This Is This

I worked for a radio station over the summer in New Orleans where I foolhardily rode out Hurricane Andrew.

Wrote a book (unpublished) and moved to Manchester. The university, coincidentally, stood where my dad did his RAF training.

Set out alone travelling for a month round Europe and Turkey. Slept on roofs and started playing guitar.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry.

England felt like home again, as Luke, Guy, Lindsay and others became my family, friends and brothers.

I walked into a health food, alternative remedy place yesterday and walked straight up to the counter and asked if they had any aspirin.

The look they gave me was priceless. Try it sometime.

I might walk up to a drug dealer and ask if he has any organic caffeine-free drinks that can stop me feeling bloated.

That’s the headline promo flag on the front page of today’s Independent.

Maybe tomorrow they will have a pop at the Jewish folks. Or people with excema. Ooh - what about Thalidomide kids?

It seems that the media can have a pop at men, gingers and posh people with no reprisals whatsoever.*

Still, it could be worse. I could be Prince Harry.

*Actually, I did reprise just a bit, but they’ll never write back.

Sure, I know we’ve had John Peel Day when the late DJ was remembered a couple of weeks ago with gigs in his honour, but that day was the anniversary of his last broadcast and today is one year since his death.

I think the pioneer of the airways and champion of independent music would have welcomed any alternative festival, so here it is - Alternative John Peel Day. Sure it may not be a big event now, but the first Glastonbury was a few hundred revellers getting groovy on free love and cheap milk, so why not? In years to come I could grow a nasty beard, put up fencing around this site and annoy locals while my best postings arrive by helicopter.

For now, though, I thought as a tribute to John Peel I could make this page load at the wrong speed or something, or change all of my links to go to websties no one has ever heard of.

But the man who trumpeted teenage kicks should be best honoured in song. (Straps on a guitar while audience emits a groan.)

Sixteen marks the halfway point of the Sum Of All Years so to break things up - and because it’s Alt John Peel Day - here’s a song about the adolescent priviledge of indecision. It contains some lyrics I am most proud of, because rock stuff is hard to write. The Killers and The Strokes do it brilliantly.

Here’s a bunch of links because I’m new to this and not sure which will work.

Play the song:
56k dial-up cheapseats connection

Broadband rattle your jewellery speed

If that doesn’t work, go here and click “Music”.

Played in a dixieland pub band with guys 60 years my senior. Just a coke, oldtimer.

Life got good again, like it does. I made friends, met a girl, travelled lots.

Patron: “Waiter? Waiter.”

Waiter: “Oui, Madame.”

Patron: “I see you have chicken on your menu. Is it free range?”

Waiter: “Non, madame. Ze menu is recycled. It is ze cheecken who is free range.”

Patron: “I see. Was the chicken ethically reared?”

Waiter: “I was not that close to ze cheecken myself. It is a very sad story. I will ask Jean-Claude.”

(Waiter disappears to the kitchen then returns)

Waiter: “I can assure you that zees cheeken lived a life better than those of most Londoners.”

Patron: “Excellent, excellent. See, it’s important to me as a consumer that the food on my plate has not raised inhumanely.”

Waiter: “Of course, Madame.”

Patron: “I also wanted to check that it had not travelled too far to get to my plate.”

Waiter: “Madame?”

Patron: “Food miles. You know, I don’t want to be responsible for my meal to be responsible for CO emissions cause by the unnecessary transport of food to the consumer.”

(Waiter disappears to the kitchen then returns)

Waiter:”Ze cheeken comes from a British regional farm which is family owned.”

Patron: “And can you t-”

Waiter: “The family in question have a 120-year lease on a smallholding constructed using reclaimed limestone and hardwood railway sleepers made from sustainable woodland not connected in any way with South American deforestation.”

Patron (slightly embarassed): “Just one more question.”

Waiter:”Oui, Madame.”

Patron: “Was the chicken placed on a conveyor belt, dunked and stunned in a tank of cold, electricified water before being beheaded by a machine, dumped on a slab, had its arms and wings torn off, been gutted, hosed down and placed dead in a fridge waiting to be cooked and served with vegetables?”

Waiter: “Absolument, Madame”

Patron (handing back menu): “That sounds lovely, thank you.”

Mum and Dad split up. I returned alone to boarding school in foreign England.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry.

It was an upheaval, in those days before the internet and satellite TV.

