OLD-WORLDY STUFF

Another village hall, another barn dance. Or ceilidh, whatever’s the difference. 

This one had guest spots for morris dancers, for folk songs about soldiers running away with gypsies, for traditional English tunes, and, unusually, the ethereal music of an instrument called a heng - which is... indescribable.

Anyway, I think this old-worldy stuff matters. I think it connects us to our heritage, where villagers would come together to sing, to dance, to drink and be merry. It’s quaint, it’s twee, and yes, anachronous with the world we actually live in, but it reminds us of our past and some of the stuff that made us who we are.

Take folk-dancing. I used to be perplexed about why the callers were insistent on getting the moves so right. But of course, it is an art form, and it really is a thing of joy and beauty when it works. And dances that were handed down though generations, whether stripping the willow in Winster, or casting off in Cumberland, ought to be preserved, just like the tunes.

Well anyway. I drove home through country lanes, listening to a late night talk show host ranting to himself. The headlamps picked out pines trees and oak trees and hedges, whizzing by inns with warm windows in flowery villages. England, the Old Worldy England was asleep.

Why don’t we gather together to sing and eat and dance any more? Is it too simple to blame TV and the Internet? Or has the world moved on so fast that we’ve forgotten the simple joy of entertaining ourselves together? Or am I wrong? Do those lo-fi opportunities still exist with things like carols round the piano, or bonfire night?

The DJ didn’t know. He had no answers at all for the cavalcade of callers who were phoning in to read out from the Big Book of Brexit Cliches. In the end I turned him off and drove silently through the dark Hampshire countryside of sleepy villages.

Good old England.

ALL HALLOWS

It's Hood's Autumn* again. I went out for lunch and wandered round the lake. Gusts of freezing wind picked up dry, crispy leaves and span them in the air. The pathways were carpeted with fresh-fallen foliage, and the trees shivered beneath the grey sky.

And so we hurtle towards November. But not of course, before we get through Halloween... and for some reason, the Big Cheeses have scheduled a company meeting on the day itself this year.

"I have a great incentive to get people to dress up on thursday in the office," wrote a colleague with a bit of influence, "they get seat priority in the meeting room and get food first."

I really object to being shown the latest sales figures by Count Dracula. It just seems so silly! And there's no evil worse than one that dresses up as silly. We'd better hope there are no serious HR violations on the day, or someone's being given their P45 by a giant spider and a Frankenstein's monster - and you've got to admit it's bad enough already.

It also seems ghastly to have to sit at the back of a meeting and be relegated to the crumbs, just because you object to the celebration of all things evil. How's that fair?

I think this year, instead of whining about how I don't like the sinister undercurrent beneath the forced fun, I might just focus on All Saints' Day instead, which is the day after. Perhaps next Friday I'll dress up as Francis of Assisi, or St Paul. Or maybe I'll just be myself.

Other than the demons of All Hallows Eve, I actually quite like this time of year. And Hood's Autumn it might be, but at least it's stopped raining, like it did all through Keats's season. There's a cold dryness to the air that's quite refreshing. And it reminds me that once we get past the end of October, everything rushes delightfully towards Christmastime. And that's something to look forward to.



*A while ago, I realised that Autumn had always felt like two seasons rather than one: Keats's Autumn (the season of mists and  'mellow fruitfulness' and Hood's Autumn (No!)). I definitely prefer the first one, though the soggy leaf-mulch of the second also has its charm I guess. At least it does from indoors, anyway.

TEA-REX

More dinosaur news today. I saw a guy wearing a “Tea-Rex” t-shirt.

I gave him the silent nod of approval. He looked at me puzzled for a while, then smiled back nervously. It’s like that thing when you honk your horn at a car that looks exactly like yours, in a country lane - especially if you’re driving something classic like a Morris Minor. Or you give a little wave to a fellow rambler, or caravanner. Just a little nod of solidarity; a classy but subtle acknowledgement of mutual appreciation.

And what appreciation! Dinosaurs and tea! Two brilliant things separated by millions of years of discovery, brought together in a Venn diagram with a pun on a t-shirt, and two random guys with the same sense of humour.

And it would have been fine... except I wasn’t wearing a matching dinosaur t-shirt. I was just wearing a jumper. There was no time to say “Nice t-shirt” and I’m definitely not a famous palaeontologist. So what I’ve actually done there, is just nod knowingly (and in hindsight, quite creepily) at... some guy.

Well. I still think that was a cool t-shirt. It was sort of Jurassic Park style. I don’t go in for comedy t-shirts (I’m not a software developer, well, not really)... but that one was about right for me. I must remember to put it on my Christmas list.

The thing is though, T-Rexes had really tiny arms. There’s no way one could have drunk a cup of tea. Imagine! They’d have to slurp the tea on the ground, rather like a chicken drinking from a thimble. It would have been a very frustrating thing. It’s a little far-fetched. I mean a compsognathus, maybe could grasp a cup, maybe a velociraptor, but not a Tyrannosaur.

