FROM CANUTE TO MY SUBCONSCIOUS

Last night I dreamed that I’d left my piano, the fabled Nord stage 2 EX, on a beach, forgotten about it, and remembered it just as the tide was coming in.

“Do you think it means something?” asked Sammy in the morning. I told her I didn’t think it did, and inside I told myself that I very much hoped that it didn’t.

I can’t imagine doing something like that. When I got back to the beach, the green water was lapping up the sides of the keyboard stand, almost touching the bottom of the keyboard. I dipped a hand into the cold sea and realised I couldn’t risk getting in in case I got swept away. Some people were trying to help I think, but their plan was to lift it out from above using scarves, and (in the dream) I thought that to be a terrible idea, and a sure fire way to tip the Nord accidentally into the waiting ocean.

I don’t know what happened. Before long I was fluttering my eyes open to sunlight through the blind, and the green water had become warm duvet and soft sheets.

I don’t think every dream has to mean something does it? It’s troubling me a bit, almost like the feeling that I have actually left something important somewhere, and I’m about to realise, moments too late. From Canute to my subconscious I guess the truth is that the tide waits for no-one?

Can I chalk this up to just the random flickering of a sleeping brain? I do hope so.

RAIN AT 2AM

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of rain bulleting the window. It’s been so stormy. In the dark I just lay there, listening, convincing myself that the house wasn’t shaking, when two utterly disconnected thoughts happened.

I get random thoughts, but two at once is a new thing. It was as though my brain woke up suddenly and just couldn’t be bothered to gatekeep them. In you come, lads. All I’ve got is the rain pounding and the ceiling.

First off: how come in Star Trek, when the ship gets hit, the consoles on the bridge explode? Photon torpedo incoming, impact with the hull, immediate sparks in front of Chekov and Sulu and then smoke and stunt people leaping from smoke and blast and fire? It just wouldn’t happen would it? I mean if a tire pops on the motorway, the glovebox doesn’t blow up.

Second. What would actually happen if the leader of Political Party A just said, hey, do you know what, Political Party B’s idea is pretty good? Imagine that in America, where the ballooning face of the candidate publicly praises the incumbent president and then the president says thank you; your ideas are good too, even though on the whole, we disagree about how the country should be run. Maybe we ought to work together a bit more for the sake of the country?

The ceiling had no answers. It’s naive isn’t it, to expect a world like that, and I wouldn’t blame anybody laughing at the idea that we might wonder it. Perhaps I ought to study politics to understand why it’s necessary to be so oppositional. Perhaps I should study Star Trek to find out why the set wobbles.

And why did these two unconnected thoughts appear together? Or are they connected? Is it really the same question? A thing that doesn’t make sense on the telly? A thing that should be better.

Gosh I don’t know. I can’t change either. I just listened to the rain and went to sleep.

THE WISDOM OF THE CROWD

They had a ‘guess the number of eggs in a jar’ competition in the office yesterday. There it was, sitting on the reception desk with A4 sheets pinned beneath it. It glistened with chocolate eggs, each wrapped in shiny paper.

“I’ve got a plan,” I said to Pedro. He looked at me. “Have you heard of the ‘wisdom of crowds’?”

Alex, one of the students had. He span around in his chair to explain.

“It was a long time ago, I think, a bunch of people tried to guess the weight of a cow or something. It turned out that the closest answer was the average of all their guesses and it’s a thing! Like a mathematical thing where all the guesses of the crowd focus on roughly the correct answer.”

I told them I had a plan. Take a photo of the guesses so far, put them into a spreadsheet and work out the average.

We all discussed it at length. Pedro had already decided to guess the maximum number of eggs by calculating the area of a cross section of the jar, then roughly dividing it by the length of each egg. If he then multiplied that number by the height, he’d have a good estimate for the total. His guess was 270 eggs.

I thought there would be more than 300 eggs in the jar, simply based on observation, but I was so intrigued by the scientific approach that we talked about it further. What about the way the eggs tesselate between the layers, how they nestle into spaces below their layer, or pack like close-packed atoms in a solid? I thought 270 would be an underestimate.

