Semicentennial

As of approximately 0600 this morning, I've been kicking around this world for exactly 50 years. I can't say I feel greatly different from my 49 year old self of yesterday, but I suppose today is something of a milestone birthday, and a time for reflection and prognostication. If my 10 year old self, say, had had the imagination to think about today, I suspect the only thought would've been that I'd be unbelievably old, but I don't feel that way now - recent health issues notwithstanding, I still feel I've got a reasonably ' young ' outlook, somewhat irreverent and certainly not reactionary, even if I have my curmudgeonly moments, and even if my musical tastes are more ' Dad Rock ' with a light sprinkling of Radio 3 than Top 40. Thinking about it, I suppose 10 year old me might have had slightly more justification in considering 50 to be old than an equivalent child today, because of the lifestyle changes over the intervening period - far more people of that age suffered poor health in the past because of the greater prevalence of what would be, by modern standards, poverty and heavy physical work.
I guess that one of the side effects of today, at least in my case, is to reflect on what has changed and what has stayed the same over the years. I have no doubt that the greatest change is illustrated by what I'm doing now - I'm sitting typing at the computer, knowing that what I'm writing will, in a few minutes, potentially be accessible to anyone in the world with the requisite hardware, which, while that doesn't cover the whole of humanity by any means, could still be counted in billions. Computers 50 years ago were the size of tennis courts, now they're in many people's phones, cameras, even pop-up toasters! There may have been the odd science fiction writer or futurologist who could have foreseen such things, but I suspect that the vast majority of people would have found such developments literally unimaginable. As far as continuity goes, I hope I'm not being naively optimistic in saying that we're still human beings, still the same gregarious primate under the skin, who can reach out and touch others of our kind, hug, kiss and love our friends and family, and, hopefully, extend that empathy out into the wider world - to shamelessly pinch a quote from ' The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' " How great it would be to be nice to people for a change".
Thank you very much to 'iw2fja' for following my blog - my previous comments about encouragement ( and slight preening of my ego!) are once again brought to mind.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Summer's over!

The excellent weather of the last couple of weeks has fizzled out into more typical Cornish mode this morning - it's damp and miserable, grey skies as far as the eye can see. Still, I'm sure it's a lot worse in plenty of other places, so I'll try and stop being the stereotypical Brit, moaning about the weather.
(Spoiler alert - Champions League result coming up)  I was disappointed that Barcelona were beaten in the Champions League semi-final last night, not just because they usually play the most spectator friendly football but because of the cynical tactics Inter Milan employed against them - there was more foul play, time wasting and, especially, feigning injury than I've seen in a major game in a long while. Without wishing to get too deep and analytical about it, those kind of tactics seem to mirror the way the so-called civilised world is going - achieve your selfish ends at all costs, trampling any decent or worthwhile people or values underfoot as necessary. No doubt I'm being naive in thinking that any other methodology would be used, especially where money or power (or both) are involved. I get the feeling sometimes that being nice to people is seen as being a sign of weakness rather than any sort of a virtue.
More positively, we went to my daughter's parents' evening at school last night, her first at senior school. She worked really hard just over a year ago to pass her 11-plus exam and get a place at grammar school, so it was reassuring to hear from virtually all of her various subject teachers that she's doing well and up to the expected standards. She's not top of the class, for the most part (except in ICT), but she's nowhere near the bottom, either. On top of that, she's really enjoyed her time at the school so far, so it really looks as though the hard work has been worthwhile. There's no way we can afford to send her to a fee-paying school, so the fact that she's thriving at what is arguably the best state school in this part of the world is very encouraging.
Finally, many thanks to Andy for becoming my latest follower. I know virtue is supposed to be its own reward, but the fact that some people are taking an interest in my ramblings is a great encouragement to carry on.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Psycho-cardiology

