Graffiti with Punctuation.

Blogging on Christmas day.

Here’s a question for you……’what did you do this Christmas’.

Blog time : it’s Christmas day 2022, my partner has just left to go see her folks for the day before heading off to her job in the local coronary care unit tonight – according to her there is usually an uptick in the rate of myocardial infarctions due to the food overload so it could be a busier night than what now is an overloaded service. Me….just made an excellent bacon butty in a toasted Ciabbata roll before settling down to my Christmas day’s work which is to write, finish and edit a whole series of new year blog posts.

A quick look and listen of the village outside reveals no people, no cars, no sound and not even the odd dog walker so maybe this Cornish village is making an early start on the food and TV coma. I kind-of wonder what’s on TV , whether it’s the same films and programmes that we got 20 years ago when we last bothered with a television ; seriously, we haven’t owned a TV in all that time and there’s nothing about it that I miss. Later on when i’m blogged out I am going to dive back into J. R Tolkien’s great creation myth – The Silmarillion which I only tried to read once in my teens and of which i had no idea what he was on about……more about Tolkien, LOTR and the Silmarils later.

The thing about Cornwall is that we don’t tend to get spelling mistakes in our Graffiti !……this is the actual painted door to a local barn and I love it.

My story -the three most interesting things.

I was originally going to call this blog post ‘the three most interesting things’ ; a sort of sideways take on the ‘three wise men’ who visited the baby Jesus in Bethlehem but then I realized that I wanted to make the post about the three most interesting things that happened to me as a child and the one thing that happened that was probably much more significant in my teenage and adolescent years. My chosen title for that was a take on a film title ‘Three weddings and a funeral’ nut I couldn’t make it work so instead I have taken a line from Stephen Fry – that blogging is basically just graffiti with punctuation.

I grew up, by the way, in a very oddly quirky house in a small market town in Lincolnshire to parents who were respectively a worker on the factory floor at Perkins diesel engine works and a shopkeeper with a small front of house shop that would once have been the house’s living room. The house was oddly rambling as it seemed to be a series of add-on’s to add-on’s, had a low and dark passage from street to back door and was usually cold, damp and infested with mice because of the town’s Corn exchange next door.

For the first few years of my life I had the tiny bedroom tucked right into the eaves of the 3 level house and which had a tiny window from which I could see mainly sky and a small corner of the central market square – it was right there in that tiny little bedroom where the single most interesting and unusual thing of my childhood happened ; briefly and basically I saw something that I have never been able to explain – an unidentified flying object (UFO) that hung silent in the sky and then slowly descended until it was out of view.

I didn’t say anything to my parents at the time because, in a way, I had no frame of reference to describe or explain what had just happened – I also thought I might get a thorough scolding because instead of being in bed I was sat at my small desk in front of the little window which is why I saw whatever I saw. Several years ago I told my now late mother about that incident because we had been talking about that house and I wondered whether it and our grandparents house and shop….one door but one just down the road still had businesses going on.

Now, you may have realized from my blogging that i’m a natural skeptic and cynic both but even so I can find no rational explanation for what happened that evening ; I wondered for a while whether I had somehow absorbed early TV flying saucer films and somehow then projected it – perhaps in a semi-awake state with a very fertile young mind. I’m pretty sure though that I was fully awake and that no other possible explanation fitted ; for example my mother suggested that it might have been an experimental aircraft of some kind because Lincolnshire was then the home of RAF and USAF bases. However, I even knew then that what I saw wasn’t for example a helicopter, nor was it an early example of what would become the VTOL (vertical take off and landing) Harrier jump jet which would eventually be based just up the road at RAF Wittering. Anyone who has ever seen a Harrier jump jet land or take off will know that the sound they produce is incredibly loud whereas what I saw was smooth and silent.

Ok, so that was interesting !

The third most interesting and exciting that happened to me in that sleepy little market town was the day that I was coming back from the shops, had to cross the road at a Zebra crossing and the thing that pulled up at the lights was an enormous (to my eyes) tank transporter (Scammell I think) with a Mark V centurion tank in dark green livery on the back.

Just to say that was deeply, madly and completely in love with tanks at the time so that was more than a bit special.

Perhaps the most significant and important thing to happen in my childhood was what came next because it still affects me today, in fact it’s going to form the main part of this long form post.

At the age of ten I made a profound life error but without knowing it at the time, in fact I got a pat on the head for it : what I had only gone and done was to accidentally pass the then important ‘Eleven plus’ exam which in those days tended to set the course a young boy or girl’s life would take. Oddly enough my two closest school friends both failed the exam so our lives forever took different courses and on my part the one thing I failed at was to form new friendships at the town Grammar school that I then had to attend. The second turn of events was that my parents then decided to move from the market town to the outskirts of the UK’s most boring city….that’s not my opinion btw – the city of Peterborough has actually been voted as such.

The grammar school that I then had to attend was a surprisingly ‘proper’ and formal school when compared to the town’s little primary school – one example is that the whole school, teachers included, sat down to lunch together and it was ‘proper’ food, surprisingly good and all of the pupils had to take it in turn to serve everyone else.

