One of my favourite days

Today is one of the days of the year that I look forward to the most. British Summer Time begins today,and even though it meant I lost an hour's sleep last night (I'm working again today, just for a change!), the loss is greatly outweighed by the return of lighter evenings. Of all the things I dislike about the winter, and there are many, the worst for me is the fact that it gets dark so early. That really seems to make the days interminable. We're still a good way short of summer, to be sure, but things are definitely on the up.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Regression

I've had a couple of moments over the last few days that reminded me of issues from my late teens/early twenties that I struggled to come to terms with for years afterwards. First of all, I was waxing lyrical (as I thought) at the dinner table on Sunday evening about a subject that interests me - the exact subject isn't really relevant, but it wasn't interesting my wife and daughter much, as soon became apparent, as they rather glazed over. It brought me up really short, taking me back to the vivid memories of a night on a beach on the Kent coast the day after my 18th birthday, when my best friend at school, no doubt with the best of intentions and in response to my being depressed to the point of tears, told me I'd never get a girlfriend unless I changed the things I was interested in, because they weren't the kind of things that would interest anyone else, especially girls. Had he but known, part of the reason I was so down was that the person I'd been infatuated with for the previous 2 years had absolutely blanked me earlier that evening (and indeed never spoke to me again), and that the person in question was a 15 year old boy who went to the same school as us and who I'd known since primary school, albeit not very well until that 2 year period. The odd thing was that my infatuation was totally asexual - I can honestly say that I didn't even fantasise about him, still less actually do anything with or to him, my feelings were limited to a totally sexless 'crush', for want of a better word, which I guess he'd finally recognised, hence his overnight change from being a close friend to hating me.
The second element of my being pitched back to 30-ish years ago was reading a post in a blog which I don't follow, but that I look at from time to time, where a gay teen said he was thinking of finishing with his boyfriend because he didn't feel he was good enough for someone so wonderful. That was exactly the position I was in at 20, except that my 'significant other' was a girl, who'd been a really good friend for a while  and who I then gradually became closer to, but I just didn't have the self-confidence or self-esteem to allow myself to think that she would ever become my 'girlfriend' as opposed to my 'friend', because she was 'obviously' much too good for me. Naturally enough, she wasn't going to wait for ever for me to get my act together, and when I moved away from home with my job soon after, she found someone else (who she subsequently married) who was more proactive. I still saw her occasionally - she had been one of my closest friends, after all - and, when it was all too late for me, she let me know that I'd been wrong about how she would've reacted if I'd been braver (my word, not hers). To say I was gutted is an understatement - it took me more than 10 years to get over it, and then only because I was lucky enough to meet someone else equally special, who I married, and am still married to, nearly 20 years on. All's well that ends well, to coin a cliché, but that didn't stop me wasting most of my twenties in self-hatred and feelings of worthlessness, something I wouldn't wish on anyone. Hindsight, the most useless commodity known to man.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Saturday night at....