Contrary to my expectations, I didn't have to wait for ever and a day for a cardiologist's appointment at our local general hospital - they seem to have had a cancellation, and I was slotted in yesterday morning. As I've said before, I tend very much towards the pessimistic side when it comes to anything to do with doctors and, especially, hospitals, but yesterday's experience was surprisingly positive. I saw a different consultant from my previous appointment, and he proved to be very straightforward and easy to deal with - I'd give him at least 9/10 for his bedside manner, so to speak - and what he had to say was much more encouraging than I'd expected. In a nutshell, my underlying condition hasn't deteriorated, and the medication I'm on is appropriate, so the only thing that has changed materially is my stress level - the prescription is, in essence, ' Chill out! '. To that end, I've been given another 3 week sickness certificate, then I'm on 2 weeks' pre-arranged annual leave, and, unless anything unforeseen happens, I should be heading back to work after that. I'm going to do my best to make the next few weeks as relaxed as possible, at least psychologically, with a view to beginning a virtuous circle - feeling calmer should help the arrhythmia, which in turn removes another layer of the stress, and so on.
I'm very flattered that Anton of ' Anton's Haus' has been kind enough to become my second follower. I hope that I'll be able to repay the interest by making my blog worth reading.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The return of my favourite story

I'm very pleased to say that ' Twinergy and the Boys of Clear Lake ' is back in business - the author hasn't been able to post for quite a while due to his domestic situation, but 3 new chapters were published yesterday. It's just a really good story with superb characters, and, as I've said before, was one of the prime motivations for beginning my blog.
My blog itself might appear to be in abeyance, but that's because I've been working on the draft of a long post about a significant episode in my life, which will hopefully be ready before too long.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The country house garden experience!

My family and I had a very laid back day yesterday - a late breakfast, because the ladies stayed in bed until the streets were well and truly aired, then a very brief trip to the local supermarket, before my wife came up with what proved to be a great idea. We spent most of what was another sunny afternoon playing board games in the garden, all very civilised and almost genteel, hence the title of the post. Because we've all got different interests, particularly in entertainment, it seems that we often end up in separate rooms doing our own thing, so it was a pleasant change to all get together and spend some quality time for once, and the fact that we were able to sit outside as well made it even better. For all the gadgetry we seem to be surrounded with these days, sometimes simple pleasures are the best.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Life's a picnic...

... or sometimes not. The morning post brought a letter from the doctor's - I've been referred back to the cardiologist at our local general hospital, news which I've got distinctly mixed feelings about. I saw the same specialist about 2 years ago, had my medication boosted a bit, and 99% of the time since then I've been able to function pretty much as normal. Until last Friday, of course, when my work-related stresses seemed to overwhelm the pills' ability to keep my hiccuping heart on the straight and narrow. The fact that my G.P. thinks my condition is bad enough to have to go back to the hospital has ratcheted up the stress another notch - I can't help but think, if not the worst, then at least on the pessimistic side, and, on top of that, I hate hospitals - even going into one as a visitor is more than would ordinarily choose to do, if there was any way of avoiding it. Having said that, given the waiting list situation in the NHS, I probably won't get an appointment for months, so I guess it's not an immediate issue.
On the grounds of wanting to do something a bit more congenial, and given the unabated pleasant weather, my family and I went out for a picnic lunch at a place called Polruan, just opposite Fowey where the Fowey River meets the sea. There's a spot called St.Saviour's Hill where you can get great views of the sea and the river estuary simultaneously, so that's where we went. If anyone ever happens to be in that part of the world in the middle of August, the Red Arrows do an annual display as part of the Fowey regatta (it's on August 19 this year) and St.Saviour's is the best place to watch the display - when we were last able to go 3 years ago, the aircraft were actually below us at a couple of points during the show! 


Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A new story

In a funny sort of way, starting the blog has actually stalled my fiction writing - I was scribbling a fair bit of stuff in a notebook 2 or 3 months ago, but what time I've had to write recently has been focused here. In the last 24 hours, though, I've had an idea for a new story, so, given that I'm off work at the moment, I'm going to try and spend some time developing the initial concept with a view to posting some of it here. I'm not holding my breath in expectation of a masterpiece, but I'll do my best.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Just in case we forget how lucky we are...

... to live where we do, this picture was taken less than a mile from our house (although we haven't quite got such a nice view from here,sadly!).

