Fatal dead line

Do you have a personal problem? A person problem? Wish that someone would simply go away?

http://www.hitman.us

They take Visa.

Ahem.

Perfect love...

I can hear it ticking away now - yes... aha...'drives out fear'? Fear, love... opposites... incompatible? Wait a minute. Isn't fear part of the strongest sort of love? Isn't light only light because of the darkness? Aren't corners only sharp because of the straight lines, and, and, and... all the other neat, packaged clichés about Life.

"Don't talk to me about Life. I've seen it." It's got lots of strange bits in, but it's far from 'rubbish'. Memories. Threads running back through the mind, but only having any essence at all because of the edges on which they snag, twist, turn what was simply "now" into "I'd never have guessed at the time, but looking back it all makes so much more sense". Even "aggggh!" into "hmmm... that's certainly worth remembering...". So is there any use then for fear? If all the nows become thens, with inconceivable value, could not one suppose that fear never should be, well... feared? Not so much on a level of anything actually changing whether or not one gets scared, but simply whether one should.

But the biggest love that I can know, is only like that because of the fear that God has let me see. The only way I can look at a diagram of two perpendicular lines and see love, is that God has let me look towards myself, and to see the fear inside. The crumpled fist of hidden helplessness. The hurt pride that laughs itself off, but then burrows down to grow new claws. The selfishness that gives away the last sweet, to grab hungrily at the piousness of its own sacrifice. If I had no fear of that, I should not spin around, eyes sprinting across the reaches of what I can understand, seeking some real way to rid myself of it. I would not plead with God, for him to come up with some real answer to it. Surely he could, surely he'd be able to? Even though it must be impossible for him... for he knows. He knows what it's like in there. He knows it doesn't get any better when I forget it. He knows I haven't seen even the half of it.

Finished! Achieved! Accomplished! That's what he said. That's what he cried out, knowing, like no-one else ever will, what it truly meant. That he could somehow fold up inside himself all of the whole of which he'd turned my eyes to see only a part. Not just with a barge-pole, not with sterile gloves afraid to touch and a face mask preventing him breathing it in. Not with tinted glasses seeing less and tweezers feeling little, but with both arms held wide open and with his heart still beating with light. He reaches out his crushing hand, strong, undaunted but with the softest contact. Takes the crumpled fist, the molten ashes from my own and holds them to his chest. How that pumping light could touch this, my weak antithesis of his firm innocence? But hold it he does, and catch my eye. Could there ever be an eye I could not catch, but his? Yet without sound or motion he simply says

"it's going down with me. I'll see you in the morning..."



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Blame it on the Radio

"did you marry your teacher, or did you just have sex?"

I like turning on Radio 4 at random times during the day. As a student, the times of day that one comes home to one's room can often be fairly random. I'm a great fan of the almost incomprehensibly inappropriate subjects which are on during the day and night. Inappropriate not in the moral sense, despite what the opening quote may indicate, but as things that students just shouldn't be listening to. Early in the morning and the evenings are disappointingly predictable.
News.
Politics.
Comedy.
Well, Radio 4 comedy is like nothing else, but it's almost too acceptable to listen to. Among some people it's almost cool. I do sometimes wish I was always washing up at 6:30pm on weekdays.

But gardening? Strangely alluring. Really - I just don't know what it is that makes me want to sit there and absorb polite elderly people recommending this season's exciting south-facing, light-soil-preferring, disease-resistant geraniums to each other. But it draws me in and hangs onto me like a shadowy beast, following the trail of crumbs falling from the dissolving cookie in my perforated pocket lining. Usually relegated to the recesses of mere dread but perpetually recluse and festering. The vice that would not need to be hidden away in secret, simply because it would never occur in public. Like how many sheets of toilet paper is your custom - no-one knows, and no-one asks. Just when I think I've forgotten about it... Like the way that I have just lost The Game. (sorry!)... I absent-mindedly wander in, push the button and get ensnared again.

Various ways to enjoy a sandy beach

Aberystwyth has many charms. Probably more than about anywhere else in the world. Miles of soft, golden sand is not one of it's more abundant assets though. For this one needs to translate one's self about 8 miles north, to a little enclave of enchantment called Ynyslas. It's a charming cycle ride, especially with five friends and 11 wheels between you. The rain was lashing down and the sun hid it's face as we gathered, undetered. Llanbadarn was widely mocked as a fool (but a nice one at that) for showing up in a t-shirt, socked through before starting ride. About half an hour later he was shown to be much wiser than the rest of us, as we pack our coats into our bags and the sun takes the mask from it's face and glows like the little child who knew how to tie their shoe-laces all along, but still liked making Mummy tie them instead.

Many aching muscles later, and a good time was had by all. Here's to the beginning of the summer term, and many more cycle rides to go.

Things learnt today:
-> Ynyslas rocks, because there aren't many there.
-> Unicycles don't work on soft sand
-> Wear a t-shirt, whatever the weather looks like

Door not in use.