The family left Philadelphia for France. They didn’t have French toast there.

“I bought a ticket to the world, but now I’ve come back again.”
S. Ballet

I used to do a lot of travelling. My dad worked hard and we were lucky to have great and adventurous holidays. Actually, I was lucky. He earned it.

I don’t travel so much now, but this has had it’s own advantages. Scotland being one, because I never would have seen the country if my budget hadn’t been seriously reassessed by having kids.

I’ve been travelling hopefully more than I have arriving and it’s taught me more that happiness isn’t measured out in miles. I no longer look at prices of TVs and and think “500 quid? We could go to New York for that…”

I know plenty of people who do, and that’s cool. People I know who earn less that the average secretary go to Australia for two weeks every year, but they are recycling their tea bags.

These days, when the money is good, we get a few more channels on the TV for the kids, my coffee gets a little better and baby gets a new pair of shoes, so to speak.

And when I do feel like travelling later, the world’s still going to be there.

The trees will be a little bigger and I may be to old to climb them, but I’ll have some good stories to tell.

Developed a colourful relationship with asthma - hid this from Roxanne Beiswinger.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry.

Why do weatherpersons on TV tell you what kind of weather you’ve had at when they start the forecast?

“Well, it’s been a bit of a rainy old day…”

Why do I need to know? If I was in the area I would have experienced it. If I wasn’t, I missed it. Weather in England is rarely an “event”. This is a mild and temperate island in the North Atlantic and we have some of the most boring weather in the world. Nowhere in England is more that 72 miles from the sea(fact), so the reports are often wrong because she’s a cruel and fickle mistress, arrrr.

Recapping that weather on a prime time viewing slot is stupid. Serously, unless some kind of weather record has been broken, I care not a fuck.

Our weather is so dull that and we have had to invent names for different kinds of mild conditions. It’s as if the Met Office has hired marketing consultants to sex things up: “murky”, “sticky”, “light flurries of snow”, “dusting of frost”, “a damp start to the day”, maybe “blustery” if we’re feeling cheeky.

Instead of “storms rolling in”, we get “rain possibly edging towards”. In England, even the weather is English. If there’s a big storm, we don’t like to make a fuss, but we’ll talk about drizzle until the cows come home.

And I love the way we get advice. Like we don’t know how cold 8 degrees is or that clear skies on a hot day mean. “Time to put on an extra layer,” “bring in any half-hardy annuals”, “pick some conkers”, “keep in the shade”, “don’t get sunburnt”. This is England! Unless they’re evacuating Farnham, we don’t really need any more information.

It’s drizzling now. Later on after tonight’s news I’ll be told it was a dull morning that got brighter as the day progressed.

In summary: Bollocks about daily life with occasional funny and the chance of philosophy from the far East. Risk of songs.

Is Ritchie Cunningham a healthy role model? Pneunomonia in hospital.

Learned saxophone, spurred on by the Happy Days theme.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry. It will get more interesting. Or at least there will be more words.

or:
The Fundamental Precepts Of Buddhism Explained
Using A Classic Punk Rock Dilemma

“Should I stay or should I go now?”

It’s a tough one, and well put in The Clash song of almost the same name.

Generally, I think if you have to question your presence in a situation you probably shouldn’t be there. But it’s not that simple here, given the consequences, as the lyrics continue:

“If I go there will be trouble. If I stay, it will be double.”

So we’ve got the first of the Four Noble Truths:

1. Suffering exists.

Shit happens, bad things take place, to live is to experience hardship. Whatever you want to call it. In all life, there is the inevitability of dukkha, or suffering. If it’s not bird flu, it’s earthquakes. You win 5-0 and your striker gets injured. The sun’s shining and you stub your toe. There’s one in every box.

If this guy stays there will be some kind of suffering and if he goes, that hardship will be twofold. Karma means that us that the suffering we create through negative action affects us ourselves.

Buddha said, as recorded in the Dhammapada:

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

So you do no harm, right?

WRONG!

No one, no one at all, can do no harm. Vegetarians kill worms, pacifists get invaded. Suffering, or trouble, just happens.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment

Clinging, desire, craving - whatever you want to call it - is the tinderbox of hardship. In this case it’s the craving to do the right thing. That’s what’s eating this guy up. To be honest, it’s not a bad place to be, which is why he already wants to fix it.