Pedro was equally fascinated by my wisdom of crowds method. I agree, it is quite extraordinary, but I was pretty sure it would work. I got the numbers and turned them into data, then turned that data into a histogram.

Two guesses were high: 500 and 600. Two were low, and the others were no more than 40 apart. With only 28 guesses, I knew it would be risky to rely on the crowd, so I decided to wait until around 4pm for other guesses to come in. 311, 323, 290… I kept nipping out to collect the latest guesses.

“When did you put yours up?” I asked. “The other day,” said Pedro. Fair enough. I was calculating the standard deviation on a sample of 31 guesses, but of course the variation was huge - about 115. Should I hold to the wisdom of the crowd, I wondered, or listen to the wisdom of Pedro?

I’ve always thought science and statistics were reliable. Logic tumbles into maths, and becomes science - immutable, open-minded, correct, based on the purity of an objective viewpoint. How the wisdom of crowds works I don’t know, but hey, if it the language of the universe could work, if it could inform me, guide me, lead me to a jar packed with chocolate eggs, then surely it was worth a go. I decided to stick with the crowd. The mean average was 301. Someone of course had already guessed 300 and so at 4pm, armed with a pen, I popped back to reception, one final time to make my scientific, logical, statistical guess, based on the wisdom of the crowd. 301 eggs.

-

A few moments later, I swung back into the office.

“You know what the crowd could never have predicted?” I asked, sardonically. Three faces turned blankly. “I’ll tell you,” I said, “That reception would take the jar back in at 3:30.”

Gone. No jar, no sign up sheets, no little yellow chicks pecking around on top of the desk - just the sound of the reception team in their office counting and laughing to themselves behind a half-open door.

My friends chuckled. They told me they would let me know when the eggs were counted, just how close I would have come. Meanwhile, I closed down my spreadsheet and its mocking bar chart.

You know, I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. I told Sammy about it and she guffawed into her pillow. Did the science work? Is there wisdom in a crowd? Did those outliers shift the numbers way off target? Was the sample too small and were the guessers unreliable? Should I have just entered into the spirit of the thing and plumped for a guess? Probably. I might easily have saved some time.

I closed my eyes and listened to the rain. The lesson is probably to stop overthinking everything, isn’t it. Perhaps it’s not all a problem to be solved.

OCEAN WAVES AND RAIN-SOAKED WINDOWS

Listening to ‘ocean waves’ today for white noise. It’s okay but it just keeps reminding me that I’m not at the beach.

I’m in Oxford, which is about as far from the nearest ocean as you can be on this old island of ours. Alright, it’s not as landlocked as say, Kansas, but it is still 70 miles from the sea - which is a long way when you’re stuck in an office with plasma lamps and rain-streaked windows.

“Have you checked the weather?” asked Sammy this morning in the car on the way to the station.

“Erm, no,” I replied. I caught up with her thinking suddenly and pulled the sleeves of my very thin summer coat. The Met office app showed a row of grey clouds with heavy looking raindrops. Too late to do anything about that.

Now here we are, with grey clouds over Oxford and rain dribbling down the window. It isn’t matching the sound of waves crashing onto the shore in my ears.

I heard someone yesterday say that people with high expectations have the lowest resilience. In other words, we’re vulnerable to depression and inactivity because the gap between reality and what we’d hoped for is massive. That sounds like a typical Generation Y complaint but it almost certainly afflicts us Xennials as well - a malaise brought on by the crushing reality of squashed pipe-dreams.

I’ve been thinking about it. I do believe that success is a result of character, and character is built on adversity - therefore, a little difficulty, a little pain and failure is actually very healthy. But what do you do when the chasm between you and the thing you hoped for is still far wider than you can jump? Do you give up? Change your expectations? Start looking for other ways to build a bridge?

I do not know. I’m in a rainy town with the sound of the sea ringing in my ears, trying to think about it. That person who made the comment went on to say that he wished a little pain and suffering on the students he was talking to - Stamford graduates who’d known what it was to be top of their class, surrounded by brilliant hope and sparkling expectations. Pain and suffering. They all laughed out loud when he said it of course, but he was very serious. Difficulty would give them resilience. Resilience was the key to success.

