A HANDFUL OF MINUTES

It's been chilly recently, and the sudden cold has me thinking about a great invention. Imagine a long-term storage heater. You leave it out in a heatwave to absorb the sun, then when it's suddenly autumn, you just slowly vent out the free heat you collected... a month ago. Surely the boffins at NASA can make that happen, no? Laws of Thermodynamics you say? Pah. Piffling obstacles!

Anyway. The thought went further, and eventually led me to think about time. What if you could store time and then re-use it when  you needed it? That would be great right? I found myself loving what I'd called a 'handful of minutes' at lunchtime today, and the thought of being able to reuse moments, as madcap as it might have been, became a short poem...

A Handful of Minutes

I wish I could take
A handful of minutes
And store them away in a jar
I'd freeze them for later,
When they would be greater,
Than often things actually are

The minutes I'd take?
Those moments of wonder
When laughter was all that we knew:
The holiday weather!
That Christmas together!
When love was still shiny and new...

The lunchtime we shared
Beneath an umbrella
The night when we danced with the stars!
That handful of minutes
And everything in it
Still frozen in time in a jar

And then when the clouds
Come barrelling onward
And misery sweeps with a sigh
I'd thaw out those frozen
Old minutes I'd chosen,
Releasing them back to the sky!

I wish I could take
A handful of minutes
And store them away in a jar
But best to be present
In moments so pleasant
For that is what memories are

AN ALTERCATION

There were five minutes to go before today's worship set in the garden.

"Hello," I said, as a man approached me. I'd never seen him before, but there he was, looking strangely in my direction.

"Are we allowed to praise and worship this week?" he asked, raising a grey eyebrow.

"Well we're not supposed to sing together," I replied, still seated at the piano. Indeed, the government regulations are still that groups of people shouldn't do any communal singing at the moment, as it increases the risk of transmission. I have no doubt that the longer that situation goes on, the more frustrated people will get, despite our best efforts to help our church step into a different way of carrying our hearts. But I understand: it isn't easy to undo hundreds of years of cultural understanding about what 'a time of worship' is.

"It's all nonsense, isn't it?" he said. He was poised to continue. "I went into hospital last month with pneumonia, pneumonia! I'm in my 70s and I shouldn't be here, by the government's advice, but I recovered just fine, and you know what, I didn't see a single case of this coronavirus the whole time. It's all a hoax you know, just a big government hoax. The devil's put a muzzle on us being able to worship for all these months, and for what? Absolutely nothing, that's what! And that Gates, he's gonna make an absolute packet isn't he? He's definitely top of the new world order. Ridiculous."

God bless that man. I basically told him that all we could do today was what was asked of us, and that we were going to honour it, whether he was correct or not. It most definitely wasn't the time (five minutes to go) nor the place (an actual church service) to have any kind of discussion about the politics, the theology, the global economics or the personal paranoia that seems to drive individuals towards conspiracy theories. I tried my best to smile, and said:

"Did you recover well? From the pneumonia, I mean?"

He told me he had, and that, I hoped, was that. He drifted away to his camping chair. Chris, poised with djembe, looked at me, beaming and just said, "Don't let it get to you, mate."

Great advice.

I did think twice about writing about this. I think it's justified though. As peculiar an interaction as it was, I think that the fact that he accosted me when he did means he forfeits his right to anonymity. I also think he's free to his opinion - just as I'm free to hold mine this way. What he did was quite rude and subversive. I was politely having none of it.

I also think it highlights quite a dangerous place we've got to in our society. We no longer have completely trusted sources of information. Into the void, rushing though the social media channels like tides of sewage and joy, come all the titillating theories about why everything's really so awful. Why the government is lying to you. Why the powers that be don't want you to know what strings they're pulling and why you should be afraid. And a lot of people, perhaps this man included, just don't know what to believe any more.

In CS Lewis's The Last Battle, there's one sad moment where a group of dwarves are no longer able to believe in the real Aslan, even though he's standing right in front of them. They'd been duped by a donkey in a lion costume and a smooth-talking ape, and now refused to believe that they were face-to-face with the Real Thing. That feels very much like a danger for so many of us. Please don't let me be a dwarf.

Another troubling possibility of course, is that (at least partially) he might be right - we really have been silenced in our praise and worship: how we've seen it so far. But I don't believe it's a difficulty we'll fail to overcome. Singing is not everything; it really isn't, and I do believe there's an opportunity for us to find a deeper kind of intimacy. We simply don't need words printed on a screen for us any more - we don't need the boxes we built for ourselves: there's a new way open, and that at least, is quite exciting.

