Centenary

It's a significant day for me, full of bittersweet memories. On the 17th of May 1926, my Dad was born, in a small town in East Kent. He would have been 100 years old today, if he'd lived, but, heartbreakingly for me, he didn't even manage to get as far as his sixtieth birthday, dying in March 1986 due to heart problems. He was a unremarkable working man, in terms of any impact in the wider world, a coal miner from when he was 14 until he retired early at 58, after having a nearly fatal heart attack in December 1984, but he was a thoroughly good man, calm and friendly, well thought-of by almost everyone who knew him. And, of course, he was my Dad, and I loved him with all my heart. I still miss him, even after all those years. 'The good die young', so they say, and that's certainly true in my Dad's case. 

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Quondam

I've considered changing the name of my (largely moribund) blog for a number of years, but I've struggled to commit - I've always liked the title, and the word 'quinquagenarian', but it's becoming wildly inaccurate, given that I'm now closer to 70 rather than even 60. So I've made a compromise, of sorts, adding 'Quondam' to my moniker. It won't change anything in a material way - I'll probably fail to add much content, if any, but at least I won't be misleading anyone any further, in terms of my advancing years!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Hundreds and thousands

Not the colourful sugary little beads that used to (maybe still do?) decorate cakes, ice cream and the like, but the pageviews that have been raining on this largely moribund blog of late. More than forty thousand in the last month! Madness! I'm sure all of them, or at least, the vast majority, have been generated by 'bots', but why me, and why now? I spent a lot of time in the 'blogosphere' between 2010 and 2017, writing and publishing dozens of posts a month, at my peak, and was largely ignored, apart from a few hardy individuals (who I appreciated in spades, and still do, even though they've moved on now), but now, I seem to be 'flavour of the month'. It's all rather peculiar. It made me think of one of the episodes of the radio version of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy', where a couple of the characters find themselves in a disco populated by 'AI dancers'. 'But there are no real people here!', someone says. Quite!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A red-letter day

 One of the worst aspects of having a stroke, for me, is aphasia. Since that fateful day in October 2017, I've struggled with communication issues, most notably my speech and, in particular, writing. My original hope was to retire after forty years with my company, which would've fallen in 2019, and I had a daydream of writing a novel thereafter, but the health fates weren't with me. I was, at least, able to read fluently, so I've spent a lot of time reading other people's words, but coming up with new material of my own has been largely a case of (literal) headaches and almost infinite frustration. But, around six weeks ago, something clicked. I had a new story in my head, and found that I could progress, to the extent of writing almost every day since then, leading to today, when I published Cousinage in my fiction blog (the link is in the side bar, it anyone cares to have a look). It's not a novel, but is 44000 words long, near enough, and the thought that I could achieve that much in the time available is a minor miracle, as far as I'm concerned. Quantity is one thing, but I'm not making any claim regarding quality, although I'm pleased enough with it to go ahead with publication. Its existence is the key for me, rather than any expectation of approbation. It might be a one-off, but there is some hope that I'll able to add to my oeuvre, however amateurish, in the future.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Blood on their hands

Sooner rather than later, I fear. The American electorate has written the death warrants of so many women, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people, Ukrainians, Palestinians, the poor and/or dispossessed, and more. And it gets worse, at least potentially - if (when?)Trump dies/comes incapacitated, the proverbial 'heartbeat away from the presidency' adage would fall to Vance, who is an outright theocratic fascist. As ever, the main problem of democracy is that any moron can vote. Well, America, you've made your bed, now lie in it. 

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A very sad day for the whole world

I woke up to the biggest news item in years this morning, but it was a desperately disappointing result. A golden opportunity to rid the world of one of the most dangerous and toxic people in living memory, wasted. So depressing.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Compare and contrast

It's a nice day today, weather-wise, so far (yes, we do get user-friendly days here, even in this predominantly grey and damp part of the world), and I was, rather vacantly, looking out of my sitting room window earlier on. My attention was drawn to one of the local cats, an animal I've seen regularly ever since I moved here. The cat was doing what domestic cats do best in similar situations, luxuriating in a patch of warm sunshine, before languorously washing itself. What a life, I couldn't but help reflecting, all wants and needs requited, food, shelter, affection, comfort. As opposed to my lifestyle, yes, I have got food and shelter, but apart from that, my circumstances aren't that great - no friends or acquaintances, apart from my daughter, who lives 250-odd miles away, indifferent health, even on a good day, a bad knee that makes even walking upstairs to the bathroom painful, and the coup de grace, my aphasia after my stroke, which hampers me so frustratingly in terms of speaking and writing, robbing me of what was one of my few strengths. I know this post probably sounds like self-pity, and maybe it is, but quality of life is a worthwhile aspiration, an aspiration I'm sorely lacking at the moment.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A bigot's charter

The current iteration of the Conservative Party has been a race to the bottom for years now, most notably during Boris Johnson's tenure, but with a General Election looming in a few months time, there's space for plenty of barrel scraping, seemingly. The next target is school sex education, from what I've been seeing today, the subject will be gutted, particularly in primary schools, but older pupils won't be immune, either - all 'children' are going to be banned from being taught about gender identity. It's not a 'Don't Say Gay' scenario - yet - but it's a patent grab for the Tories in terms of winning the bigot vote, the right wingnuts, especially the religious right, will love it. And if some young people get killed, by their own hands, or through bullying or even outright murder, well sobeit. Frankly, that wouldn't be a bug, but a feature for those scumbags. 