I switched off the ocean waves in the end. I have to focus on the next step, which today is getting through a day in Oxford: a working day, a set of to-dos and the agenda that’s trickled down in front of me. Inexorably though, I know the day will morph into tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, until the coming moment when I’m standing on a windswept shore - endless ocean ahead, crashing and rolling onto sand and stones. I’m pretty sure I can get there.

LIGHTBULBS AND CANDLES

Today I feel as though I’d quite like to change something big. You know, on a whim, just dye my hair, quit my job, buy a car, move to Scotland - something like that. Something to really get the eyebrows flying.

We won’t do any of that, of course. Sammy and I are far too risk-averse to jump without thinking, and I know that you can’t throw a rock in the pond without making ripples, no matter how satisfying the splash. But sometimes, just sometimes… life is so hard and so tedious, it just feels like you have to change… something.

That old Einstein quote came up the other day - about how it’s insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect different results. I don’t know if he really did say that, but when I heard it dropped into conversation, I stared at the floor and pondered. What about a hammer bashing a nail into a tough bit of wood? What about what we’re told about praying and never giving up? What about keeping going because the darkest hour is always before the dawn?

I think there are contexts for repeating the same thing over and over until you break through, and there are contexts for changing things until you find the way to get somewhere new. That’s what Edison did with the lightbulb - each failure was a step, an evolution towards the best solution. In one sense he kept doing the same thing, in another he changed something every single time. It’s said that it took over 500 iterations.

Nevertheless, it does feel like I have to change something. It could be a small thing, rather than a drastic thing. Then again, perhaps it needs to be something big and scary?

I wonder how Thomas Edison felt when that final iteration popped on and lit up his workshop? I imagine he saw dollar signs, but it’s nice to think that he clapped his hands together and said ‘Eureka!’ or something apposite. ‘By Jiminy!’ or ‘Saints be praised!’ or something American.

I don’t know what to do; only that there’s an ongoing dissatisfaction in simultaneously believing in electric light and yet still going to bed with a candle night after night after night.

A MOMENT OF CALM

There’s an advert out at the moment for tea. Gone are the days of chimps pushing pianos or cartoon Yorkshiremen putting their slippers up. This one features a woman in ripped off jeans and billowing shirt, reclining on top of a car at the beach. The sun sparkles from the waves and she lifts a transparent mug to her lips (teabag label in view), gazing out over the endless blue.

“A moment of calm…” says the soft voiceover. The camera pulls back and we see her on her car, parked up on the sand. Finis.

My guess is that this is how they want to make you feel when you think about that tea. Free, unbothered by the world, off-road, alive, living your best life. By association, your subconscious will remember that in the supermarket, and a glimpse of that feeling will return, just long enough for you to pull a box off the shelf. You might not even realise it.

How did she make that tea? She took a flask with her, I suppose. There’s no sign of it though. Perhaps she poured out the hot water into the cup in the car and then climbed up onto the bonnet? Perhaps she took the flask up there, and the cup, and the teabag? Either way, it would have been a bit awkward. There’s a lot of paraphernalia involved.

Maybe she has a friend? No sign of a tea-making accomplice though, especially when the camera pans back. There were no footprints, so her buddy probably hadn’t gone for a walk, and in any case, ‘a moment of calm’ suggests that we’re to think of her alone, miles from anyone who could cause her stress. No, she drove out there solo. She made herself a cuppa alone, and she clambered up there on her own, for certain. And somehow she’s going to have to climb down again with an empty mug and a soggy old teabag.

A moment of calm eh? You don’t get to see the cumbersome moments of awkward struggle either side. You don’t see her pulling off the road and wondering whether her tires will sink into the sand. You don’t see the tide coming in, or a dog-walker shouting “Shouldn’t be here, love” or pointing out the Pay & Display thirty yards behind her. None of that - just ten seconds of calm, earned with a larger amount of difficulty beforehand, and followed by more of the same.

But maybe that is exactly the point. Sigh. I’ve been played on a meta level. Again.

