One for the Pencil-Loving Mule!

Imagine how many of those Derwent Watercolour pencils are inside this trailer!

We'll Just Have to go a Little Faster,or We'll Never Get the Jump Right.

I Was Disconnected.

I lost my internet connection.
I tried all the usual stuff, you know, disconnect the cable modem, allow it to reboot, ditto the wireless router and the computer, nothing worked.


Eventually I dialled the number on my internet provider's bill, to hear the automated voice tell me there were no known service outages in my area. Then I dialled another number, hit the right buttons, listened to the recorded messages for a while, until i got a human. The human listened to my woes, advised me to power down the cable modem......
Eventually the human decided to transfer me to the tech helpline... So I got the lady in India whose speech was very difficult to understand. "I vant you to take off the power supply to the cable modem please...." Can I just bang my head against the wall instead?
She told me they could not get any fault to show on my line but said "theres something very strange". She would not expand upon that statement, just that an engineer would come out on Saturday morning between 08:00 and 12:00.
In the meantime I could clean my house, read "War and Peace", and learn esperanto, perhaps.
I'd have preferred immediately, because having no internet is like having no phone. Disconcerting.
I can remember the days when our phones were wired to the wall, in the hallway.
I'm addicted, I realise.
So the day after, I went out to have a look at the internet connection box on the front of the house.
The cover was off. the connection splitter block was disconnected, and the incoming cable from the street, from the interwebs.... was connected, directly... to a black cable headed upwards to my neighbour's flat.
I reconnected them all to the splitter block. My upstairs neighbour is an idiot, a fuckwit too. I rarely see him. I took my doorbell out because I was sick of his idiot friends and ex-girlfriends pushing on it, when ringing his, banging on the door, and throwing stuff at his windows didn't work.
Today the repairman came. I didn't tell him what I'd found, just that it had been bust open and disconnected. He looked at me, smiled and said... I hear what you're saying. We'll have a record of any connection other than your modem. Here's my number. Just call me if it happens again.

So I'm back again.

For a while.

Although You Would Not Know This,

I write every day. I write blog posts every day. I write letters every day. Some days I write poems.
Yesterday I wrote four blog posts.

Yes, yes, I hear you. "Where are they then?"
"They're unpublished", I say, evasively. The thing is, I do my writing whilst driving, or in the bath. Or up a ladder, or whilst hammering at a piece of precision machinery, down in a hole beneath the earth, but always, always, in my head.
In my head.  That's where my novels are, and the plays, the screenplays, the collected works of me.

To steal somebody else's line, "I was born at an early age......." I was indeed. I was born in "The Imperial Nursing Home", in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. (my sister was born in a castle, Hazlewood Castle, I'm not sure, Imperial's pretty cool sounding, but a real life castle? One mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086 a.d.? Damn. She wins in the cool birthplace stakes).
As soon as I could express myself I was making up stories, inventing invisible friends, creating an extremely detailed back-story for my teddy-bear. Ted Edward was a bit of a tycoon. He was, for the most part, choosing to live with me, a toddler in a small village in Wharfedale, but in his other life he owned a fleet of trawlers that operated out of Grimsby, into the high arctic, sometimes he was out there, skippering in the gales, north of iceland. Other times he was suavely dinner-suited, driving his Rolls Royce to whatever mysterious assignations grown-up teddy bears had.  And he had a big truck. With eight wheels.
Ted Edward would sit with me on the rusty bridge over the wharfe, and point out the great mysterious fish in the dark waters below. Bincontyles, and Boncontyles, they were. To this day, no adult has ever seen one, nor ever will. The bincontyle can grow to over seventy six feet, and could swallow a house if it wanted to. Boncontyles are somewhat similar, only green.
As I grew older, grown-ups ceased to always pretend to believe what I told them.
Ted Edward died, only about ten years back, victim of a flood caused by a burst water pipe. Gnarled old sea-bear, he'd survived so much, we'd been apart for years, I grew up, moved away, lived in other countries, and he, well, I understand he was travelling a lot, building a railway over the Andes, prospecting in the Yukon, I understand he was the first teddy bear to meet the Dalai Lama, and of course, the first bear of any sort to circumnavigate the globe in a steam-powered airship of his own design.
Some time in the early nineties, we were re-united, shared a house in Leeds, I told him of my mundane travels, he told me of the time he sailed Cape Horn in a bathtub, whilst escaping from pirates.
Then, one night, as he was hibernating, in my store-room, a pipe burst. Ted didn't stand a chance. The mould got into his sawdust. His growl disintegrated.
I was there at the end. Brave bear, the last few days he refused pain-killers, but swigged bottles of trawler-rum, raving about the old days, and... the island... with the wreck of an old wooden ship... chests of doubloons, preserved in the dry cold, they dragged them to a cave, covered them with rocks... that was during the war, after they'd drifted for eight days in the liferaft. They were taken off the island by a german ship. He thought it was the Tirpitz, but they were kept below, until it reached port. He escaped, built a boat out of packing cases and bedsheets, sailed home in time to be re-assigned to the pacific, and when he eventually returned home, his old log, with the coded map of the island had been destroyed in the bombing.