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Singularity

A smile, a wordless enunciation of the feelings within
That smile, transforming a handsome face to ineffable beauty
At that moment, I cross the event horizon, drawn inexorably to your singularity
No escape from you, no escape from me
Falling to the centre, helter-skeltering inwards
The ever-tightening grip of the spiral
All information is lost at the singularity
All difference, all distance between us is extinguished.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Developments

Well - I've still got a job, but I'm off sick for at least the next 2 weeks after going to see my doctor this morning. Apparently I can't have my heart medication boosted because I'm already on the maximum dose, and I've also got low blood pressure (which I'm sure would come as a huge surprise to anyone who knows me, including me!) so that even the amount of medication I'm taking now could potentially cause dizziness or even fainting fits. I'm still pondering what to do in the slightly longer term - I have perused one or two job websites, but having spent as long as I have in my present industry (31 years & counting), it's quite hard to find anything other than pretty menial jobs that I've got the relevant experience or qualifications for. I did see one particular job ad that piqued my interest, for a freelance writer, but, on reading the detailed description, they were looking for science and social science graduates to research and write academic articles in subjects specific to the graduate concerned. I'm pretty sure I've got the intellectual wherewithal to do that kind of thing, but if your C.V. doesn't contain the primary requirement for the job, it doesn't bode well for your chances of being employed.
On a much happier note, many thanks to ' A Wandering Pom ' for taking the time and trouble to become my first follower and commenter - at the risk of a little egomania, I think most people who write blogs (and certainly myself) enjoy the process of blogging in itself, but the thought that what you write might be interesting enough for others to want to read is a pleasant one. I'll make every effort to maintain and improve the level of interest, and even, hopefully, to make it a bit less relentlessly downbeat!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Difficulties

First difficulty is that I can't blog on my laptop at the moment - I can sign in to Blogger and read mine and other blogs, but when I try and start the ' New Post ' screen, it hangs up on ' waiting for Google Analytics '. It's been like that for 2 days now, so I've had to resort to firing up our elderly and glacially slow desktop to write this.
The second, and far greater difficulty, is around my job - if I've still got one, that is. I went home sick on Friday evening with a recurrence of my heart arrhythmia after suffering nearly 3 hours of trouble making and verbal abuse from the local yobs where I work, with no police attendance despite numerous phone calls and promises that they were en route - from Mars, presumably. In amongst the umpteen phone calls, I had a pretty serious row with our on-call manager over the situation, so when I speak to my own manager tomorrow, I expect to be in some kind of trouble. To be blunt, I really don't care at the moment - I'm in the mood to tell the company to stick the job up their arse, and any threat of anything disciplinary coming my way would be the straw that would break that particular camel's back. The drawback of chucking my job in, however, is how I would then support my family - my wife works full-time, and has a pretty good job, but there's no way we could live on just her wages. I feel really stuck at the moment - it seems that whichever way I turn, there are negative consequences.
Look on the bright side, some might say, and at least there's one positive at the moment - it looks like Spring has finally sprung, and it's sunny and fairly warm today. It looks like I might be facing plenty of enforced leisure time to enjoy it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Not quite right!

The pictures were where I wanted them on the preview of the last post, but didn't quite publish in the same layout (sigh!). The miracles of modern technology - or is that the lack of miracles of the nut attached to the keyboard!!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A bit of an experiment

I'm going to try something new with the blog. My daughter took quite a few pictures of our trip on her phone, so I'll try to post a couple here. It's taken until now to get to this point, because we had trouble getting the pictures off of the phone - my daughter's laptop has Windows Vista, which the software that came with her phone doesn't seem to like, but we found that it works OK on my XP-equipped computer, so.... here goes!

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Clockwise, from top left -
Shakespeare's Globe exterior, Shakespeare's Globe interior, Danaide by Brancusi, my first real life Mondrian,

A bit of struggle to get the images where I wanted them, but practise will make it easier (I hope!).

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

London trip

It was, as anticipated, a long and pretty tiring, but interesting day yesterday. My daughter and I left the house at 6:20 to catch the train, arriving in London at 10:00. Having planned in advance what we wanted to do and how to get there helped speed things along, and we arrived at Bankside by 10:45, where we visitied the Globe Theatre, which my daughter wanted to do, having spent some time studying Shakespeare at school, followed by my half of the deal, visiting the Van Doesburg exhibition at Tate Modern. As luck would have it, I found the theatre tour quite interesting, even though I've never been a Shakespeare buff, while my daughter found at least some of the modern art we looked at to her liking. The best part for me was actually seeing some works by my favourite artist, Piet Mondrian, in the flesh, as it were - I've seen most of Mondrian's works in books, TV programmes or online, but, until yesterday, I'd never seen any in real life. In the afternoon, we went on to Covent Garden, where there was some street entertainment, amongst other things, going on, and finally (just to prove that my daughter isn't simply some bluestocking swot) to Hamley's, which was absolutely packed - you'd have thought it was Christmas week, given the crowds in there!
After some food and drink at Paddington station, it was time for the train home, and, hardly surprisingly, neither of us saw the whole journey back - my daughter, in particular, spent quite a lot of the time asleep - before we finally retrieved our car from the station and got home just before 9:00.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Got the music bug!