work!! There are advantages and disadvantages to shift work, but working a 12 hour shift on a Saturday night into Sunday morning probably tends towards the debit side. Having said that, if I wasn't working, I'd probably be sitting at home drinking too much beer and/or Chilean Chardonnay, so it's at least better for my liver that I'm here, if nothing else!
I'm still musing about putting some of my fiction up on the blog, but my big production number, my novel (the one that everyone is supposed to have in them somewhere) has stalled at the moment, because I think there's a fundamental flaw in the basic premise of its plot, namely that 'people' will accept someone that would normally be vilified if they do something noble and honourable. In reality, 'people' would probably follow the schadenfreude route, and say that the anti-hero got what he deserved. I put the word 'people' in inverted commas because I don't want to deal in sweeping generalisations and tar everyone with the same proverbial brush, but there seems to be a strong tendency towards moral issues being judged in strictly 'black and white' terms nowadays, in the style of knee-jerk tabloid journalism - 'people' seem to be incapable of appreciating the slightest nuance or shade of grey in any argument, something I believe is borne out by the attraction that fundamentalism seems to hold for many, whether it be religious, political, animal rights or whatever, the view that 'I'm right and everyone else is wrong if they don't believe what I believe'. For example, I'm an atheist, and have been since my early teens, but I would never try and convert anyone to my point of view -if someone wishes to believe in God, that, in my opinion, is their business - but I get the feeling that there are many who wouldn't extend the same courtesy to me.
I've mentioned before that one of my inspirations to begin this blog, and a story I'm a big fan of, is 'Twinergy and the Boys of Clear Lake'. In one of the chapters, the young author expounds what I presume is his own optimistic philosophy through one of his characters, namely that tolerance for less conventional lifestyles, in this case homosexuality, will gradually increase with time. My immediate reaction, which I wrote in my notebook (but didn't eventually leave as a comment on the story blog, because I thought it would be perceived as excessively negative) was that I thought that he was being unrealistically idealistic, the more so because he's growing up in the U.S., which is a society that seems to me, as an outside observer, less tolerant of moral 'otherness' than most. I really hope he's right and I'm wrong, that his idealism will trump my cynicism, but I remain to be convinced.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Proper Cornish weather!

A lot of people think of Cornwall as being a holiday kind of place where it's always sunny, but, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the local tourist board, I have to say that real life's not quite like that. We actually get a lot of days like today, where the weather's coming in from the Atlantic, and it's grey, wet and windy - and that's just in the summer! Having said that, I still think Cornwall in the rain is better than almost anywhere else in the U.K. in the sunshine, so I'm far from complaining. We're just coming up for 10 years of living down here, and I, at least, wouldn't voluntarily think of living anywhere else in this country, although my wife sometimes gets frustrated at being so far from the rest of her family (they live almost 300 miles away).

Just a passing thought to end - is rotary oratory a circular argument?!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Axiomatic?

The word 'axiom' is defined in the dictionary of my word processor software as ' a statement or idea that people accept as self-evidently true'. It would, no doubt, therefore be axiomatic to most people that my attraction towards boys is wrong and indefensible. However, there is a secondary definition of the word from mathematical logic of a proposition that is assumed to be true but is logically unproven, but still used to prove other propositions in the system. What if that assumption was wrong and able to be trumped by a further, incontrovertible piece of logic, another axiom? Love, perhaps?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Tell the truth...

"Tell the truth and shame the devil" was one of my mum's common sayings when we were growing up, the point being that if you don't tell the truth, it will catch up with you in the end. There was a bit of that yesterday, by employees of a nationally known car repair and maintenance company. My car was due for its MOT test, so I took it to a branch of the aforementioned company in the morning for the work to be done. As it turned out, some suspension parts needed replacing for the car to pass the test, so I agreed that they should do the work, and they told me the car would be ready by mid-afternoon. I then went home to bed for a few hours (I'm on night shift this week) before ringing the garage when I got up. They told me the car wasn't ready at that point (4:30) because they had been waiting for parts, but that the work was being done and that it would be ready in an hour. I duly went back to the garage, to find that the parts actually hadn't been delivered, but were en route. The upshot of it all was that I ended up hanging around at the garage for nearly 2 hours, getting more and more annoyed and frustrated, until the car was finally ready at 7:00. If they had told me the truth in the first place, I could've borrowed my wife's car to go to work last night and collected the car today - I can't say that I would've been delighted by that outcome, but at least I would've known where I stood and not wasted a large chunk of my day. Instead, I ended up thoroughly pissed off, and Kwik Fit have lost themselves another customer.
Rant of the day over!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Meanderings

Being new to blogging, and not even having read any blogs until a couple of months ago, I'm finding it hard to know at what level to pitch my posts. Up to now, it all seems to have been a bit heavy, although given the stimuli that led me to starting the blog in the first place, perhaps I could forgive myself a little seriousness.

