hail

Where Elin still plays horses in Specsaver glasses

And the goal-line technology confounds,

My manly fingers dried out like winter veg

The games, despite the cold, went great.

The warm-up might have lasted years – perhaps it did?

Owain never grew above four feet.

But rarely has a test in Llandissilio been so… passed.

He bossed the thing and flailed that bat

Sword-like and reckless through the chilled swathe

Outside off-stump,

His cheeks flushed, hands numb.

I clapped and stamped and ooohed and aahed

With heart. To keep them happy – to keep me warm.

Calibrating this or that, according to the manual.

So cherish and celebrate this brilliant catch or stop,

The moment of some daft, uplifting grace or bouncing joy

For this or that non-sporty girl or boy.

A spiteful grab, mind, then mild rebellion

As, unsubtly, the littl’uns shirk their fielding job.

Relax. The focus comes and goes when you are eight.

And as it does, where else to look but up?

Distracted by some floating, fleeting presence

I might, in fact, forgive.

From Mid-off comes the call,

Sky-punchingly possessive. Barcud Goch! Barcud Goch!

I drop the ball.

I think we can share this, fellahs?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

So Tsonga attempts a fairly unconvincing drop-shot carrying all the threat of a handbag assault by Michael Gove. Meaning it was lame and self-defeatingly unfocussed. Murray responds in a kindof Baconesque blur somewhere between Screaming Pope and Vengeful Jock Upstart – he did paint that, didn’t he? – featuring discernible, co-ordinated, near sadistically-expressed brilliance. Meaning a gathering of the apologetic ball into some Caledonian vortex before the suspiciously automatic catapulting of said furry sphere back at the central body mass of the now fearfully star-jumping French hulk. It hits him, venomously, deep into his bollocks. Cue Blues squirming, Pinks giggling.

That sickeningly sinking feeling. That Oh My God I Really Might Puke and Parp 3 lbs of Angel Delight-consistency Shite Out At The Same Time feeling. Cruelly familiar to every male member(?) of the population over the age of about two days but mysteriously absent from female experience. Weirdly funny right then to all but he, the recipient of that extravagantly piquant instant.

Tsonga really copped one hardcore style and he may even as I write be using that as part of his response to the queue of journalists wanting to ask that second question (about how his Todger feels) an acceptable period after Q 1 – the one, obviously, about how HE feels. (Because they’re separate, presumably?)

But I may be being flippant in a moment of alleged National Triumph. This being after all the first time since that prehistoric American (Fred Perry) in his Mod T-shirts dun so-o gud that a Brit… dun so gud. If I may though, I would like to proffer in a sense of keen – remarkably, vividly, ashen-faced-with-(k)nobs-on keen – brotherhood, two remembrances which er… resonate clangiferously in this seminal moment.

Was leaning over a rail fence aged about four when a deceptively doe-eyed but actually savage steed casually leant through and bit/plucked inquisitively at my nether regions. Think only the magnificent heaviness of my sixties-era cotton footie shorts prevented Emlyn Hughes-like vocal rearrangement. Blessedly, there are no scars RT-able and Oh Yeh Baybee the wedding tackle remains verifiably intact. Had more than one other goolaciously ghoulish event – including the obligatory winkie-in-zip rite of passage – but only one rivals the Tsonga Oof.

Football. Caught one right in the knackers having spun round to counter an incoming challenge from some early-shaving donkey from Chesterfield. He hoofed it in the manner characteristic of a cerebrally-challenged No 5  – soundly at Row Z –despite the fact we were unthreateningly mid-pitch. Meaning he really did hoof it. I lay there pretending to be unconscious for about ten minutes whilst the tears coiled behind flickering lids and the ache in my testicles persists 40 plus years after the event. So, Monsieur Tsonga I/we do understand. It happens to us blokes.

Whether this ball-on-ball incident conspired against the (surprisingly?) popular Frenchman today, who knows? Murray for me was tougher, more durable, closer to absolutely elite level tennis more often – though often the standard was good. Expect many though, to settle for praising the Scot’s cahunas.