There was no time to say all of that of course. I just beamed back at my friend Chris, closed my eyes for a little focus, and gave it a tiny powerful prayer - the kind that's long fuelled me in those moments of attack. I won't be disrupted so easily. There's too much at stake. 

POLITICAL COMPASS

I did one of those political compass things today, just to see if my views had changed since the last time. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you where I landed, or what my views are - you know I don’t ever do that, and I’m deliberately careful about the subject.

What was interesting to me this time was the way the questions were stacked, and what impact they might have on the way we answer them. I assumed the algorithm was unable to factor in how a question made you feel, and therefore whether answering it impacted the way you answered the next one; I may be wrong - it could be smarter than I know. All I could think of though, was whether it would have been the same if I’d taken it backwards.

For example, one question might ask whether you think it’s important that people have jobs. My response might be, er, yes, I think it is. But then a few questions later it asks you whether you think the entire point of education is to train children for their future careers. Can I answer no? Can I separate one question from another? Can I believe both things?

Perhaps I can. Perhaps I’m thinking too deeply. If it were a person with a clipboard asking me face-to-face, I’d feel under immense pressure to be consistent in these things. It would be a proper test then, and I’d want to pass - which in that scenario would mean that the tester likes me as a person. And on the whole, we all appreciate consistent, honest people, I think.

“Our race has many superior qualities compared with other races...” asked the test, further down. “Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree?”

I know it’s trying to push all the card-carrying authoritarian racists into their despicable quadrant, but really? Are the closet jingoists and xenophobes out there going to agree with that? Or are they more likely to pretend they don’t? Or just unaware that they hold that view at all, because they’ve convinced themselves otherwise? Seriously, who’s ticking ‘Strongly agree’ there? Apart from Joseph Goebbels.

Anyway, I landed almost precisely where I was when I did it before, which is probably a tick in the box for the men in white coats with clipboards. They like consistency, apparently, those zany boffins.

Another entanglement is how faith interplays with our answers. A question on abortion for example, might push the algorithm a long way to the left if it’s worded so that you’re agreeing it shouldn’t be illegal under any circumstance. But it is possible to believe, I suppose, that faith and state should be separate, even if you’re a person of great faith - in which case your approach to the question might be different. There’s a lot to be said for good context. And a pithy survey online might not be fully reflective.

Well despite the quantum entanglements of a primitive algorithm, I ended up as I say, in the Political Compass quadrant I expected, where half the people I know might be waiting for me, and the other half might be shocked I ended up there and not with them on the diametrically opposite side of the chart.

And if that’s so, that’s great. In a system where we choose our leaders by secret ballot and have had hundreds of years of training ourselves not to bring it up in public, that seems like just the way I’d like it.

DUST

Shake off the dust

You weary land

Shake off the old for the new

No longer trust

Those fears of man

When the sky is so gentle and blue

Shake off the world

Its old refrain

Break off the things of the past

What had unfurled

In dust, and chain

Is over and done with at last

Shake off the old

Arise and come!

Oh come to the water with me!

For rivers of gold

Await the ones

Who shake off the dust, and are free

MY FAVOURITE FORM OF TIME TRAVEL

I got in the car today to go and get sandwiches. Something strange happened. As I closed the door, I caught the scent of something - a sort of car smell, nothing specific, just hot plastic, or seatbelt or something; a very familiar, but also a very lovely old smell.

I started the engine, but I was already in deep. What is this? Nostalgia? I suppose it could have been that - but there was no melancholy, just a happy reminder that maybe the world is much bigger than I've allowed myself to remember. I drove, clumping the car off the kerb and feeling intrigued.

I think it might have been a sort of repressed form of hope. I'm not certain I understand why hope would hit me at lunchtime on a very ordinary Friday, but I suppose whatever it was, it was so different, and so joyful, that it just reminded me of a world out there I have forgotten about - and it felt like nostalgia, because there was a time when I once knew it.

The world is very difficult isn't it? We can always look back with rose-tinted spectacles of course, but it does seem much bleaker than it ever did. I miss church - not the version we have now, but perhaps the carefree version we used to have. I miss my old house with all its rooms and stairs, and I miss feeling young.