3. Suffering can be overcome by practicing non attachment

There is a way out. The best efforts of human endeavor can remove the causes of suffering by being free from delusions, craving. Take away the foothold and the basis of any trouble. This guy is not quite there, and I always find the third truth a kind of half-truth in a literal sense. It’s a means to an end, a Get Out of Jail card, because the last truth tells you how to do it.

4. Do the right thing

Suffering can be overcome by doing the right thing. There’s a little more to it that that, a whole Eightfold path based on right speech, right intentions, right thought, etc, but there’s no time to go into that here, because there’s the more immediate need of the stay/go thing.

By staying behind and the hardship being double, he would be making it worse, but at least he has the chance to fix things. It’s better to give things a go and try and make things right than to bugger off, leaving single trouble behind.

Isn’t it? Maybe going and opting for single trouble is an act of compassion for those you are leaving behind. I think he should face the music and dance unless this guy is such a dufus that the others are all thinking: “Seriously dude, please leave. We don’t want any double trouble.”

So anyway

Trouble, double trouble, either way, there are always problems. No one can do no harm. Do the right thing. “Hang on, didn’t Spike Lee say that?” Dude, everyone’s said that. It’s not rocket science. Actually it is rocket science, but it’s everything else we set out to do. It doesn’t mean we all have to be driven, striving personalities and do gooders and annoy people. It’s not saying “do good”, it’s saying do what is best. If you have to cut down a tree to stop it falling on your house, then that’s what you do.

He should stay. If it’s all the same to the others, he should stay - double trouble be damned.

Never give up, stick around, do your dangdest and give it what you got.

“You get the best information, you consider all your options, you look at the potential good … and you do what you think is right.”
Leo McGarry - The West Wing, S.6:Ep.1

Next week
Teenage Kicks - A Non-Violent Approach
Plus - Miami Sound Machine’s “The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You”: The jihad of the mambo

A friend of mine is seeing a shrink. It’s cool - he calls him a shrink. I’m not making light of mental health.

Except when he told me what he paid an hour for his sessions and I replied: “What?!?! That’s INSANE!”

I didn’t even think about my choice of wording before I said it. My friend just looked at me.

I am such a knob-end sometimes.

Started playing football. I ruled the left wing.

Well, that and baseball. And Wagon Wheels.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry. It will get more interesting. Or at least there will be more words.

Star Wars became my only love.

Italics rock. They can change the whole meaning of a sentence and they don’t even do anything. What actually are they? I speak OK English some and I don’t know.

Are they punctuaton? Are they an inflection? Maybe they aren’t either of these things.

Maybe they just are.

Think about Anne Bancroft delivering the line to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate when she says:

“Would you like me to seduce you?”

It’s a sultry retort, a sassy comeback full of suggestive challenge. But get a little Cntl+i action in there and you’ve got a whole new meaning.

“Would you like me to seduce you?” Find someone else, you slut. I’m not that easy. And why wasn’t I your first choice?

“Would you like me to seduce you?” If there’s no one else available, yes please.

“Would you like me to seduce you?” They really go the extra mile here with the service, don’t they?

Promptly left for United States.

Was child knitware model.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry. It will get more interesting. Or at least there will be more words.

Speaking of names I have a fear that someone who shares my name is going to gain infamy for doing something very nasty and I’ll be stuck with the comments.

I fear that someone called Cliff Jones will go on a killing spree or moon the Queen during a state funeral, so for the rest of my life when I introduce myself, no one will say anything but the thoughts will linger there like a silent fart.

A friend of a friend called Mark Chapman shares a name with the guy who shot John Lennon and I’m sure he gets it all the time.

I went to university with a guy called James Mason. His stock answer to pleasant old ladies who filled in forms in Post Offices was “That’s right, except he’s dead.”

And what happens if I’m on the receiving end of an introduction. “…And this is Cliff, who works in the News. Cliff, this is our newest recruit to the IT team, Pol Pot.”

I mean what do you say?

What don’t you say?

There’s only one thing worse than being sung about, and that’s not being sung about.

It would be a mixed blessing to have a name that was immortalised in song. The Peggy Sues, Laylas and Roxannes of this world know what I’m talking about.

I once worked with a lady called Jolene and I resisted saying the dumb bleeding obvious “Oh, like the song-” when I met her. Raving Simon was different though. I had a lot of time for him if he thought of something, and it was going to be fun, he went with it. When I introduced Jolene to him, he went straight the chorus, complete with Dolly Parton accent. He didn’t even shake hands because was too busy dancing.