Pray for petrol?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The things that really get our goat tell us (or otherfolks?) a lot about where we’re at as people, right? As ‘individuals’. They give stuff away. Like looking your fellow in the eye when you talk to them whilst simultaneously trying to tell the minimum amount of the truth – or an outright lie I suppose – they represent a tactical error, a cheap submission of possession. So I should probably be somewhat circumspect before blazing into some further Vinnydiatribe about well… anything. But life would be less fun, eh, if purveyors of colour and opinion such as my good self let too much restraint and consideration get in the way of a good rant? Rants can be okay – both entertaining and cleansing even – if they manouevre or lurch accidentally into the lush territory of comment; real comment, where spite and spittle and punkydelic revelation bridle against dumbstuff. So, eyes a-swivel… here goes…

Let’s start as so often with the abstract; the felt. There is a direct correlation between my feelings for and about my Outlaws (which are mixed), their adherence to the gospel according to the Daily Mail and the panic buying of petrol. And by surreal but clearly imagined extension the demonization of single mums/chavs/gays/blacks/Asians/everyone who has not the fortune to be starchily anglo-saxon with-a-little money invested, is further enwrapped, infuriatingly, into this blue-rinsed(?) bundle. Meaning the wasps’ nest that is currently and indeed typically my head responds with a kind of spontaneous fury to linkages between What The Mail Thinks – or its obvious but sometimes unsaid manifesto – and what then actually happens in the wider world. Although – forgive my anarcho-pedantry here but I am loathe to view this particular landscape as in any sense wide – it’s surely arse-clinchingly narrow but let’s move on. It is, therefore often the machinations of the sub-Middle Class Right that get my goat.

The comb-over racists; the instant coffee-slurping homophobes; the blandly bitter; the church-goingly devilish, Jammy Dodger-toting entrenched. With their silver cars and silver spoons. Their white sugar. Their propensity to sound so one-dimensionally thoughtless whilst in Twenty Eight Second Deep Political Conversation Mode that you wonder if they might implode like some un-gay fairy at the culmination of their most killing observation that everything is because “All these people are getting all these things and we’re paying ferit!” Yup; luv them.

So the panic buying of petrol – which I don’t of course entirely blame on The Mail – has troubled me. In terms of the demographic of the slavvering topper-uppers it might be interesting to see who these folks are – even who they think they are? – but sadly anthropologists are otherwise engaged in (relatively?) lucrative projects in Dubai or Cambodia, I suspect. Allegedly, much of England – you poor poor loves – has been standstilled by these decently law-abiding and Minister-attentive folk. Only a heroic few have resorted to battling on the forecourt in defence of their honour and their right to dismember the opportunity of other, less aggressively responsible souls. Should their physical condition allow it – ie. if Gaviscon/Werthers levels have been sufficiently respected, these Defenders Of The Right To Get Absolutely Mental have launched themselves from their Renault Clios in lion-hearted response to some other’s hands upon the precious nozzle. I picture them, rolling around in the blotted sands of the forecourt; legs thrashing the unleaded air, flat caps awry, brogues still immaculately tanned but twitching out, violently, the death-throes of Moral Rectitude. For the good of this great nation; for the civilised world; for Biddy Baxter and Douglas Barder and yes! David Beckham. Then dusting down and finding that bloody Tesco Clubcard.

There is no strike, incidentally. And if there was all the Great Powers know/knew that a week’s notice had to be given, begging questions about the realness of any emergency. (In fact, probably wee-weeing all over any such notions at all.) Interestingly or not, fairly compelling cases have been made for this whole farrago of clunk-clicked politically-motivated or simply inept ‘statements’ being a sharp little number from the government to help swiftly massage income up at a time when unhelpful figures might bundle economic commentators into using words like Double Dip Recession (and stuff). Conspiracy Theory or Truth? As always the twitter/internet beast seethes with contradictory passions but queues down the road have made a comparative irrelevance of such unpatriotic sideshows.