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

An utter surprise

For some reason, my largely moribund blog has been 'flavour of the week' - there have been more than 3000 views in the last four or five days. I'm sure it's just web crawlers crawling, but it has helped to push the blog, after 13-odd years, beyond 100000 views overall. Thank you for reading - even the crawlers!

Love & best wishes to all 

Sammy B

Risk and reward

Before last weekend, the BBC Weather website was promising us snow, albeit light snow, and freezing temperatures for today and tomorrow, so I stocked up with groceries on Friday with a view to staying at home until at least Wednesday - I hate snow and ice these days, given my somewhat fragile health, and my propensity to fall on my backside as soon as slippery conditions prevail. But this morning, the snow has been conspicuous by its absence, and it's been largely sunny so far, although it's pretty cold (by UK standards). So I've spent a good hour trying to decide whether to go out, without much success. I almost never see anyone when I stay here at the flat, and I do like to feel that I'm part of the human race occasionally, but, overall, I would only go to the pub, so the balance of probability is that I'll stick to Plan A and skulk in my man cave instead - isolation is preferable to breaking my neck, ultimately.

There's a longer term conundrum in my life, as well, although the potential risk in this case will almost certainly prevent me from being tempted with the slight chance of what would be a substantial reward - there's a new(-ish) family living in the building where my flat is, and there's a passably cute boy in the scenario. I don't see him very often, despite the fact that he lives about 30 feet away from me - they're on the ground floor, while I'm four flights of stairs above - but he has given me a smile and wave a couple of times, and we have had a very brief chat, just once. I can't lie, the prospect of having a 'young friend' would be beyond awesome, even if we didn't do anything other than talk, but the pitfalls seem unsurmountable - he's pretty young, even by the standards of my 'reviled by society's' AoA, and his English seems to be rather minimal (I'm fairly sure that the family is Eastern European, although what exact nationality, I don't know). So it's really little more than a daydream, in all honesty. But what if....?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Just another day

 And tomorrow will be the same, too - me on my own, bumping along the bottom, no-one to talk to, no-one to see. New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, February 25, May 11, whatever random date you like, it's all the same to me. To be fair, most of it is self-inflicted, given my borderline social phobia and my aphasic speech, but it's hard to drag myself out of that rut. K will probably ring me tomorrow (hangover permitting, she's not her father's daughter for nothing!), but that's about the only likely patch of blue sky I'll see to welcome in 2023.

Still, there's no reason for anyone to be as negative as me, and I hope everyone has a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The festive season has finished

For me, at least - my daughter has been visiting me over the last couple of days, but she's gone now, down to her mother's place for the actual festivities. It was planned weeks ago, so it's not as if I was left in the lurch at the last minute. The joys of 'broken families', I suppose, and any chance of seeing K is a bonus, given she's living and working 200-odd miles away from me these days. So it's just me until at least after the 27th, and I'll just have to console myself with the food and drink I've stocked up with in the fridge and freezer.

I hope anyone who sees my musings has a pleasant Yuletide. Season's greetings, and all that!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Shiver

We're into the first cold snap of the winter, and it's freezing here (by the standards of the UK, at least). It could be worse - the BBC Weather website was threatening snow earlier in the week, but that dire prediction hasn't come to fruition so far. I absolutely hate snow these days, although I don't have go out on bad weather days, as long as I can keep my grocery stocks maintained suitably, one of the few advantages of early retirement through ill health.