However, the blogs I enjoy reading tend to be a lot more light-hearted, so I'm going to try and follow their example to some extent. For all that I probably come across as a bit intense, I have got a pretty reasonable sense of humour, although it probably tends towards the slightly surreal - the Monty Python end of the market, you might say. The person who I have most in common with from that point of view is my daughter - no doubt it's because the things I find funny have rubbed off on her somewhat, but it could also be because she's the most intelligent person I have any regular contact with, and my humour can be a bit on the abstruse and intellectual side at times - I like puns and plays on words, that kind of thing.

Having said I was going to try and be lighter, the last paragraph still sounds a bit serious and analytical - I suppose I'm just going to have to keep trying - or perhaps better, not trying too much and being a bit more spontaneous.

I'll share what is probably my favourite joke with you - I have to add straight away that I didn't think of it, but heard it on a local radio station where we used to live (oop north!):

- Two fish in a tank, one says to the other
" How do we drive this,then? "

Very silly, but I love it!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Deja-vu & a dream boy

Sitting here reading my last post, I had a massive deja-vu moment - I'm convinced that I've dreamed about sitting in this computer chair, reading my own blog, and that I had that dream before I even knew what a blog was.
The dream world is part of the reason that I've got into the kind of conflicted state that has led me to wanting to begin a blog and put my thoughts out in the wider world. On 3 or 4 separate occasions, I've dreamed about a boy who lives close to where I work, and who I see walking past my workplace from time to time. Without putting too fine a point on it, he's the most beautiful creature I've laid eyes on in the best part of 30 years, but not in a girlish way - he's about 13, athletic, all boy, just perfection. If it wasn't for the fact that I've never spoken to him and know almost nothing about him, I'd probably say that I'd fallen head over heels in love with him. I just didn't expect that kind of thing to happen to me, at my age - it's almost like a pre-adolescent crush, and one that has dragged feelings and memories of a very, very dark time in my life almost back to the surface. This is the second time I've alluded to this darkness from the past, and I hope before too long to be able to write about it, but I'll need a bit more courage than I'm capable of just at this moment.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Deep breath.......

I've been hesitantly trying to write this next part for 3 or 4 days now, and it's stubbornly refusing to come out right, or, indeed, come out at all. And given that 'coming out' is kind of the issue, I think I need to just go for it and damn the consequences (or risk thereof). When I said in my first post that I was bisexual, I was only telling part of the story. I'm pretty good at selective truth (dissimulation, if you want a posh dictionary word for it), but part of the object of the blog was get thoughts and feelings I struggle with out of my system, so selective truth defeats that object. The truth is that the same sex part of my sexual nature is attracted towards boys, those from a couple of years either side of puberty, say 11 to 15 for round figures. This isn't something I'm especially proud of, but, equally, it isn't something I'm deeply ashamed of either (especially as I've never acted on my impulses, beyond reading online fiction & fantasising about it) - it's just part of me, and has been since I was in my early teens myself, finding out about sex, myself and the interactions between those topics. I know in making this 'confession', I'm probably setting myself up to be shot by both sides, but I feel the need for honesty at this point in my life, and I've got no-one I can realistically talk to IRL, so I'll just have to take the risk of whispering into the void and see what, if any, echoes I elicit.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A femoral what?!

I'm off work at the moment, the first time I've been off sick for a couple of years. I've managed to somehow strain my femoral adductor muscle (as my doctor told me) - I wouldn't even have known what or where my femoral adductor was until Monday, but it's the muscle that runs down the inside of your leg from the groin towards the knee. What I do know, though, is that it's bloody sore - I can't drive, struggle with walking, especially up stairs, and can't do my job, which involves quite a bit of heavy physical work. So all I can really do is sit around popping painkillers from time to time, and catch up with the reading and writing I was complaining of not having time to do a few days ago!

Reading back what I wrote on Sunday, it does seem a bit relentlessly downbeat. There are and have been negatives in my life, but, on the whole, I'm not really so badly off as all that. When you see news about earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and think about how devastating events like that are on the lives of the people they affect, the things the likes of me think of as problems, like yet another bill landing on the doormat, seem almost insultingly trivial.

Love and best wishes to all

Sammy B