He told me "Find the island, my young emperor, on the island are the documents, everything you will need to re-claim your throne."

You Know How...?

You know how you're driving along and you notice, on the mileometer that it's about to hit a load of noughts?
Well, a while ago, active-meter  said this blog was heading that way.... just as with the car, you look away, get distracted, and the moment's gone. Yep. the blog rolled over the hundred thousand mark a few days ago, and I failed to notice.

Now, I know some bloggers get that in a fraction of the time, but I'm just bewildered that a hundred thousand visitors have been by, when I've still got no idea what this blog is about or why.
Thanks for visiting, whoever you are. Most of you have just googled "Youtube not working in firefox", or "tractor porn".
Hey, whatever floats your boat, that's fine. I'm sorry about the disappointment for you tractor-porn searchers, maybe I should post an image that almost lives up to the title.

There, that's a nice, innocent, image.

From the North Devon Young Farmers Club calendar, via The Daily Mail. Whilst looking for a pic to post..... ohhhh I saw things that seared my eyeballs. Don't. Just don't image-search tractor porn. Or if you do, don't blame me. That girl on the bulldozer? what's that about?

Reminiscence Of the 1980s

Like Sartre and his piece of cake, a few chords can throw open the memory banks.

"The Voice of the Beehive" did it to me this afternoon, heard  them on the radio, remembered a whole load of inconsequential stuff, going to Newcastle (the Tyneside one) to buy a load of stuff including a gas kiln, from a closing-down pottery, in a fifteen-year-old seven and a half ton truck called "Frankenstein", which was an unmitigated pig to drive, no power-steering, in fact, not a lot of steering, other than random lurches across the carriageway, sixty miles an hour top speed, if you could cope with the noise and random changes of direction, crash gearbox, 45 mph if you wanted to sustain the illusion of being in control...
The back was filled with tons of firebricks, kiln shelves, clay, a pugmill. After we finished loading, it was late evening. Heading back southwards, the drive was worse, as the lights were as weak as tired glow-worms, and the motorway was blocked by an accident, traffic crawling, so we diverted to the narrow roads over the hills, and I was soon exhausted. Plan B came into action... 
We found a nice flat gravelled clearing in the woods, set up camp for the night, cooked a meal, broke out the beers, chilled out... all was well until almost midnight when rumblings, roarings, and clatterings filled the night, drowning out the owl-hoots... oh yes. explosions, automatic weapon fire, purple haze.... helicopters, fast jets streaking across the sky.

We'd camped in the midst of an army training area. Our clearing was a battlegroup headquarters. Stuck my head out of the tent, to see tanks and mobile command trailers, we (my little brother and I) would have re-animated Frankenstein and moved out, but there were tank-transporters unloading all over the exit-road. And we'd had a few beers. More than a few beers... And "Voice of the Beehive" was playing in the cab, as WWIII erupted around us... helicopter gunships over the trees.... not much sleep was had at all.
But at least the army was extremely generous in the morning, as we crawled out, bleary-eyed and totally unrested...  a voice said... "My officer said I was to tell you the army owes you a breakfast".
Noisy neighbours, but they cook a mean breakfast. And an hour later, the clearing was deserted  again, as if they'd never been there. Seven a.m., a new day.







The man in the moon is my man
He never says nothing so I know he understands
He's the brother I never had-
The husband I'd never
want he's everything to everyone - he's famous
He's the man in the moon
he's the man in the moon
The man in the moon is my man
The man in the moon is my love caravan
He'll never break my heart I know he's here to stay
Tell all the other boys to go away
I'll take the man in the moon
I'll take the man in the moon
he's always dressed properly
he's always where I can see him
he's always there when I need him
The man in the moon's got the stylin' flat
his dinner guests include the sun and saturn
The cow who jumps over - he knows all the astronauts
I would be a space case if it were not for the man in
the moon.
Oh the man in the moon
he's always dressed properly
he's always where I can see him
he's always there when I need him
The man in the moon's my cosmic high
The man in the moon's a pearl of a guy
I trust him on venus
he's not the cheatin' type
He don't talk so we don't fight
I'll take the man in the moon.

Stupid Journalist Quote of the Week.

"In one potentially serious incident, an attempt was made in Lurgan, Co Armagh, to hijack and burn the Enterprise train which runs between Belfast and Dublin. The driver managed to steer his train out of trouble and there were no injuries." (The Independent)

The last I heard, trains were things that ran on rails, and went wherever the rails did. Unlike bus-drivers, train drivers have no steering wheel.

It never ceases to amaze me that journalists, who we foolishly imagine to be trained in reportage, are so poor at reporting. People who make their living by the written word...........