I do get rather isolated sometimes, though, so I try to associate with the human race occasionally. Yesterday was one of those days, and I forced myself (!) to visit my regular Wetherspoons in 'town' for a few pints. I haven't got any acquaintances, never mind friends, at the pub, but I'm recognised by sight there, mostly through the staff, to make me feel I'm part of the community, if only tangentially. One other benefit of the hostelry is its status as a 'family friendly' establishment, which means there are sometimes opportunities to catch a little eye candy. Not this time, though - midweek days in term time are rarely beneficial in that context - so instead I decided to treat myself to a rare takeaway meal when got back to  my local bus stop. And my decision turned out to be a win-win scenario - not only was the food up to their usual good standards, I had a 'boy moment'! He was waiting for an order when I arrived, and, in typically teenage ill-advised fashion, he'd decided that a tee shirt and shorts were a good idea - the poor bugger was literally shivering, visibly. Despite my reluctance to engage with anyone nowadays, given my embarrassingly poor speech, post-stroke, we struck up a few minutes worth of conversation. He was 13/14 - his voice had definitely broken - but he was still cutely boyish facially, so he wasn't the only one shivering. No doubt he'll be another 'ghost' and I'll never see him again, but my encounters with boys are so far and few between that anything like yesterday's are an oasis in an almost relentless desert, so I'm going to enjoy them when they crop up.

Love & best wishes to all

Sammy B

Sports news

Having decided to start blogging again, the first question has to be what I should write about. My general lifestyle hasn't changed overly, despite the upheavals of the Covid pandemic - I've been lucky, or maybe careful, to be fair to myself, in not contracting the virus (as far as I know, although there have been untold numbers of asymptomatic cases, certainly here in the UK), and I've had all of the vaccinations available to me (including the regular flu jabs I've been taking for more than 10 years), so my overall health, apart from the after-effects of my stroke in October 2017 (5 years ago now, doesn't time fly when you're not having fun), hasn't been too bad, I'm relieved to say.

So, instead, how about discussing one of the items that has been helping with my sanity over the last couple of years, namely watching a lot of televised sport. I've been a football (i.e. soccer, for those not in Western Europe) aficionado all my life, so the World Cup is a current favourite, needless to say (I'm watching the Germany v Japan game right now), and I'm also a big fan of many winter sports, the new season of the various Alpine disciplines has started to kick in, and I hope the Nordic events and biathlon won't be far behind. But my greatest passion is, sadly, in the off season at the moment - Australian Rules Football. I remember seeing a few highlights of the sport in the early 1970s (VFL games at that time), and enjoyed it, but then there was a 10-15 year hiatus here, when (as far as I know) there wasn't any coverage at all. But then Channel 4 stepped into the breach with a weekly 90 minute programme during the season in the late 1980s (I think was first shown in 1987 or 1988, but I haven't managed to find the exact year), and before long I was an enthusiastic viewer, firstly of the sport in general, but soon of a particular player - the best forward, in my humble opinion, that has ever played in the history of Aussie Rules, Tony Lockett. And his team was St Kilda, without a doubt the least successful club in Aussie Rules history (27 wooden spoons, one solitary flag!). Given my penchant for underdogs, me becoming a Saints tragic was a no-brainer. And so here I am, 30-odd years later, still riding the roller coaster, the highs and lows (mostly lows!), with my beloved, heartbreaking Saints. We've sacked yet another head coach, replaced him with the coach, Ross Lyon, who's been the most successful for us in recent times (although I wasn't a fan of his even when we were pretty good, 2007-2011, including three Grand Finals, one of them drawn - I thought his gameplan, revolving around ultra-defensive pressure, was hard to watch, even though we were winning most games in that era, especially 2009) after another underwhelming season. But hope springs eternal, the National Draft is happening on Monday and Tuesday (another date in the TV diary!), we might find the new superstar we've been craving for years. But I'm not holding my breath in expectation! Go Sainters!

Love & best wishes to all

Sammy B

998

Well, I guessed it was close to 1000, but I was surprised how close it turned to be. Looking at the last post I published here, and its anniversal theme, I idly wondered how many days had passed since my decision to go on hiatus. I could've worked it out, by mental arithmetic, but it was far easier to find a website to do it for me instead. And the answer is 998. 998 days since I was here, in a writing capacity, at least. I have considered resuming this blog a number of times in the interim, but I haven't committed myself, found the motivation, basically, until now. I can't imagine many, if any, of the few people who used to read my ramblings are still around in 'Blogworld' - blogging is a bit passé, I suspect, long supplanted by 'cooler' social media options - but I'm a bit of a stick in the mud, so Blogger will have to do, I'm afraid. I won't be posting daily, all in probability, but who knows? I might find the impetus from somewhere, stranger things have happened.

I'm aware that my blog's name is now an anachronism, given that I'm a sexagenarian these days, but, at least for the moment, I can't be bothered to adjust it yet, if at all. Consider it a quirk, perhaps!

