Category Archives: General Rambling

For posts that just go on and on and on and on and ……

Thick, thin, bushy or not. Why do they want to make mine different?

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Facial hair. For men, it’s something you either like or don’t. For women, of course, it’s different.

But, there’s one bit of facial hair that, without them, it looks strange and so most people leave them although most people, it seems, these days, make them as small as possible.

I’m talking eyebrows.

To be honest, what is the point of them? Other than allowing other people to tell when you are surprised or angry or thoughtful. Unless you’ve been botoxed up top, in which case it’s not possible to move them, which I always find quite amusing.

But, other than giving indicators of your mood, they seem pointless.

But they are there. And, love them or hate them, you would look pretty odd without them.

However, why is it, when I go to the barber’s, they always want to ‘trim’ mine? It’s not like mine are so bushy as to seem like overhanging rocks. They’re quite flat, really, though thick ….. ish.

I suppose the only strange thing about mine is that there are certain individual hairs that grow quite long. You can’t actually see that normally, since they flatten out along the brow. But, if I pull them down, sometimes the odd one will reach my cheek. But mostly you’d never know this.

These days, for both men and women, the art of plucking or shaving your eyebrows so that there is a thin line or, at least, less than was originally is widespread. But these are, generally, people under 30 or those with huge eyebrows. I am not under 30 and mine aren’t huge.

So why does the barber ask me? Worse, why does he feel he should make sure that I really, really do want them left alone?

They may have no specific meaning or use but they are a part of the character of your face and I like mine just the way they are. It’s bad enough that I have to shave most days and have my haircut once a month. I don’t want to be worrying about whether my eyebrows are too thick and need trimming. Bah!

Move along. Nothing to see here.

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There’s a disturbing thing about polls.  The results will depend on the question asked.

There’s also a disturbing thing about the media. The headline will not necessarily reflect the actual truth. After all, it is a headline and they want you to read it.

There’s another disturbing thing about the media. Or is it about people, in general? It seems that the media, far from reflecting public (or even popular opinion), seem to have taken on a role that was, at one time, the role of the church. They ‘encourage’ certain thinking in their readers.

Take the Daily Mail. Sometimes called the Daily Hate Mail. If you can stay above the overall hatred that is not reserved for anyone in particular but is directed at all people at some time or another, it makes for an interesting read. They hate ‘benefit scroungers’, ‘gay people’, non-white people, white people, Christians, non-Christians. In fact, they hate everyone at some time or another. However, apart from those people who ‘cost the taxpayer’ they seem to hate Muslims most of all.

So, it would be fair to suppose that most of their readers (I say most as I am one of their readers – who disagrees with most, if not all, of their ‘reports’) also hate Muslims.

And so, their article about the latest ‘poll’ has a headline that is quite astounding. Half of people would support a right-wing party if it gave up violence. Except, if you actually read the article and look at the question posed, the headline should read ‘The majority of people don’t want an English parliament, don’t want more controls on immigration and don’t want to challenge Islamic extremism’. Of course, that wouldn’t make you read the article, would it? The reality is that 48% of people said they would support a right-wing, fascist party that didn’t use violence. But, history has shown that they do use violence, since that is part of the fascist make-up. And so, the result is that MOST people wouldn’t support the normal fascist party.

And, anyway, it’s the Daily Hate Mail that is always banging on about how it’s terrible how English people are treated in England; how there is never enough controls on immigration; how Islamic extremism is in every British city whereas, in fact, none of these things is true for the MAJORITY of people. In the same way that MOST people who clam benefits are not low-life, work-shy, scroungers – but every day they have an article about someone that they have found who is like this and readers would think that EVERYONE on benefits is like this.

It disturbs me that so many people can believe the headlines without thinking about the reality.

So, move along now. Nothing to see here.

A brand new day!

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I feel much better, thank you for asking.

OK, so you didn’t actually know I wasn’t feeling so good. It’s not that I’ve been ill. It’s just that, if F isn’t around, I get angry, frustrated, panicky, etc.