And then one showery day in late August, it seems I got swept up in it all again. Perhaps it is just that: nostalgia. Sometimes I get the feeling that people dismiss nostalgia as a waste of time, a trivial thing that you can't do anything about so you might as well snap out of it. I don't know. To me it feels like my favourite form of time travel. But is it forwards or backwards?

If it's hope, I mean real hope, then perhaps out there in the car I caught a waft of the future. Perhaps there are excellent times ahead I'm not going to want to miss. Perhaps there's an end coming to the mindless ocean I so often feel silenced by, and this pandemic has exacerbated. Honestly, if it weren't for the friends I have, I think I'd be lost in the waves.

I got sandwiches. The world is weird. Masks and distancing, fear and control; social media wars and sniping from the valleys. Nobody knows who to believe, and everyone's merely surviving on their best intention. You know what. I don't think it's good enough for me. I need hope. I needed that little ripple of joy from another time, from another moment.

I have to believe there's more than this.

I, WRITER

My manager described me as a ‘professional writer’ today. That does seem strange, but it is technically true - that is what I am.

The trouble is that at functions, when people swallow an awkward pause and say, “So what do you do then?” I feel a bit pretentious saying, “Oh I’m a writer,” and instead I go for the more palatable, “I’m a software engineer” route. I think mostly that’s to quash the notion that I sit in a shed, twiddling pens and drinking whisky. I’m not that kind of writer.

Another term that gets slapped on us sometimes is ‘wordsmith’ - perfectly valid: a person who uses tools to craft words and sentences into a usable form. However, I think even that’s been overcooked by some people. After all, we all use words every day, bashing them into shape every time we pick up our phones. In the medieval village, the blacksmith wasn’t just the best at metalwork; he was the only one who could do it. So the idea of a ‘wordsmith’ to describe people who write for a living seems a bit redundant.

I do do that though. I have ‘writer’ in my job title, after it was surreptitiously changed from ‘technical author’ by the Americans. No daydreaming of novels for you Brits; get on with the writing what we tell you to write. And so she’s right: I am a writer, maybe in the same way that a pen is a ‘nice writer’ or a typewriter converts the brilliant thoughts of a quick fingered developer into printed ink. Less inspired, more toolbox.

Well. I’d like to write books. It would be interesting to be paid lots in advance to come up with something engaging. I’d almost certainly leave it all until the last week though, and then spend every waking moment in the whisky shed.

Joke. I don’t like whisky - it might as well be paint-stripper. Oh and I don’t have a writing shed either, so the Hemingway Method might be for someone else.

My manager was trying to build my confidence in a subtle kind of way. It is hard to push back the developers’ sincere attempts at writing customer-facing content, and she was reminding me that I am a writer, and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to effective writing. I can’t review their code but I sure can correct their grammar.

By the way, I don’t hate being called a ‘wordsmith’ - it’s quite endearing. I won’t ever call myself one though. I am a technical writer; I write about technical things. And a whole bunch of other non-technical things in my spare time of course (this is blog #1793) but I don’t get paid for that. What I do get reimbursed for is being a very professional and somehow highly experienced explainer of concept and procedure, and there’s no bottle nor shed required.

LAUGHTER LINES

Look at the lines of laughter

The smile that gives them away

The wonderful wise

And glistening eyes

That shine like the breaking of day

Look at the joy of the moment

That’s etched in that valley of tears

She smiles with a sigh

And a knowing reply

To the toll of the passage of years

And look at the love in the sunlight

As autumn is turning the trees

So young are the lines

That laughter defines

For a heart that will dance on the breeze

SIX WEEKS FOR CHANGE

It’s one of those lovely, sunny, blustery days. The trees are alive with the wind, and the sun is warm. Meanwhile the sky is blue and bright, with tiny white clouds that make it look like the whole canvas is deeper, and higher, and bigger than ever.

I’m in the park of course, listening to the roar, and watching the shadows dance.

I have to make some big decisions. For reasons I can’t explain, the next six weeks feel like they might be significant, a time to figure out with God, what the next bit of my journey might look like.

It would make sense. I’m 42.5 now, and if you believe in the numerology of 7s, that means I’ve already lived through six cycles of life, and it’s time to transition into the next one. 42 days seems quite the thing.

I know, things can’t really be as accurate as all that, and neither do I really like the thought of change, but if it’s clockwork or not, I do feel different. And that difference inevitably leads to change.