Until recently I didn’t think my name came up in a song. Cliff that is. It turns up indirectly like in the “White Cliffs of Dover”, but I don’t take it personally. Jones turns up plenty - Wife and I had our first dance at our wedding to “Me and Mrs Jones”. You had “Doctor Jones” (Aqua’s ill-concieved follow-up to Euro dance pop smash “Barbie Girl”) “Mr Jones” by Counting Crows, “Crackity Jones” by The Pixies, the Irving Berlin showtune “This Is The Army Mr Jones”, and probably more.

But I went through life thinking that no Cliff had ever inspired any lyricist beyond the writer of “Clifford The Big Red Dog” - until my sister played me a snipped of the Billy Ray Cyrus song “Achy Breaky Heart”:

You can tell your ma
I moved to Arkansas.
Or you can tell your dog to bite my leg.
Or tell your brother Cliff,
whose fist can tell my lips.
He never really liked me anyway.

Oh my sweet lord in heaven.

I know that at least six songwriters lay claim to having penned at least some of Achy Breaky Heart, and I don’t know who this Cliff is. But I hope it stays hidden in the verse and if someone does write a song with my name in it, I hope it’s a good one.

We moved south.

Stood up.

The Sum Of All Years is an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the corresponding age for that entry. It will get more interesting. Or at least there will be more words.

We wrapped up warm and went out with the kids their bikes, past oak trees two hundred years old. We collected acorns and chestnuts and bark for an Autumn project Son, 5, is doing at school.

I love October. Kerouac wrote “October is the sweetest month. In October, everyone goes home.”

It’s great to think those trees were planted before my oldest known relative was even born and will stand there long after me and the kids are gone, still producing acorns for other children to collect in later Octobers when they go out on with their dads on bicycles.

Or hovver boards. Or maybe they won’t even have dads. Maybe they were spawned from cells or some type of DNA graft. I’m not sure, but I do know about the acorns.

—
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Born

Read the The Sum Of All Years

Blogday - woohoo! I was thinking it might be best to mark the occasion. A sonnet? Haiku? Small gathering of likeminded websites? Or maybe an autobiography. Yeah. An autobiography in a blog. An, if you will, (smirk), blogography (snort).

Like with most of my ideas, I started to talk myself out of it almost immediately. I thought that there’s not much to write about that happened when I was really young, because I don’t remember as much about then as I do about the last five years. Any stuff relating to me as a ten year old, would be about, erm, ten words long. But then people who read online don’t generally want to read a lot, so that might be a good thing. They like bitesize chunks of life, so why not break the years down into separate entries?

Meg did something cool last year with Project Mayfly, where you got to sum up your year in twenty words or less.

That could work. There may well be ten words for my ten year old entry, but there would be a lot more for, say, twenty five years old.

Then it hit me: I would write an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the number of the corresponding age for that entry. Ten words for ten years old, eleven words for eleven years old and so on. Hmm - I can do that. It’s punchy and it’s totally word-geek me. It’s got that “simple complexity” thing that I really like.

And I just worked out how many words I would have to work with:

1+2+3…+15+16…+32+33=561

A life in 561 words. It seems easy, but that’s probably because I haven’t started yet.

Socrates wrote that the unexamined life was not worth living, so in that spirit, Project The Sum Of All Years is launched.

On Monday.

I really wanted a drink last night. I haven’t got a problem with drinking, I just fancied booze. Like when you hanker after chocolate or crave tobasco sauce. It was more or a distant yearning than a need.

I’m normally quite well stocked in the booze department. We do the booze runs to France and buy everything anyone might want when they come round, so I can be the man of the house when they do and pat them on the back and say: “What’s your poison? We got everything,” and pray they don’t ask for Kalua.

Trouble is, in October you end up with bottles of all the stuff you don’t drink yourself.

I’m a pretty conservative drinker, and 95 per cent of my intake is made up of while I consider to be the three main booze groups: whiskey, beer, red wine.

If that sounds boring, think again. You could spend a lifetime of happy discovery on any of those tipples and never get bored. My favourites of the first two could take up entire entries, but that’s for another blog.