Perception is nine tenths of the law. People have been led to believe those commie lorry drivers (who spend surely too much time in French travel-stops talking to their unwashed comrades?) are about to stitch us all up; best get our retaliation in first. The top man himself has even suggested it might be prudent to stock up. The paper says The End Is Nigh – right there, on page 1, 2 and 3, next to the stuff about George Wassuname and the other Scots peril. Salmon! No – Salmond! He’s a red an all! And now he IS trying to nick our petrol!! Best strike a blow for the family, for us, by filling right up; in the blurry understanding that this might even have the double benefit of denying some treble-chinned Jock or workshy other from dribbling 5 quid’s worth into his unroadworthy Escort. Why not? I’ve paid my taxes; bet they haven’t.

If I’m cruelly extrapolating or inventing well then so be it. Personal experience leads me to believe and to fear in this way. On the one hand I ooze faith in people; on the other their herdiness, their plodding dumbness and perhaps most offensively their selfishness is, to me, galling. How dare I? Well, having during the writing of this mal-focused reflection visited out of some honestly genuine – ie. diesel-deficient necessity – a fuel emporium in Haverfordwest, only to find it bereft of that syrupy elixir, the hackles are again rising. I am transported by the vogue for rage.

So don’t talk to me about pipelines or planning or tankers or truths; get me a club. For I am preparing, raging but prudently, for the next life, where karma ensures I now know that I fetch up on some snow-blown floe, icily bank-full of purpose, marching at some doe-eyed seal pup; a particular and hypnotically engaging one; wearing a flat cap and – admittedly bizarrely – brogues.

Dumb questions.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Don’t know about you but I hate feeling excluded from stuff; whether it be (literal) entry to something or exclusion through snobbery, for example. For now, if we stop to reflect on all manner of political discourse (please, do!) we may find pretty early some obstructive force, some veil through which we feel we may or should not peek.

On times this will feel just ‘right’, the presence of some justifiable and even necessary filter, through which we have to earn passage, through understanding. Because we need to feel confident of a certain level of intellectual competence in Subject A before we run with it, debate it, unconstruct it. So essentially we fore-arm ourselves, against asking dumb questions, often by turning sheepishly(?) away from those things we ‘don’t know enough about’. Though I am guilty of it, I hate that.

My suspicion is that much of this self-denial of the cerebral joust (that might on reflection be regarded as a life-enhancing or defining stimulus) is more coerced than personally screened. We are made to feel inadequate. Pressures emerge from all levels of the sky-scraping beast that morphs into (or rises from?) say, the body politic/the fiscal gherkin/the evolved system. Us normal folks are lost or spun or misled by something in the constricting ether; something on the one hand rather rundown and bad-breathlike and on the other awesomely pervasive; powerful.

My instinct is to fight that stuff; to defy and to undermine it. This may mean pushing out beyond the ledge of my core subject expertise – that would be er… sport maybe? – and blowing a raspberry at the notion of received wisdoms elsewhere. Received wisdom often perpetuates myth, right? Is often grounded in smugness; may need the faux-oxygen of privilege or the cover of opaqueness. Perhaps mystery itself may be an outlier in this matrix of conformist gunk? And perhaps, therefore we need an occasional, demystifying blast of… punk?

Punk was wonderful for its moral zeal-with-a-mohican. Punk said – if you were listening – stop preening and start speaking from the heart. Stop twiddling those solo’s and tell me something real. It was magnificently articulate and magnificently necessary in that respect. Punk began unpeeling the facades of the worlds of art/music/politics because it seared angrily through; it was a focused mischief blaring wildly out for betterstuff. It may not have paused too long in consideration of the need for nuanced arguments but maybe that counts for urgency rather than in some cool deficiency column. Great punk(s) had no respect, other than that which was earned. Great punks did not understand, so they demanded answers.

John Lydon may have been the only great punk. ‘Metal Box’ from Public Image Limited remains a staggeringly discomfiting but articulate noise, an appropriate racket from which to launch an onslaught against (capitalist(?) drudgery—witness the “shallow spread of ordered lawns”. Something is being punctured or exposed or better revealed; a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of normalcy; a sad, bad intellectual thinness. There is poetry in these dumb questions. These questions might not have been asked… if we’d have just… behaved.

So though I do despair at how we still fawn before the current gods – for ‘growth’/some careering stability/the normalcy of sheepishness – those rib-progglers, those UnCutters, those Occupiers give me hope.