Go on then, stick the kettle on. I get it tea people, I get it.

HOSPITAL CITY

Hospitals are just weird cities. I seem to have been visiting at the end of the days, when it feels like I’ve walked in on the tail-end of something long and tiring. Exhausted faces wander the corridor, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lanyard dangling and soft shoes giving themselves away on the squeaky floor. The little shops are all closed, grey shutters pulled to the polish, and signage switched off. Someone mops. Someone else pushes a rattling trolley. A few hours ago, I imagine, this hallway was chaos.

Then there’s the ward. My dad of course, is in the Acute Stroke Unit, same as my Mum all those years ago. Through the rubber-sealed double doors, past the steadily blinking intercom and hand sanitisers, round the very wide curved reception desk and into the hum of curtains, machines, white boards, posters and clocks. It smells of TCP.

Weird cities indeed. Everything is connected, everyone has their place and their uniform and their role. Once again I wish I knew the difference between the nurses in dark blue, in light blue and in white. How do you address them? Do I need to?

I didn’t really. One of the whites came and took my dad’s blood pressure. She was nice. Then a dark blue came and said hello to everyone on the ward. She was exactly the kind of person you want as a nurse, I thought. She greeted my dad by name and asked how he was doing.

I found the ward a bit difficult actually. There were old men in every bed. Wild hair, gaunt faces, angular limbs. One kept crying out, “Help!” in a loud, raspy voice. I don’t know how my dad has slept these three weeks. It’s about time he was heading home.

“Don’t grow old,” warned my Mum, half smiling. My eyes widened a bit in the glaring light around Dad’s hospital bed. Everything within me wants to avoid everything about this place. I never want to be there, staring helplessly up at those ceiling tiles. And yet every day of my life is certainly connected to the next. Perhaps there’s a chain of days, of mornings, noons and nights, leading inexorably to the last day of my life. And statistically… the old men’s ward in hospital city… well I just don’t know what to think about it.

Life’s so fragile. What if it were over tomorrow? What would you say you’ve achieved? How do you make sure that between now and hospital city, you live, and I mean really live?

NOT THE PLUCKY HERO

“That er, that doesn’t sound good,” said another passenger leaping up. I could see heads popping up over the train seats, and I flicked between their wild, puzzled expressions, and then out of the window.

Still moving. Fields rushed by, clouds hung in the air over trees and grass and telephone wires. The engine sounded normal. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong at all. Yet we’d heard what we’d heard - a great clanking of something underneath, clattering and bouncing along as the train sped over the top of it.

Tree branch was my guess. Next would be something falling off the front of the train, but that seemed a bit less likely. Within moments, the passengers on the 1734 from Oxford were cautiously back to their phones and their books.

I still have adrenaline though. What use would I be in an emergency? If the train overturned, or there were some desperate story of survival from a horrible accident, who would I be? Not the plucky hero the movies tell me to be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I’m no Jason Statham.

No, heart pounding, fear burning and panic-mode activated, I’d be doing my best to get out. I hope I’d help others instead of smashing a window and rolling out into the fresh air, but I don’t think anyone can be absolutely certain.

I feel sure it was a tree branch. The driver didn’t bother to let us know, and the train kept rumbling into stations as it went. As long as: it goes, it can actually stop, and it can start again, I don’t think there’s much more really that I can expect from a train. Perhaps that the doors open? That’s a good one.

Anyway, nearly home now. The sun dipped below the hills of South Oxfordshire, the train whizzes and rumbles in its evening glint. I’ll be there soon, and I tell you: that really does sound good.

POCKETS OF SPRING

We’ve had pockets of Spring, I guess. The occasional warm afternoon, some blue sky, tinted gold. The trees are budding certainly, and yes, blooms of pink magnolia stick out against the grey. It’s hard to say the Spring has definitely arrived though. And it’s still pretty chilly.

I’m wondering a lot about life at the moment. No surprise - my Dad’s still in hospital, my Mum is only just about able to walk without two sticks, and I’m in a weird funk about my identity - all the beauty and learning of being less than two years married, and a whole bunch of fears about the future mix around in the paint pot with the failures of the past. It isn’t any wonder that I’m thinking about life.