Then again, I don’t think ‘Vecoffeeraptor’ is anywhere near as good a pun for a cool t-shirt. And it has to make sense or all you’ll get is random, puzzled looks from strangers. And no-one needs that.

THE NINTH EYE TEST

Orthoptics this time. I've been before on one of my visits. I had to do the test where you hold a pointer over some dots.

Today, I was thinking about childhood, in the waiting room. There's a wide table of wooden railway blocks, and engines for pushing along the chunky tracks. Someone had built a suspension bridge and had positioned Thomas on top as though he was racing back to Sodor.

A good percentage of my instinct was to get down and play. This would have been a highlight probably, while waiting when I was small. There would have been a simple joy to a table like that, with its grubby toys and well-worn pieces - the kind of safe happiness that's specifically designed to hide the real world of hospitals and surgeries, and the room down the corridor.

Poking out of a plastic book box was a copy of The Gruffalo. I guess it would have been The Very Hungry Carterpillar back in the 80s, or perhaps The Tiger Who Came to Tea, or Meg and Mog.

As an adult, looking across the half-empty orthoptics waiting room, I saw different angles. These things: the stories and wooden railways, they're distractions. They're peacekeepers and placators in an anxious place. I remember getting annoyed at the dentist once because I couldn't finish the story I'd been reading. Adults don't think like that, do they? They're not there to play.

And yet. There is a table for us in the presence of our enemies. What if it's this kind of table? What if it's a table of railway blocks and plastic stations? What if it's shuttles and dolls and finger puppets and adventure stories? What if our enemies, things like sickness, anxiety, despair, worry - are held at bay by our Father while we... play?

I thought about it all through my orthoptics appointment. The doctor blazed a torch into my pupils, the screen of letters wobbled with the aura. She held up a card and moved it towards me until I went cross-eyed. I was somewhere else.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old," wrote someone famous, "We grow old because we stop playing." I definitely think there's something a lot less silly about play than we imagine. At least, as I imagine. Reason stopped me from playing with the toys in the orthoptics waiting room - but I don't think reason should always win. There's a lot to be said for play: real, creative, imaginative table-fun that leaves worry far down the hall in the hands of the One who holds my world. And I don't want to forget that.

LEADING QUESTIONS

The glass cabinet gleamed. Top shelf: replete with muffins (by the look of them, the fabled tropical muffins I keep going on about). Bottom shelf: a plate of regular-looking chocolate brownies.

I licked my lips. It's been a while since they've had the tropical muffins in - and as you know, a more succulent, delicious, diffuse mix of textures and flavours you'd be hard pushed to find.

The usual lady was waiting behind the counter. Next to her, the chef, who was deep in concentration, was counting money from the till.

Eyes wide, I was about to open my mouth to ask for a tropical muffin...

"Oh you must try one of the brownies today," she interrupted, "Nick [the chef] made them, and they are to die for!"

Nick looked up from his counting with barely the flicker of a smile. I reflected on my options.

What are you supposed to do in this situation? The longer I took to deliberate, the more awkward it got - I could barely ask for a tropical muffin now, and I was conscious that explaining myself if I did, would be like scooping water from a sinking boat. I looked back at the golden muffins. I looked down at the very ordinary brownies.

"Well sure," I said, gulping, "I'll take one." She beamed, then wrapped up a chocolate brownie for me.

We're all guilty of asking leading questions. I do it; I do it all the time without realising.

"Do you want to help me?"
"Would you mind...?"
"Any chance you could...?"

Sometimes I hear myself asking these questions-it's-impossible-to-say-no to, and I cringe on the inside. I never want to put any pressure on anybody, and I certainly don't want to present a choice of options without considering the possibility of a no. I don't want to run any team I'm in that way. I always want there to be the possibility of the tropical muffin.

The trouble is that in our culture, we've already experimented with how to de-lead-ify a leading question, and unfortunately all the fluff we've added to leading questions has just made it a whole lot worse.

"Say no if you don't want to, no pressure, just asking, just on the off-chance..." - sometimes means the exact opposite, making it even harder to say no, actually adding pressure, being more than a simple question, and with all the hopes and dreams of my world resting on the chance that you'll say yes... We don't make it easy, do we?

Well. I ate the brownie. And, to be fair, it was delicious. With apologies to Nick the Chef, it wasn't stop-the-world-I-never-want-to-eat-anything-else delicious like the tropical muffins are, but it was pretty good.

I'm sure there's a lesson in here for me, somewhere.

BUILD YOUR OWN T-REX

A lady got on the bus today, holding a huge Jurassic World Build-Your-Own-T-Rex kit. Three things went gallumphing through my mind like Gallimimus, almost at once:

That. Is a cool present.
I wonder what people are willing to pay, for Christmas-Morning Joy.
I'd love that.

Every now and then, I get a rush of that childhood Christmas excitement. I know, I know, it's only October, but it hits you at weird times, the festive spirit - that's how this stuff works. You just feel it like a little tingle, a memory; a wide-eyed kind of ludicrous hopefulness that doesn't quite belong on a grizzly morning. But there it is.