After what I wrote earlier on, I got into watching a few music videos on YouTube, then a few more, then.... I'm still into it nearly 3 hours later, playing songs I haven't heard for ages. Happy times!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Writer's block!

I'm sitting in front of the computer feeling that I want to write something, but my mind is about as blank as the screen was before I began this sentence. Calling my situation 'writer's block' is rather pretentious, I suppose, because that implies that I consider myself a writer, at least in an amateur way.
I'm listening to the radio while I'm typing - Planet Rock, specifically, as that's the station I almost always listen to - and a song with good memories attached has just come on, even though it's a song, and indeed a band, that I don't like myself. The song was ' Whip It ' by Devo, a fairly obscure item, to be sure, but one which several of my friends from home were keen on, and which was played at most of the wedding receptions of our group of friends (and on numerous other party-ish occasions), except mine. There were a few other songs that were synonymous with our little coterie ( ' Holiday in Cambodia ' by the Dead Kennedys was probably No. 1 on that list), and when I hear them, they always remind me of some really good times (and some sad ones, but very few in comparison). It's funny how music can not only set a mood, but recreate moods from years and years ago - very Proustian, I guess.
An early night is in order today, because my daughter and I are getting up at some ludicrously early hour to head for London for the day tomorrow. Living in Cornwall is great, for the most part, but, at least by U.K. standards, it has the drawback of being a very long way from pretty much everywhere else. Still, no pain, no gain, to coin yet another cliché.

Hope everyone has had/is having a Happy Easter.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

From one extreme to the other

Well, it looks like yesterday morning's sunshine was the weather gods' April Fools' joke, because by mid-afternoon it was pouring with rain and even sleeting a bit, and the wet and windy stuff is back with us this morning. After feeling upbeat at first yesterday, it all rather deteriorated as the day went on, to the extent that by the time I got back from work last night I was moved to comment to my daughter that it was one of those days when you feel like cutting your own head off.
I think I might sometimes be expecting too much from life and from other people, but, compared with the impression I get of the young writers of the blogs that I follow, and from my daughter and her friends, namely that they're intelligent, articulate and caring people, I fail to understand why a lot (in my experience) of current teenagers seem to have no ambition beyond getting pissed, causing trouble and firing off volleys of offensive verbal abuse, if not actual violence, at anyone who gets in their way. This seems to be particularly prevalent where I work, a small, superficially quiet and slightly touristy town where you'd expect nothing untoward to happen from one week's end to the next. I make no claim to having been an angel when I was younger - I drank more than my fair share of beer and got into various scrapes from time to time - but I don't recall me or any of my peers having the attitude that a lot of these yobs seem to have of having not the least respect for anything or anyone, even themselves as far as I can see. Some might say, no doubt, that I'm just being a typical old fart complaining that ' It wasn't like this when I was a lad ', but I don't see how a purportedly civilised society can function when large sections of it don't seem to care about anyone but themselves - I stand to be corrected, but I get the feeling that the present-day U.K. is one of the most selfish places in the world, and there are times when I want nothing more than to leave the country, and probably would if I didn't have my family commitments.
Looking on the brighter side, however, I'm just embarking on 5 days off over the holiday weekend, with my wife and daughter off work and school respectively for most of the time, so I think it's time to kick back and have some fun time together, something that doesn't happen often enough lately. And to hell with the weather gods!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A new month & some sunshine

10 days into Spring, and we've finally got some blue sky and sunshine. The weather down here has been rancid for the last week or so, but things are looking up today. I'm not working over the Easter weekend, although that's only because it's due to be my weekend off anyway - I normally end up working most bank holidays - so I'm hopeful that the weather will hold and that we'll be able to do some family things for once. My daughter and I may be going to London on Monday, although it'll be a long day trip if we do - we've both got places we want to visit, which, by a happy coincidence, are almost next door to each other. I spent a couple of years living in London in the 1980's, so I don't get stressed out by the hustle and bustle, and I can find my way around fairly well, certainly in terms of the 'touristy' bits, a considerable advantage if you're intending to go to a few different places - it's really easy to waste hours in London just getting around if you're not familiar with the place. I suppose you could say the same about any large city.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B