But last night he came round, even if it was very late. I slept well and feel so much better.

He makes me feel calm and the issues/problems or whatever just seem to disappear when I am physically with him.

It’s annoying, really, that he has this much effect.

But, now that I’ve spent time with him (even if nearly all of it was asleep), I feel like it’s a brand new day.

Which it is, of course :-)

There is no truth in any of this, whatsoever.

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Warning: None of the following may be true, real or ever have happened. If you are incensed, angered or just slightly annoyed by it then STOP READING.

He had mentioned that he would like to go and see it. The problem, for me, was that I too wanted to see it but I didn’t want to spoil my enjoyment of it by watching it in Italian and understand little, to have to watch it again, in English.

So, someone gave me a copy ….. in English. I watched it over a few nights. Now, here, I should give you some background.

I don’t really like them. They are German, after all (with apologies to the Germans at least one of whom is a friend). I think it’s more that they are German and think they run the UK which they don’t, quite obviously. I mean, they even had to change their surname from Saxe-Coberg and Gotha so that people wouldn’t confuse them with Germans (which they were). This was the First World War.

By the second one, they were quite happy to court Hitler. ‘He seemed to have the right idea’!

When the old father died the succession passed to Edward. But Edward was having a not-so-secret affair with a married American woman. He loved her so much he gave up on ‘his duties’ and so his younger brother became George VI. His wife, so it is said, hated both Edward and ‘that woman’, Wallis. Not because they were horrible (although they might have been) but because they were the cause of her husband being put in an impossible position and, eventually, dying rather younger than he might have, ordinarily.

After George’s death, his eldest daughter was next. There was a small snag, however. His daughter would be Queen. His mother, still alive, was the Queen Mother (Mary, wife of George V). So what would the title of George VI’s wife be? You couldn’t really have two Queen Mothers, now could you? OK so officially she died of ‘gastric problems’, being an euphemism for lung cancer. Or, of course, given the scheming of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, she could have had the old Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, done away with?

I plump for the last option.

So, I go to watch the film with a preconceived idea of QE, the Queen Mother (being played by Helena Bonham-Carter) as a rather wicked old witch who ruled her husband and, when he became King, the household, with quite an iron fist. Of her husband being a bit of a wimp. Of the politicians of the time being rather stupid, etc., etc.

But, this is a film. It is made ‘nice’. Actually, I found it quite heart-warming. HBC was wonderful as the Queen as was Colin Firth as Bertie. For me, Geoffrey Rush as Logue was the best of them all. Actually, it made me almost cry at the end (because I am such a softie and just love happy endings in films).

So now I have told F that I will be very happy to go and see the Italian-dubbed version of The King’s Speech (Il Discorso del Re) at the cinema. In fact, I said we just HAVE to go. The only thing that ‘worries’ me is that I like it so much because it is also a story of Britain (and a Britain we like to think of as ‘Great’) and a man overcoming all odds and a woman who loves him – and will an Italian think of it like this also or will missing the Great out of Britain mean that it is much less of a good story?

And, F replies that we should go this weekend. I am happy.

The Internet and democracy.

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There’s been a lot of ‘talk’ about how the Internet (and, in particular Twitter and Facebook) have helped bring about the move to democracy in the middle east/North Africa.

I think we should hesitate for a moment before passing judgement on either the Internet role or whether there is a real move to democracy.

It’s all to do with perception and we should be careful that what we perceive turns out to be the reality.

Let us first take ‘democracy’. Democracy for us is one thing. But, much like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. If a foreign country’s democracy doesn’t fit our picture, then we consider it not to be democracy. But democracy is different, even between countries in Europe. The idea is sound, the reality something different. Many voters in the UK, for certain, often feel disenfranchised, feeling that ‘their vote’ is worth nothing.

More importantly is that these uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere leave a vacuum. Take Egypt specifically. The army has run the country for years. The army are running it now. Sure, the top man may have gone and some of his cronies but, much like in the UK, the Government isn’t actually run by the Government but by the people in the civil service (or, for Egypt, the army) and regardless of the top figures, they are the people who decide what actually happens and, more importantly, how it is implemented. In other countries, we are equally likely to see one dictator replaced by someone similar even if his/her views are slightly different. We should be careful what we wish for. Change may not bring about the change that we actually want.