A Found Fragment

I was footling around looking for something else and found this recorded talk, by an airman who'd learned to fly before the first-world war, only ten or so years after Orvill and Wilbur flew their first flier at Kitty-Hawk.
He flew and fought with the Royal Flying Corps in the WWI, and then,  25 years later, too old  for active service, signed up again, during the second world war, maintaining and ferry-piloting aircraft. We meet him as the allied forces are being pushed back toward Dunkirk, the Nazi "blitzkrieg" throwing all its might into this sector........


"As we passed over the wooded country towards St. Omer, popping noises began to interrupt our conversation. At first we thought we were passing over French practice rifle and machine-gun ranges. But soon tracer bullets began shrieking up at us, and the pops became very sharp and nasty cracks. It was only then that we noticed about a dozen German tanks on the roadway under some trees outside a village. We could see quite plainly the Nazi swastika marked in black on a white circle covering the tops of the dull brown-and-green tanks. As we swooped over them, just over the tree-tops, the crews hurriedly drew some camouflaged netting over their markings. Then we caught sight of motor vehicles and troops who suddenly began diving into the ditches and firing at us. We flew lower still and hurried on.

When we got to Merville, the fleet of civil air transport quickly unloaded their food and ammunition and left again for England for more. The rest of us settled down to servicing the Hurricanes we'd come to rescue and soon the first was away in spite of it being badly riddled with bullet-holes.

The next one took longer, but by midday we were able to offer a fresh mount to a pilot who landed on us unexpectedly by parachute. He'd just had a desperate fight high overhead, thankfully accepted our offer and was soon off to rejoin his squadron on a strange mount—much to the astonishment of his flight sergeant.

It was soon lunchtime. We had a lovely chicken stew, with many vegetables, made for us by a sergeant of a Northern regiment who had become detached from his unit after a scrap with the Jerries, together with ten lads from somewhere round about Sunderland. The sergeant was in fine form. So far, he told me, this war had just been his cup of tea. Later in the afternoon I discovered why. For while refugees wandered up and down the road according to the direction from which the nearest gunfire and sniping seemed to be coming, there he was, joining in the Bren-gun carrier section and having a crack at the He.s and Me.s when they came too near to be healthy. It was a fine sight.

Just as we'd got the third Hurricane going, I was surprised to see one of our own aircraft leave a busy little dogfight, streak down towards us and drop the familiar little message-bag, telling me to bring the next serviceable Hurricane back home to England before nightfall. It was a strange sight in the sky—with a Tiger Moth and an Autogyro, bringing back sharp memories of peacetime flying, now floating around absolutely unconcerned on their message-carrying jobs. You might have thought they were helping the police to handle the traffic on Derby Day!

I was glad of this message to bring the Hurricane home for more reasons than one. The main reason, I think, was that—well, I wanted to test a theory. The theory is that having once been taught to fly by the R.A.F., it doesn't much matter what type of aircraft you're asked to handle—provided you remember to turn all the taps and push and pull all the knobs of a modern aircraft in the proper sequence, and have the good sense to enquire about the aircraft's peculiar habits from someone who knows her ways. Simple enough—if you have time. The unfortunate part about it was that I just didn't have time.

To cut a long story, the Merlin engine of my Hurricane took me off in grand style. Soon it throbbed gently into top gear. The boost came back, and the wheels came up and soon we were all set for Home, Sweet Home. I was above, in the air, without a care in the world—except that I was flying a machine I'd never handled before.

Soon I was to be disillusioned. Not long after the take off, the nasty "noises off" started. Then tracer-bullets began coming down at me from the hillsides. Foolishly I shot up to about 8,000 feet to sail straight into a perfect pattern of horribly noisy black A.A. bursts. An entirely unorthodox manoeuvre got me sideways and down out of this, but not before the keen eye of the Messerschmitt flight commander had registered and dived to the attack simultaneously. The strip he tore off shook me more than the A.A. gentleman had done a few seconds previously, and I slipped inwards towards the nasty noise and steeper down, changing the direction to meet the second strip from Number Two, from the other side, and wondering what the other four lads were up to above and behind.

Thereafter, as I had not had the time of means to get the Hurricane's guns serviceable, the chase went on up the village street and down a chateau drive and once almost through the chateau front door, until suddenly, twisting downstream in a wooded valley, I slipped out clear over some sand dunes and out to sea, where the fleet off Boulogne opened up on the pack at my heels. One salvo was enough for them, and I climbed up leisurely and thankfully and perhaps a little regretfully to look back at the smoke of battle round Calais and Boulogne, a weird picture in the misty red light of the setting sun, and on the other side of me at the quiet peaceful countryside of Thanet. Then, home to roost, as I had done so many times twenty-five years ago, thinking of my son and his regiment somewhere inland from Dunkirk, and wondering what kind of miracle could save them all, and if the people at home had any real picture in their mind's eye of the scene so close to them on the other side. The refugees, the burning villages, the noise and smoke of battle, and how they would stand up to the onslaught if and when it came and would they remember the defeat in Flanders with no less honour than the victories which will follow in the last rounds of their fight for freedom."

I don't know this man's name, but I thank him, and his son, and all the others he mentions. Without them, I'd be speaking german.