So the clock starts on a loose six week period I’ve set for myself. Perhaps I’ll figure out what’s what, perhaps I won’t. I’ve got to give it a try though.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 54: DAD-JOKE WARS

"So did you hear about that accident on the M1? Apparently a prison van collided with a cement mixer and everyone escaped; police say they're looking for hardened criminals."

I was glad I was on mute for the Dad-Joke Wars on the Virtual Coffee Break today. There was suddenly a terrific tumbleweed moment, in which absolutely nothing happened at all - and I happen to find those moments very funny. So I chortled away silently behind my screen.

"Yes well that reminds me of the sailors who accidentally got covered in red and purple paint," contributed the next contender, "...Marooned."

Some eye rolls and groans. But we were not done.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger auditioned for a film about the world's greatest composers and the director asked him which one he'd like to be, and Arnold said: 'I'll be Mozart'"

There was a ripple around the chat this time. At least this one subverted expectations and led to something approaching a punchline.

"Ah very good," said someone, defeated and knowingly out of the running for King. There was another beat of silence. I listened. One second, two seconds of pause, and then:

"I suppose," (quite seriously and thoughtfully) "That that's because he was Austrian, right?"

"Who? Mozart? Yeah, I think so," said Mr Pub Quiz, in on the chat at the right moment for apposite facts.

Confusion all round was followed by a moment of beautiful realisation, as the final contestant chipped in with:

"Yeah maybe that's why Arnie chose it."

And everyone fell about.

Now that's funny. If you ask me, that's the real King of the Dad Jokes.

FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION

I had to do mandatory training today, entitled 'Respectful Workplace'. I should point out that it was mandatory for everyone, not just me - I have not been harassing people.

It was very American. I don't want to say too much about that, but the trainer (a lawyer, I think) was really open in a way us Brits just would not be. She kicked off by saying she enjoyed making people feel uncomfortable, which, I'll be honest, doesn't sound like standard practice for workplace trainers. But she did, and then she certainly did.

Anyway, once she'd pointed out that English people have a different relationship with certain swearwords, and that Americans have a weird pride about their feelings for "Mac Dawnald's" ("Sometimes your arteries need a lube")... she went on to talk about why workplace relationships are essentially a terrible idea...

"So I'm going to smoosh all the hopeless romantics out there," she said, gleefully, "...because relationships fail at a remarkable rate. Think of all the people you have to date before you find 'the one' and then 'the one' doesn't have a greater than 70% chance of making it through your lifetime..."

Thanks a lot, lady.

But wait. Aren't lawyers supposed to be logical? If she truly believes this, then surely she doesn't believe in the concept of 'the one' at all... the way she paints it, it might as well be a fairground attraction, like some sort of coconut shy or a shooting range: sure, step right up, spend your money until you win a prize, and then when you're inevitably fed up of that cuddly toy, or it's fed up with you, back you go for another awful round. There's no 'the one' in that picture, is there? That's a tortuous game of trial and error.

It's not my field this, but regardless, I'd rather stay at home.

The only conclusion I could come to (while she went on about why the evident reasons why they 'poo poo' relationships between HR and finance) was that this poor lady once did believe in fate or divine providence, but for whatever painful reason, has now concluded that successful relationships are two unfortunate things for human beings: rare, and lucky - like hitting the star prize on the one-arm-bandit.

I don't believe that. I just don't. I think you have so much more choice than just alignment of the stars, and it's a choice about who you want to be, what kind of person you're becoming, and where you're going in your own world first. It's an adventure on which you can choose your companions, not through a dating lottery, but through being intentional about your own life and seeing who might go on a journey with you. It's so sad that a lot of solid relationships fail, I agree - but it doesn't have to be the depressing normal.

Call me Anti-Morpheus if you like, but I don't believe in 'the one' either - I think that's daft, at least unhelpful, from the way we're constrained to perceive time. But I do think you can turn each other into 'the one' with a lot of hard work and commitment to a common goal - if that's what you want to call it. There's a journey of friendship to go on together, I reckon, in a direction. But the myth of 'the one' only ever seems to lead to disappointment - and that I fear is what happened to the Respectful Workplace Trainer.

I concede I may be naive. It's not my field. All I know is that I honestly would rather stay home and work out how to be an awesome person, than hang around grotty fairgrounds.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 53: SEASONS

It feels as though the year is turning. Perhaps that's a strange thing to say in August, as the school holidays draw on and the cricket hums in the background. But there are signs.