I wonder how often it happens, that in a lecture in a module titled "Web Programming", teaching about website 'sessions', people have been reduced to tears. It did today. It happened to me. I don't cry often, though in the last year or two I have developped a lot and now the occasional film or song in church (or even book, in exceptional circumstances) will get the warm-and-salties running. But who can keep a dry eye, or even a straight face, when a lecturer dispenses his knowledge through a beard for which the definition 'super-goatee' would be like describing the grand canyon as a pavement crack, and gesticulates as if his limbs have been re-animated from a paralytic state using just a smidgen too much silicone.

Then he says "let's just put this together with some syntactic sugar" and all hope is gone. Just hang your head and try to explode quietly.

New-fangled ideas

This morning was the chronological host to an event which surprised even me. My mother is a regular computer and internet user, and perfectly competent with it. It seems though, that the mental processes that go with this ability, and the intergration of this with normal life, still seem to be a little distant.

Scenario (I wonder where that word comes from - it doesn't look very, well, local.) - Mum has lost touch with an old friend who was her bridesmaid 25 years ago. These things happen. The thing is, now that she wants to discover her again, she begins to employ a rather strange method. It involves paper. Both in the form of a letter, and in the form of a paper - the Luton local press. The idea being that if this bridesmaid-from-yesteryear is still known in her local area, someone might read a note placed in the newspaper and be able to share her contact details. All well and good. Not a bad plan. Could even give some useful results, with a lot of luck, lots of paper, and several weeks.

Or. This beautiful beast which you are riding at this very moment. The internet. Yes, just before mother leaves to post her letter to the newspaper to get this manual process rolling, I enquire innocently whether she's tried Google yet? Seems not. So a quick search of the name of this, now not so young, lady. Guess what? She's got her name and current photo ( apparently quite recognisable after 25 years) on a website of a local (to her at least) Gilbert and Sullivan society.

Mum then had only the dilemma of whether Royal Mail's current self-adherent stamp glue would come off with steaming.

The call of the sea

When the salty sea air is making the metaphorical journey down from the recesses of memory into the less metaphorical recesses of ones nasal cavity it can mean only one thing. Yes, it needs no call-ID feature, no picture-message-ringtone, no door peephole... the call of the sea can be coming only from that epitome of sun, sea, students and socks and sandals that is... Aberystwyth!

Sweet home Aberystwyth, where the skies are so grey,
Sweet home Aberystwyth, I'm a-comin' home today!

Which reminds me: I'd better be a-packin' up my bags.

Whatever a cynic may think, surely this proves that Spring has come to Britain?

A good holiday day begins with waking up without the aid of artificial expergefaction, the cold grey light filtered through the yellow curtain, a more practical form of rose-tinted glasses. The window pane glistening with raindrops, occasionally getting scattered by a gust of wind hurling itself, and a fresh volley of drops, at the window from the outside. Inside is still warm.

A few more chapters of a world so like this one. Maybe a little more coincidental, a little more magical and a good dollop more explainable. The parts that aren't are quite intentional. All the parts that don't work, all the reflections of the incapacity in this 'real' life are stacked against each other into ways that seem to make them make so much more sense.

That's Adrian Plass for you. His short novel, An Alien at St. Wilfred's... a beautiful way to spend about 6 hours of your life. Hopefully it will affect much more than the hours that it is read.

But now that the sun is shining, the sky is so blue it almost convinces you that it's not even cold outside and the remains of the rain make half the world sparkle. What music can I listen to on a day like this? When silly love songs just make me just want to forget, and loud, angry ones don't work because I don't have regrets. Nothing too flippant, yet not too poinient, in case it finds a nerve best kept hidden. Not too distinctive yet not too bland. No use being sad, but happy seems a little off the mark. Can't look forward, don't want to look backward, won't look down, I'll have to look up.

OK :)

This is not the end

...it is not even the beginning of the end. In fact, it is quite simply the beginning of the beginning (discounting of course, all the other tentative beginnings that I've had in this direction).

So, I've finally started writing an online journal; that which the Funky and With It social commentators might describe as yet another portentous spore on the hay-fever-sufferers nemesis that is the world of the 'blog' (assuming here that the concept of blogging is like a summer meadow... work with me on this...).

In other words, I'll put into other words various things that I find to be worth commenting on in this funny thing called life. I've been told that people seem to enjoy the way that I write, so I hope that my attempts at interesting lexicographic contemplation will be received with glee and anticipation (or at least amicable sympathy).

The more that it seems people are reading this caboodle of wiffle, the more I'll be inclined to add to it. So please do, read and return.

So, with nothing more to comment on currently than the weather (lovely and sunny, spring definitely rolling up it's sleeves and putting the patio plants out), I'll ponder rhetorically whether anyone else has noticed the delicious irony in the slogan used by 'Cauldron' brand vegetarian ready-meals. "Adding life to your cooking" Mmhmm?