I’m sure, when books were printed for the first time, there was a feeling by those in power, that this was ‘dangerous’. This meant that the people get to know too much. And people knowing things is always bad – at least for the people in power. Then there was the telephone. It was said the the loss of Vietnam by the Americans was down to television and how quickly things were beamed into people’s home, showing the reality of the war. And now there is the Internet.

Did you know, for example, that in spite of our headlines in the West about how China restricts access to sites they don’t like the US does it too! OK, so that was a ‘mistake’ but it does show how easily they can do it. More importantly, they DO do it. It may be for good reason but how do we really know? To whom are they accountable? And the Wikileaks thing, where they advised that no governmentaly employed person, nor their families should access Wikileaks?

As usual, it all comes down to fear. It’s not the Internet that’s really the problem but that the Internet allows things to be distributed to a larger audience faster, even, than television. It’s better than a phone call because it includes video. It is proof of a terrible thing (even if, in reality, it is not actual proof at all, since it can be faked).

And have you noticed what most of these uprisings seem to be based upon? It is the young people who say they have no work, no chance of bettering themselves.

And, in the West, we think we’re immune from this? Why? We don’t have young people? We don’t have huge amounts of unemployed young people? We don’t have these young people with little sign of things improving soon?

The student protests was one thing. The tax evasion protests another. I predict there will be more. I predict that, sooner or later someone getting beaten by the police when on a peaceful march, will die. Sorry, just in case there is doubt, I mean in the UK. It has already happened in Egypt and Bahrain. Fro the UK, remember the video footage of the guy in the wheelchair getting dragged across the street by the thugs? Ooops, sorry, the police. And the guy that was badly beaten and ended up in hospital? You may think it’s a far cry from Egypt or any of those other countries but it’s the same really.

If we continue to pound the young people with this unemployment or, when they are employed, we tax them so high as to make life too hard for them, you think they won’t, at some time, rise up against the ‘regime’?

Coming soon to a town centre near you – rioting and unrest!

Inevitable but, still ………..

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“I didn’t know you had a blog”

Well, that’s not entirely true.

“I wouldn’t read it anyway”. I know that.

But now I feel I must, at least, show him. But, I am a procrastinator and so I procrastinate. It was Thursday and we are now on Saturday. It was over a beer with An and him. I mentioned it in passing. After all, it’s not a secret, as such. Not really.

The problem is not that I don’t want him to see it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I would prefer that he knows it is there, even if he doesn’t read it. I would prefer that he has seen it, even if he chooses not to read it but I wouldn’t mind him reading it. Well, not really. I think. Maybe.

No, the problem is that I must explain. After all, these things I write are not always, shall we say, exactly as other people see it. They are, in fact, what goes on in my head and what goes on in my head is more like a parallel universe – almost the same but with subtle (or even not so subtle) differences.

And, of course, he is there. In every post – even if not mentioned. He is there because, well, he is the most important person in my life and so ‘invades’ each post because he is always in my thinking, in my head. And, since this blog is about what’s in my head, he must be there.

I wouldn’t want him to read something and misinterpret or be upset by something. After all, very few of my readers actually know him. He is just ‘F’, some guy. He doesn’t have a face or a personality – except the personality I have given him. The personality I have given him is the one I see and the personality I write down is the one I have in my head. I’m sure he would disagree about some of it, would say ‘but I’m not like that’ and he would be right, I suppose. He isn’t like that – except, actually, in my head that’s exactly what he is like. And that’s quite difficult to explain. It becomes more difficult when we talk in a language that one of us doesn’t fully understand – even if his English is very, very good.