I've said this before, certainly: back in the old days it always felt as though the fulcrum of the year was the camp at the end of July. It neatly split the year into two halves, and when we came back from it, collapsing in tiredness after unpacking the tents, everything definitely felt like late summer. Autumn was in the air, and the new school term was beckoning.

There's no camp these days. We have to navigate our way past the fulcrum without that lovely delineator. And that means typically at some point in August, we look up, and realise what's happening.

And what's happening is that the trees are changing colour.

Already.

I noticed it in the park yesterday. As the sun threw lovely long shadows beneath the oaks and elms, I saw gold shimmering through their translucent leaves. I glimpsed a hint of red too, as the wind rushed through a canopy, and a silvery flutter against the bright blue sky. There's no doubt: the trees are getting ready for autumn.

The grass too. The recent heatwaves have turned the grass a whitish-brown, a dry and crispy carpet to catch the leaves. In fact last week's storms have already hurried that process along.

So strange as it is, it really does feel like the second half of the year. It's darker earlier - sometimes through clouds, but not always, and there's occasionally a shudder in a gust of wind, just enough to remind you that your coat is still hanging up in the hall without you, and that you might need it again soon.

I don't mind. Autumn is my favourite season. And this happens every year doesn't it?

But not quite like this. This year, 2020, isn't like every other year. This year, we've rolled through the seasons in different phases of a lockdown, during the first global pandemic. And I think I, like a lot of people, had hoped it would have disappeared by now and that life could be back to normal.

"Half-way through," I remember saying to my Mum, positively, on the phone. It would have been about seven weeks in. Even then, I expected normality by the summer. So much for normality. Maybe we all felt like that. 

The same turning trees were young and green back then. I wore my winter coat to the park and felt the early spring sunshine. The bare branches were just sprouting into flower, and there was blossom falling on the fresh grass. I don't know if I could have imagined I'd still be wandering out there in autumn.

And maybe there'll be more? There are bound to be freezing November days out there, and perhaps even crunchy snow. Those trees will look very different, poking out of the thick white snow, icing weighing down their heavy branches. Christmas might come and go, and lead us full circle to spring again?

Well. There's a certain joy in watching the seasons change like this. For now though, it's late summer all of a sudden, and delightfully, pensively, startlingly, autumn is coming.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 52: TEAM VIEWER

One of the scary things that happens all the time now is the thing with Team Viewer. If you’ve had to use it (or some equivalent) you’ll know what I’m talking about, and probably why it’s scary.

You give IT permission to take control of your computer, and then you watch them move the cursor, open config windows, close that browser window you left open with your Amazon wish list, then open a new one to test your connection.

In the good old days, as I’ve said before, I’d shut all my windows, log out of google, then take my laptop round to Tom, the Service Desk Wizard. Tom would twoozle a pen in one hand, then fix all my woes (just like any wizard should) but he’s a little further away now, and because he’s too far away to walk to, it makes a lot more sense for the company to send my IT request... you guessed it... to Yerevan Dave, in Armenia.

We’ve been here before: his name’s not really Dave. But he does have control of my computer, and he is using the Team Viewer magic to find out why I’ve lost so many emails.

It must be difficult for HR and Super Bosses, you know, CEOs and the other big cheeses - they most certainly wouldn’t want Yerevan Dave nosing around their inboxes and network shares. Nor, I imagine, would Yerevan Dave want to be burying into that kind of sensitive detail! Not if I know Yerevan Dave!

My guess is that if one of their big-cheesy computers develops a problem, the execs don’t call Yerevan Dave or Tom the Service Desk Wizard. Nah. They’re Commissioners Gordon; they’ve got a hotline. They call HelpDesk Batman.

And by that I mean of course the Big IT Cheese himself, Bruce Wayne, in his fancy kitchen.

Anyway, Dave’s finished now. Something to do with domain profiles, VPNs, carburettors, manual release valves, and sprockety joists and flimflam capacitors... I think.

To be honest, I’d just rather it worked, than me sitting here writing nonsense while Dave browses my Amazon wish list from Armenia.

BEFORE THE STORM

I switched off the engine. It struck me suddenly just how quiet it was in my street - silent. No traffic, no weather, no hubbub, just my wrists clicking as I turned off the headlamps, and the noisy clink of the seatbelt as it unclasped, then spooled across my chest. I guess I do that every day.