It lasts longer when you're younger.

At the bus stop outside Sainsbury's today, it was just a moment, before that lady climbed aboard the 26 and flumped into her seat with the Build-Your-Own-T-Rex kit next to her. I was already back to October by the time the bus chugged off.

There is something to be said for Christmas-Morning Joy. It's pure and without inhibition; like a child, but brighter than the room, stronger than the shimmer of baubles and tinsel. It's ancient and new, delightful and precious, like a window into the past.

Yup. I can see myself slotting balsa-wood vertebrae into a ready-made spine. I can see a paintbrush with a dollop of dark green paint, and sharp, plastic teeth, and beady lizard eyes. I can see all that, and me sticking my tongue out while I concentrate.

But I'm old. I need gutters, and seals for washing machines. I need a new front door, a doorbell, a drill, and a hammer. Not to mention a car. There's not a lot of room for a Build-Your-Own-T-Rex.

And yet, on the inside...

BEAUTY IN THE TRANSITION

I saw a flame-red plant creeping over a wall today. It was vibrant against the grey morning, amid the raindrops that curled over the edges of its russet leaves.

That’s autumn, right there, I thought. Fiery leaf from the heart of the sun, curling in the rain, over a sopping garden wall. Rain pattered from my hood. I stopped and ran a wet finger under the leaves.

There’s so much beauty in the transition, isn’t there? We don’t always like change, and as everything hurtles and accelerates, we sometimes lose the things that we like to hold on to. I think autumn might be able to teach us how to transition in beauty, even when it’s soggy and miserable. That little plant, just a tiny fragment of Earth’s foliage was erupting with colour at the end of a summer that deserved its majesty.

-

Anyway, I wax on. The other truth is that that little blast of colour had completely interrupted me thinking about the relationship between tea strength and the number of tea bags you put in the teapot. I do have a theory. But then, I have lots of theories, and my friends still roll their eyes most of the times I say ‘I have a theory’...

But what if it’s not a linear relationship?

What if two tea bags makes a pot that’s more than twice as strong as a pot with one tea bag? I’m not saying it’s logarithmic like the Richter Scale (or nearly quite as important), I’m just wondering whether it’s a log-base-something-or-other relationship. And what about the size of the teapot? Is there an easy way to calculate exactly how much tea you need, rather than the old ‘teaspoon per person and one for the pot’ rule, which by the way, wasn’t necessarily as linear as you might think. What is the effect of a lot of tea swimming around in boiling water? Does it diffuse differently when there’s more of it?

I’m glad I was interrupted by nature. Some thoughts are more important than others.

SAY THANK YOU, MR CUCKOO

Well the legs have just about stopped aching.

My knees sorted themselves out first, followed by my hips (I couldn't navigate stairs at all for the first couple of hours), and then finally, the calf muscles returned to normal. I even ran for the bus today without a crunching pain from each stride! Always a plus, being able to move like a regular human.

And so the week fills out into its usual flumpy self. Meanwhile, in a weird moment of self-awareness, I've realised that I say 'thank you' like a cuckoo.

I just heard myself say it: "Thank you" cascades from a 5th to the 3rd, like the opening two notes of the Westminster Chimes. Every time I get off the bus it's there: a chirruping, melodious cadence ringing through my head like a sitcom doorbell. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Still, I bet it annoys me more than it does the bus driver...

Oh! Speaking of annoying the bus driver... last night, I really did annoy the bus driver. And not by saying thank you.

I was trying to learn a tune (for a gig I'm playing on Saturday) and, with headphones in and hood up, I was silently tapping out the bars on the side of the bus. It was taking all my concentration (the syncopation is mad), and I hadn't noticed that the bus had suddenly slowed to a halt.

I saw the driver leaning over his cab and mouthing something at me. So I stopped the track in my ears and looked blankly at him. He muttered something and went back to driving the bus. At the next stop, I got off and he just growled,

"It's very distracting sir, very distracting."

I gave a sheepish sorry and hopped off.

I suppose I could try a different interval if I don't want to sound like a cuckoo. Maybe in reverse - a sing-song 3rd to a 5th? That's thank you to the tune of 'so long' from 'so long, farewell...' from The Sound of Music. Thank you, thank you... auf weideirsehen goodbye...

Hmm. It puts the emphasis back on 'you', but the 'Neighbours' uptrail makes it sound like a question. Thank you? Am I sure I want to thank you? Could be misinterpreted. Especially by angry bus drivers.

8th to a 5th? Sounds like a train.
2nd to a 1st? Jaws theme.
7th to 8th? Ascending. Nice (jazzy) but hard to remember.

I think I'm going to have to stick with the cuckoo. I suppose it's tried and tested, and I'm probably not going to be able to help it anyway. Or maybe I should go with a good old fashioned one note 'thanks' or even a 'cheers'.

You can overthink these things.