Rummaging around Withnail-esque, I discovered that the contents of my (not actually a) cellar are:

Champagne, 6 bottles
Gordon’s Gin
Pimms
Port, 2 bottles
Brandy
Absolut Vodka

Which is great if the officers of the Coldstream Guards are stopping by, but useless for sitting down to watch Lost with my feet up.

I found one bottle of red wine, but it was a Chateauneuf du Pape 2001, and I decided I definitely wasn’t worth it. It was a gift for my 30th birthday and would be very tasty and worth a bit.

I decided to save that and open it when friends came round, and when they will say: “Oh, don’t open that vintage bottle of wine for us,” whereupon I would retort: “What, this old thing? No, I often drink these when I sit down to watch Lost with my feet up. Sometimes I suck back a Lafitte and watch repeats of Third Rock. Pork scratchings?”

I had a camomile tea instead. Now that I am worth.

Note to non-British readers: Alcohol in mainland Europe is much cheaper than it is at home. People who live in the southeast of England find it cheaper to driver to Dover and buy a ferry ticket for a day return and fill their car with euro-booze than it is to buy your alcohol at home. British people find France is a nice place to have lunch. We also hold many of our wars there.

Note to American readers: next war we have in France, you guys have got to come over again. Cheap booze!

Colleague (watching Sky News): “Oh my GOD, what an ugly baby.”

Me (turning to look at TV): “What, that one?”

Colleague: “Yeah. His face - he’s just really ugly. - ….Oh shit, he’s got no arms. Bugger.”
(colleague cringes in self-loathing and shame)

Me: “You wanker.”

I was getting dressed this morning and was still thinking about the spider from yesterday.

When you think about spiders, you think you see them. A little scurry in the corner of your eye scuttles itself into you imagination where no cup and postcard can scoop it up to safety.

And then there’s the itching. The uneasy skin when you thin about the eight hairy legs. It unsettles you because you can never be sure of where a spider is until it’s very, very close with eyes and body and teeth like bristling husks - and that brings on the creeping skin. In each fold of your clothes and every bit of bare skin, there’s the itching. Yes, like that.

So I kept thinking I saw a spider. Spider in my slippers, spider in the shower, spider in the towel. I put on my shirt, still imagining a spider and even thought I saw one there as I buttoned up my shirt. Heh, crazy.

I buttoned up my sleeve and then buttoned up the other one, up which was running a Category 3 spider towards my shoulder. I flung off the shirt, or at least tried, because it was buttoned up. The shirt was actually over my head, but I couldn’t get it off, so what I in fact did was to create a little chamber with my shirt, containing a panicked spider, two inches across, one human head and a nice aftershavey smell.

I had to take it back off my head and unbutton the shirt, which contained a live spider somewhere. I flung the clothing to the bathroom floor and did a little dance, brushing my skin and hair to make sure it wasn’t on me. Fingers in the ears, the lot.

I ran into the bedroom where wife was sleeping. “Spider. In shirt,” I gasped, “Cat 3. Many buttons.”

I composed myself and she demanded I kill it. Easy for Lady Macbeth, there, I had to do all the work. I had to return to the shirt and shake it out. I dropped to the floor and I turned to grab a slipper. When I turned back towards it, I saw some legs disappear under the laundry basket. I pushed that to one side and the spider ran to where I pushed it. I pushed it back the other way and WHAMMO!!!

When Tacitus, the Roman historian, deemed that Britain was worth the conquest, he wrote: “the forests were without savage beasts and the ground voyd of noisome serpents.”

Put a spider in his toga and he would have felt differently.

So it has come to this.

Nearly a year of blogging and I’m writing about my cats. But they are useless, because they don’t bother spiders.

While rodent carcasses litter the alleyway, hedgehogs have free passage around the parimeter of Jones Towers and there is an open door policy for spiders.

I caught a Category 3 spider this weekend (Cat 3 = auditory. You can hear them scuttle along the walls as they move). I had to use a cup and a stepladder* to get it.

As I put the cup over it, there was a sickening moment where it disappeared and I thought it was either in the cup or running up my sleeve. Luckily I could feel it rattling around in the cup and it was safely dispatched through the catflap.

Maybe the cats bring them in and watch me hunt spiders for sport. I’m sure as this one ran away, he turned and winked some of his eyes at the cats as if to say: “Same time tomorrow guys? I’m going to check in on the hedgehogs. They’re having an all-you-can-eat slug-fest by the hostas.”

*This is not my real ladder. I never got on with my real ladder.