My ears buzzed. I imagine pure silence would be so unbearable that our bodies make little noises to protect us from it. Or perhaps they just do, anyway. A little gurgle of the tummy, the air gently cascading in and out through the nose, a creak of the knee. I closed my eyes and I listened.

The Oxford train rattled away across the valley. A mile away at least, but there it was, unmistakable over the sleepers. There was a faint murmur of a TV or radio, and maybe the squirrels leaping in the trees in the park. There was no wind to tickle the leaves, and every bird for a hundred miles had fallen silent since sundown.

Then, there was a soft rumble of very distant thunder. It was barely louder than my stomach, but unmistakably grumbly somewhere - like furniture being pushed around again because the upstairs people still can’t agree on where the sofa should go before their guests arrive for dinner.

The sky started to flicker too. Lightning - white and blue, but also, still silent, and still very far away. A storm was coming. 

And before it came, before it shook the rooftops and split the sky (and it did); before the rain pounded the concrete like hammers and the gutters all sang with joy in the fresh night air (and they did)... the world was quiet. Ready, waiting.

THE MULTIPACK TWIRL SWINDLE

So I was persuaded the other day to go and get a tub of ice cream.

To be fair, I didn't need a huge amount of persuading; at the time it was so hot my head was on fire, and the hypo-decision-making-cortex in my brain had stopped making rational choices. It was basically sending an emergency: "Send ice cream, send ice cream," to the rest of me.

So there I was in the Co-Op, buying a tub of Carte D'or, and multipacks of Galaxy Ripples and Cadbury's Twirls, as the optimum choice (Flakes of course, famously) had sold out.

-

Well. Don't judge me but I ate all the ice-cream. Out of the tub, with a spoon.

Somehow though, I still ended up with chocolate left over, and so this morning, for a snack, I fetched the pack of Twirls from the freezer (for that is where I had them kept) and opened them up.

I'm outraged. No wait, what was that word my friend Sarah found?  Apoplectic. Or perhaps livid, as she'd doubtless prefer. I'm livid.

How come the multipack Twirls are so much smaller than the regular ones? They're barely bigger than fun-size!

First of all, they're 34g. The regular ones are 43g, so that's 9g of chocolatey goodness I was suddenly missing out on. Secondly, the price of a 4x multipack is exactly the same as the price of 4 regular Twirls! So for the same price, I could have bought 4 separate Twirls, and had 36g more chocolate... which is an extra multipack Twirl, isn't it?

What a swindle!

Meanwhile, it turns out (I looked it up) the 11 pack gives better value. That's 236g of Twirly goodness for the price of 5 regular Twirls. But disappointment still lies within, for even though you're technically getting an extra 1.5 Twirls... they're only single bars!

Who's expecting single-wrapped Twirls? They're famously in two-packs! It would be a bit like unwrapping half a Jaffa Cake, or the top bit of a custard cream!

Perfect, you may think, if you needed to stick them in a scoop of ice-cream, in the sad eventuality that you couldn't get Flakes in your local Co-Op for your home-made 99s.

But unfortunately, I had already scoffed all the Carte D'or, hadn't I? So that was that. 

WATERMELON SKY

 Another swelterer today. It's upwards of 30 degrees again, and I'm sitting in my room in shorts and t-shirt with the fan blasting six inches from my face. And I am still boiling.

You know what I could do?

I could eat a watermelon. Yes. A whole, massive, juicy, anguria of a thing, glistening with dew, succulent and red, and deliciously bulbous.

That's what I did in Italy, 25 years ago. I practically lived off watermelons. I'd buy them from the canteen on Via Settembre XIV, I'd get them from the fruit stall; I'd take them home, chop them up, or sit with one on the steps of the medieval church, sometimes between the trees in the ever delightful Piazza Italia. Ah. Happy days. Covered in sticky watermelon, 17 years old in a foreign country, being gawped at by the vecchi and the Italian pigeons.

Funnily enough, just like in Italy, the clouds are stacking up in that way that they do before a storm. As the afternoon wears on, the sun lights their tops in a sort of a crunchy gold, and they stand out against the faded blue, August sky. I remember sitting on the ancient high wall overlooking Umbria, eating anguria, watching clouds like that while the local jazz festival played. That was a hot day, not dissimilar to this.

It would make sense, wouldn't it, to add watermelon to my shopping list. If only for the cool nostalgia.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 51: LONG HAUL

In news that surprises nobody these days, our working-from-home contingency has been extended beyond October, until the end of the year.