Most people who know me well have not reacted to the blog very positively. One person explained it as like ‘reading my personal diary’ – a little like snooping in my head. It’s OK for me but not for them. Like when someone dies – it’s those that are left behind (which is a strange statement in itself, I always think, as if they have raced ahead somewhere and not waited for all the others to catch up) that really suffer. The person who’s dead does not suffer at all. Then there are those who have searched and searched for mentions of themselves. Looking for how I really feel about them. But how I feel about them doesn’t really feature since the blog is about a moment and, worse, a moment that has a basis in real life but is still in my head. Which is a different thing.

Yes, it’s a different thing entirely.

But I should show him.

He has had plenty of chance to look. It is easy for him to find. I leave my computer on when I go to work. He uses it to play ‘the game’ (as we call it) on Facebook. But he only has to click on the tab to see it.

Still, I would be more ‘comfortable’ if he had seen it.

After I explain it – or try to explain it.

Just in case.

Yes, I should show him.

Maybe today?

Or tomorrow?

Soon.

Learning something every day. But how strange it can be.

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OK this could be a bumper day for posts. Not because I have nothing to do at work but because I have lots of things to say. But, you know how it is, sometimes the posts come and sometimes they stay as draft until, eventually, I take some random quotes from them to make a random post and then delete all the drafts. However, if I do post them, then I’ll ‘space them out’ timewise, so you won’t have to read a load of them all at once :-)

Anyway, on to the post itself.

S tells me that she needs my help because she wants to order something on the internet. She wants some false nails ……………. for her feet!

I am ashamed to say that I guffawed at this. It was a true guffaw not any limp-wristed snigger. I was in shock. I had NO IDEA! Of course, given a little bit of thought, it is obvious. If people can be worried about their appearance so much that they are prepared to have some guy/woman carve out chunks of their face, buttocks, thighs, etc. to have that perfect look or have some strange chemical injected so that they have lips that are more like Bianca Jagger’s than Bianca Jagger had or have a face that, when breaking into a smile, it looks like they have just come from the morgue, then a bit of glue and some plastic crap stuck on the end of your toes seems nothing.

But I really had no idea.

So I googled it. They even sell it on Amazon! I don’t know why but that seems to make it more respectable. Like you were buying it from Boots or Marks and Spencers. To make it even more shocking, you can get them in different varieties – short square, French bare, French sparkle, Lilac, etc.

You learn something every day.

Weather, washing, whinging

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“It was too hot”.

This was in reply to my “It was lovely weather but still too cold”.

Don’t ever think that as British, we hold the monopoly on complaining about the weather. We just have ‘more’ of it. Here, the weather is never right. It’s always too cold or too hot or too rainy or too much snow (well, this time last year, anyway). The only thing it rarely is (and so rarely complained about), is too windy.

I have a sneaking suspicion that every country is, more or less, the same.

When I replied that we still had to wear coats, the original quote was qualified with “Yes but it’s too hot for February”. There’s just no pleasing people.

And it was a rather splendid weekend (apart from the coats thing). The sun shone and it was almost too warm (outside my flat anyway) for a hat. Almost but not quite. If I was a truly British person I would, given the weather, have been out in shorts and a T-shirt!

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It seems that my washing machine has all but had it. It doesn’t always spin. And, anyway, when it does spin it sounds like I also put a load of boulders in with the wash. It’s so loud that I am unable to hear anyone on the phone unless I move to the bedroom.

So I went to have a look for some over the weekend.

I was expecting to pay between €200 and €300 so I was a bit shocked when there really wasn’t anything below €400. Damn! But I AM NOT going back to hand washing and so, this week, I must just bite the bullet and get one. I don’t really want a crap one so you have to pay more than €400 but I could do without it right now. Damn again! And then, this year or next year I suppose, will be a fridge.

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I feel better than I felt on Saturday.

Just thought you should know.

Perhaps I should apologise to A for being a miserable bastard when we went out on Friday night? We went to K2. I think I should revise my feelings about K2 as it really was quite good.

Hmmmmmm

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“I just wanted to say hello”

I bet you did.

I’m too tired to respond properly – although I give it a go.

Too tired.  I had an accident this morning.  I was late into work.  I’ve just about had enough.

OK, so today is not a good day, then.