Love & best wishes to all

Sammy B

Decennial, and out

Probably out, anyway. Today marks ten years to the day since I launched myself into the cyberspace ocean, and, predictably, a lot of things have changed in my life, some good but far more bad, pretty much all documented in the pages of this blog. In terms of carrying on here, though, the worst thing is my aphasia - it's just so frustrating to not be able to express myself fluently, even though my writing is markedly better than it was when I had my stroke in October 2017. Given the fact that its so painful, mostly psychologically but, occasionally, physically, too - writing can be a literal headache, on the bad days - and the fact that my blogs, never popular, but now almost completely ignored, means that I can't find the motivation anymore. I'll never say never, but this very well could be my last post.
If this is the end, thank you for reading - I'm not intending to delete the blogs, so I still hope that some people might find what I've written is useful, or even entertaining, but I'm not holding my breath in expectation.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

The last cutie

Maybe, at least. I was out and about yesterday, and saw a delightful boy, 12/13, right in my AoA, the most beautiful creature I've seen this year so far, and close to being the cutest I've seen in the 11 months since I moved to my 'new home town'. But, apart from the fact that he was a 'ghost', disappearing within a couple of minutes my seeing him, the usual depression set in, the knowledge that even if I saw him all day everyday, he could never be mine, even as a friend. Just like I've never had a boy in my life, ever, even when I was a boy myself. I'm 60 in a couple of months time, and I've spent nearly 50 years living with unrequited desire, never able to have what I want most. Pretty much the ultimate life sentence. No doubt the haters will say that is what I deserve, apart from the ones who just think I should be lynched instead. Days like this, I just feel like drinking myself to death. At least the pain will stop, finally. And there will be no cuties anymore. Forever.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Nostalgia and sadness

Both of those things, and together, too, in more than one case today. It started with watching an old 'short' on TV, a film originally designed, I suspect, as a cinema filler before the 'main feature'. The film was about 1950s Cornwall, hence my interest, and it showed my last domicile before I left the area, but more pertinently, a shot of a village pretty close to where we first moved to the duchy, and a village I really liked - apart from the fact that I would've never been able to afford a house there. That led to me googling, stupidly, the village we did live in at the time, with the predictable result that I ended up feeling pretty miserable, given the fiasco that subsequently befell me (albeit self-inflicted, for the most part). As if that wasn't bad enough, the lunchtime news announced that Terry Jones had died. Monty Python was a big huge thing in my life, especially when I was a teenager, so losing another 'hero' is a thoroughly sad day. To ice a very dark cake, Sky News (when I was in the pub, I wouldn't piss on the Murdoch cabal and their operation if they were on fire normally) had a 'talking head' discussing Jones' life, a comedian and writer who happens to be the resident 'celeb' at a Wetherspoons I used pretty regularly, especially when my 'real local' closed down in 2016. And that led me into further in greyness, about Stanmore in general, but in particularly about Cammy, who I lost as a pal because of the pub's demise. As I've said before, life is shit, except when it's really shit.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Funny how memory works

I was browsing a website I read regularly a while ago, and the post I saw, rather tangentially in terms of their usual fare, mentioned fossil hunting. Given that I was (and still am, being honest) a bit of a nerd, I joined the school Natural History Club when I was 13-ish, being a member for a couple of years. It was mostly conducted during lunchtime break (which was beneficial sometimes, especially in the winter, when you could stay indoors rather being chucked out in the cold!), but there were a couple of Saturday 'field trips', too, cheap enough for my parents to afford the cost. One of them was to a place well known for finding fossils, so I was very keen to go. It was Springtime, and it was a nice day, weather-wise, too, but it had been pretty wet earlier in the week, so the hillside we were investigating rapidly became a carbon copy of The Somme - I've never been so muddy in my life, as far as I can remember. But that wasn't the most memorable element of the day, though, hence the post title. I ended up working with a guy, who I knew by sight, but soon became friendly with that day. And he was utterly gorgeous! I was barely 14 then (he was two years younger) and was starting to realise (hazily) that I might’ve been, by the vernacular of the times, 'a poof', so, needless to say, I didn't do or say anything to out myself - I'd have been lynched, probably - but I spent the afternoon doe-eyed, to say the least. Nothing substantial happened later, either, in terms of our 'relationship', but we stayed 'mates', loosely, until I left the school when I finished my A-Levels in 1978. And that was it, I've never thought about him again (although I recall, very vaguely, one of my long-term friends from school mentioning him some time in the 80's), until today. He'll be 57/58 now, I've no idea what he's doing now or where he lives, but I hope he's had a good life. Better than mine, certainly. But the vagaries of memory can still recall the beautiful boy I remember, all those years ago.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Catalunya

I've had a e-mail from K this morning, complete with a couple of photos, telling me that she's settling in well enough as regards her Catalan adventure - she's staying in a rural area, 25 miles or so from Tarragona, away from the tourist hotspots, which is good from her perspective, so that she can't be tempted to spend too much of her money, she says! I'm pleased she seems to be happy so far, and, of course, I'm relieved that she's safe and sound - I know she's an adult and a sensible one, too, but I can't help worrying a little bit occasionally. K is the only person, really, that cares if I live or die (including myself, sometimes), so anything bad happening to her would be close to unbearable.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B