And to think, I gulped in March when someone said it would last until the end of June! 42 weeks of working from home would have sent me into shock if I'd known what was coming in March. But then, you could say that about a lot of things.

What is interesting is that each time the Big Cheeses get together, they seem to be extending WFH at the half-way point of the next extension. For example, after 10 weeks, they ballooned it out to 20. Now we've hit 20 (this week is actually Week 22), we're off again to 42 (end of the year). You know what happens next? We get to November, and they extend to the following November... will we be working from home for ever?

I hope not. W-ing from H is proving challenging enough. Another freezing winter, sweltering summer and crunchy autumn, and I'll be feeling cracked up like old leather. If I'm going back at all, 2021 seems about right.

SUNFLOWERS

I remember the day

I first saw the sky,
The breaking of dawn in the dew
The beautiful way
The clouds tumbled by
And the heavens were lit bright and blue

The desperate night
Had lingered so long
And our hope was a day not begun
But there in the light
Came the notes of a song
As the birds serenaded the Sun:

Oh sing to the night
You flowers of gold
Come and sing of the glory above!
For billowing bright
Each heart to behold,
He is rising upon us with love!

And we sunflowers all
In the fresh morning sun,
How we lifted our heads ever high!
And we sang in the thrall
Of the beautiful One
As He burst from the earth to the sky

I remember the day
When I first saw the dawn
And You shone through the yellow and blue
Now sunflowers say
With a passion reborn
Our glory has always been You

Oh sing to the night
You flowers of gold
Come and sing of the glory above!
For billowing bright
Each heart to behold,
He is rising upon us with love!

I'M NOT A LUMBERJACK AND I'M OKAY

"Any reason why you've gone for the lumberjack look?" asked Lisa, laughing, while I logged onto the call.

I was wearing a checkered black and red shirt, and a cap. I smiled, along with everyone else.

I very nearly said:

"Well I do sleep all night and work all day..."

But a thing occurred to me, quite quickly, and, in just enough of the moment for me to lose the window of comedy timing. And the thing that occurred to me (sitting there in my lumberjack 'uniform') is that I don't think I ever found Monty Python particularly funny.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the humour mechanics of Monty Python. A man writes a joke so funny that it can be weaponised by nation states, another guy does a dance and slaps someone in the face with a wet fish. Meanwhile there's an office for people who want to have an argument, and of course, a pet-shop owner tries to convince an irate customer that the parrot he just bought is simply 'pining for the fjords'.

These phrases entered our culture a long time ago, and in certain subsets of social groups, they keep reappearing - even now. 

At university you were considered the height of wit, a regular Oscar Wilde in fact, if you put on your best French accent to retort to an argument with:

"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!" 

I kid you not: everyone fell about at that kind of pre-Internet 'meme'.

For some reason though, I don't think I found it funny then either. It was surreal slapstick, sure, deliberately designed to make no sense at all and use surprise twists or rambling non-endings to derive the laugh; it combined cartoonish grizzle with irreverent silliness, subverting any previous expectations we may have had, by obliterating the traditional sketch structure that (until that moment) had needed a solid set-up and punchline. I get it - that subversion in itself, is humour, not to mention the rebellious Britishness of the thing.

However, surprise really is at the heart of funny - and by the time I encountered this subculture, the 'surprise' element of all of those jokes was already well known. 

What I'm saying is that nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition any more, except for everyone, who suddenly very much expected the Spanish Inquisition. And the only humour that was left was the shadow of that first funny appearance, re-shaded by students in halls in the 1990s who coalesced around the fading remains of an old fire, warming their hands on the neatly quotable memories. Hilarious. But not (I thought) funny.

So I didn't say anything, even though, my colleagues were probably of just the right age to have loved Monty Python almost as much as they loved quoting it. It would have been a cheap laugh I didn't believe in.

Plus, the more I think about it, the more I think it would have been me stoking that fire, doing the very thing my friends were doing in 1996 that made me not want to fit in in the first place.

And even lumberjacks have to be true to themselves, don't they?

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 50: NO QUEUES AT THE BAR

‘This is new,’ said my inner monologue. I was approaching a pub I’d been to loads of times before. Only this time, instead of strolling in, hands casually in pockets, I was met with the signs - the new, laminated, bold-print instructions on safely using the Fox and Hounds.