I put Vivaldi on. Primavera. It’s so joyous and glorious and magnificent; like watching the flowers open in real-time and turn their brilliant new petals towards the sun. From the very first bars there’s the elegance of soaring birds against the fresh white clouds, and the sound of laughter in green grass. Spring should be all about hope, new life, something unseen and young and wonderful.

Perhaps it’s because Easter’s early, or it’s down to global warming or something, but it feels a bit like Spring is struggling to break through the winter. Sammy pointed out that it feels like it’s rained every day of the year so far. I couldn’t disagree - whether that is true or not, it feels like it. Magnolia, yes. Also puddles.

Perhaps I should be patient. Perhaps my breakthrough is on the way. Perhaps all the signs of Spring are shooting up in the shadows, and I’m not seeing them for what they are - promises. Perhaps my Dad will be home and make a full recovery? 

Perhaps I’ll figure out what I want to be, and it will satisfy me to pursue it. Perhaps all those other things that weigh on me like heavy skies, will be pierced with warm sunshine, wisping them away like candyfloss, until Vivaldi’s world of magnificent Spring makes sense again.

FOREST FIRES

Reading Prince Harry’s book, Spare, the other day has been enlightening. I don’t want to talk about the details - about a million people have already raked them over - but one thing has definitely occurred to me as a result of the tell-all, and that is that humans are not designed to hold onto anger.

It’s not a theory backed up with any evidence or discipline; I’m no psychologist. It’s more of an observation. A person consumed with unresolved anger always seems to have a hard time containing it, and whether they’re princes in palaces or part-time poets, that particular raw emotion seems to come spilling out sooner or later. And it can be torrential for the closest bystanders.

I don’t want to be an angry person. Oh, I know for some it helps them focus, gives them fire and drive, and I’m all for channeling passion - it’s just that I’d rather keep any flames of fury under control in the grate, instead of throwing burning logs at people in the living room. There has to be a way to master it.

What I would like is to have a soft heart. It isn’t a push-over heart or a wimp-out-of-conflict heart; it’s more about listening and embracing and forgiving. It sounds woolly doesn’t it? Not much use for warring brothers in high castles. Frequently in the book, I’ve slid my bookmark between the pages and wondered how on earth I’d advise them if for some reason they asked me. I’d have an easier time with budgies trapped in gilded cages I think, but I’d hope at least I’d tell them about anger corroding from the inside out and how it’s best to deal with it quickly and in short accounts - rather like venting a pressurised volcano.

As I said though, I’m no psychologist. Just someone recognising things I need to deal with in myself, and seeing that left to its own devices, an angry heart is just a forest fire waiting to happen.

BOUNTY CAKE

You know what I’d like? A cake made out of Bountys.

Now I know what half of you are thinking and yes, I know, but we’re each of us entitled to like what we like. And while you might think Bountys were a cruel Machiavellian prank on humanity, I think I’d like a Bounty cake. And we like what we like, don’t we? So there.

I guess it would be coconut filling, all the way through. Or perhaps it would have to be spongier somehow to keep its shape, but it would definitely have that same taste. And then it would be encased in that Mars chocolate, simulating as it does, the shell of a desert island coconut, rippled by the tropical wind on a turquoise sea

A slice of that with a cup of tea right now, would be terrific. Sammy’s out. I’ve put the FA Cup quarter final on as though I were a person who knew about football. I do wonder whether I’d have liked football more if it had been on TV. Then, I still had to endure it in PE I suppose, so perhaps it would still have been awful. Well, you like what you like.

Could you melt down a Bounty? I wonder if you could melt the chocolate and then use it for icing. Then it would just be a sponge recipe, probably two layers like a Victoria sponge, but with a splash of coconut flavouring and coconut flakes mixed in. There could be a chocolate filling as well.

Man United went one-nil up while I wrote that. The stadium erupted with celebration as the players in red peeled away to the corner flag. What does that feel like? I wondered - that amount of noise at something you did, you made happen. It must be intoxicating, dangerous, addictive.

I’m going to be dreaming about that Bounty cake now.