They’re very well organised. A one-way system around the garden, well-spaced tables with large umbrellas, menus and benches; table service with bar staff in posh black masks! Nobody goes to the bar any more; in Coronatown, in 2020, the bar comes to you.

Where was this when I was first figuring out the pub-queuing rules in the 1990s? That mystifying system we had of slowly nudging our way through a sea of tall people’s elbows, leaning confidently on the bar and trying to catch the barman’s eye... would not have been the frustrating puzzle it was had there been table service!

Gone would have been the days of seeing people who were behind you suddenly appear in front of you in the ‘queue’ and trying to figure out how they quantum-tunnelled past you! (And for a nation famed for our queues by the way, the pub is a belting anomaly that no-one ever talks about isn’t it! We queue for the bus simply, linearly, but the  queue for the bar is a melee - either so advanced that it no longer looks like a queue at all, or so primitive that our quest for ‘getting served’ has somehow overwhelmed our traditional queue-logic completely and turned us into a sprawl.)

Anyway that was the old way. No more clutching a tenner in a sweaty palm while you’re being shunted about by the crowd, all angling to rest a victorious hand on the wood, or a precious foot on the gold pipe that runs beneath.

And what about having to lean across, to shout your order into the raised eyebrow of the staff because the music’s enormous? I used to have to heave myself up on my elbows, over the bar like a child, feet dangling and everything.

“Pint of coke, no ice,” I’d say. The bartender would cup his ears and mouth the word ‘what?’

I’d invariably end up with some purple concoction. At one particular pub in Bath, the cider I’d found I’d accidentally ordered (according the system) glowed in the dark.

Yeah all that’s different now. It’s civilised and simple. A man who looked like Zorro showed me to a garden table with a Kronenburg umbrella, and I ordered an orange juice. I didn’t go inside once the whole time. There he was with a pad and a pencil like a springer spaniel.

It’s sad I guess, going to places that used to feel freer. But for now we all get that it’s necessary. I do hope I get to live in a world where the old English pub is back to normal though, some day.

TICK TOCK

Tick tock

Said the clock

It’s time to go to bed

But somehow I was writing

Silly poetry instead

THE POSTHUMOUS JOKER

Right. This is about words and pronunciations, so yes, feel free to skip over it. Though it does start with Batman...

... kind of.

This morning I watched a clip of Heath Ledger playing the Joker in the film, The Dark Knight. You might know that he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that role in 2009... and perhaps rightly so; he was great.

But he was also dead. The award was presented, as they say, ‘posthumously’.

Posthumous. How do you say that word? I’m asking because the narrator in the clip said:

Poast hyoomus

... and I spluttered, “What?” over my breakfast porridge.

That surely can’t be how you say that word? Post (as in lamppost), hyoo (as in Hugh Laurie) and mus (as in... well mus, I suppose). Post humous?

Porridge.

I scratched my head for a while, looking puzzled. Perhaps I’d only ever seen that word written down? Perhaps I’d been hearing it wrong in my head, just like I’d read ‘Por-taker-bin’ instead of ‘portakabin’ when I was eight, but surely it’s not that obscure, posthumous! I must have actually heard it somewhere!

I have been pronouncing it:

Poss thyoo mus

... Syllable stress on the poss, digraph ‘TH’ as it is in bath, and myth, and yes, Heath (the joker) Ledger... I never thought of splitting it out into post humous! That just seems mad.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s an American thing - you guys say stuff differently to us Brits, and that’s just the way it is: a matter of regional interpretation. Well fair enough, though I do have thoughts on US English, for another day...

So I did what any twenty-first century indignant would do, and looked it up. I went to dictionary.com and I went to the Cambridge dictionary site, and then I checked it with Merriam Webster.

And. Here’s what I found:

/ˈpɒstjʊməs/ = posstyuhmus

So I was half right, and so was the narrator who’d made me splurge porridge oats on my laptop. Both right, both wrong. No TH but no American ‘post’ (rhymes with toast) either, and certainly not split into two words so that you stress the humous bit!

Admittedly (and thankfully) it’s not a word I need everyday. At least next time I know how to say it. And listen out for it! Who knows, maybe I’m not alone in mispronouncing posthumous. What do you do?

Though, thinking about it, I wouldn’t correct anyone in person. But perhaps that’s how these things perpetuate? Politeness lets them lurk in the shadows of our vocabulary? 

Well, sometimes Batman has to let the Joker get on with it.