One of the funny things that happened in the first few months there did so in our woodwork class which was taken by a scary ex RN petty officer who mainly set the work for the day and then retired to his desk which was set diagonally across one corner such that he could see everything that was going on – at least when he wasn’t engrossed in his newspaper – or so I thought. One day I had to go and ask teacher about something that I was trying to do and so approached his desk somehow in a blind spot. As he registered my presence he quickly put down the paper that he was supposedly reading but which in fact was only there to hide a copy of Playboy magazine – that was my first, brief experience of a Porn magazine by the way…..by far not the last though even at the school.

The best thing that happened at that school, when judged over a long time, was that our English teacher, appropriately named Mr English would sometimes read short sections of J.R. Tolkien’s book ‘The Hobbit’ to us and I think that his purpose in doing so was to create an actual sense of what the characters would sound and act like ; he had a big and booming ‘Gandalf’ for instance and a surprisingly Andy Serkis-like Gollum voice which made me jump with memory when 40 years later I got to see LOTR.

I was only there for two terms and then my parents decided to move to the city – as I said above – so I moved school just 2 terms into the first year at a time when everyone else already knew everyone else so I was very much the outsider. When I first met my new English teacher he asked me what we had been reading, I mentioned Tolkien and the Hobbit of which the new teacher was openly and deeply contemptuous as being a children’s story – remember that I was 11 or 12 at the time and i’d been reading well since the age of 5 or 6 unlike many ‘kids today’ many of whom are functionally illiterate even when they leave school. As you can imagine that wasn’t a teacher/pupil relationship that was ever going to prosper as most of the time at school I read the stuff that we had to – ok so I have to admit that Animal Farm was good – but mostly I shared fantasy and science fiction with my best mate Dave.

By the time I left school at 16 i’d read the much longer Lord Of The rings (LOTR) at least twice but then again I also think i’d read War and Peace, a fair bit of Isaac Asimov and the novel-like abridged version of Solzenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago , which strangely our English teacher also detested. I wonder now if that teacher was an early version of the political left’s ‘long march’ through school’s and universities.

Winter Solstice.

It usually works out that my partner has to work part of Christmas and in fact in years past we were both used to being on shift and not seeing much of each other for a few days. What we have always tried to do instead is have some time together on my partner’s birthday which also just happens to be the winter solstice ; it’s purely my joke when asked what we do on the winter solstice to answer that we dance naked around a fire in the forest and sacrifice a few virgins. Of course we don’t do that now because virgins are in such short supply in Cornwall.

What we actually do is head off either west to Truro or east to Exeter, spend some time browsing bookshops, drinking coffee and finding a nice lunch somewhere. This year we managed to get lost on the badly road signed outskirts on the way in and gave up our day out early in favor of a late lunch in our nearby town. What I have to admit to though is while browsing the large chain/franchise bookstore I kind-of have a slightly naughty hobby.

The usual bookstore we visit has three floors and a cafe, a section for just about everything and anything published except I noted this year anything to do with boats and sailing aside from the odd book in the transport, sport or outdoor/nature sections. This year I happened to be on the search for anything by the very late Thomas Aquinas or the more recently ex Thomas Merton so I had to spend some time in the small section marked ‘religion’ : there I found just one small bible, a larger Quran , plenty of new age nonsense and oddly both ‘The God Delusion‘ (Dawkins) and ‘God is not Great’ (Hitchens) so I think I could see which side of the fence the bookshop staff sit on.

My childish and guilty hobby is to browse the ‘rainbow’ sections , pick up several books of the identity politics persuasion and hide them upside down and backwards facing in a different section of the store – i’m an eclectic and random ‘mover’ so this year several ‘anti’ books ended up with the vegan cookery books where they probably felt more at home and at least one serious rainbow alphabet tome joined the humor section…..bad choice methinks.

Christmas

For my personal Christmas treat I found a copy of J. R. Tolkien’s great creation myth story ‘The Silmarillion’ , unpublished during his own lifetime and which I think I tried to read in my teens and i’m sure I didn’t understand or appreciate at the time. I consider myself fortunate that I was introduced to Tolkien early on by my first Grammar school English teacher who read short sections of it in class. A few years later I read LOTR for the first time and at the last count I have read it maybe a dozen times and got different things from it each time ; the last significant time that I read it was in New Zealand when we were out on the trail, essentially walking through much of the scenery and I was kind-of reading it a wilderness journey while we hiked past Mordor, through the Wizards vale and had a nice latte just over the road from the site of the last alliance of men and dwarves vs the orcs and Sauron.

I am on a strangely different journey now because last month I found myself reading the creation myth/story found in Genesis – that being because of my RCIA class that month. Something that I didn’t know about Tolkien and hadn’t surmised from his books is that he was a devout Roman Catholic whose Catholicism runs through and underpins much of his life’s output. Re reading Genesis is simple enough and short enough because the entire universe is spoken into being and in the entire basis of creation is based on ‘the word’ ; Tolkien’s great creation myth is close because in the Silmarillion creation is first sung into being as a great song from Illuvatar (God) to the Valar (angels basically) who together sing the creation back and forth, filling it out and making it more complex. To not bore you all too much then one of the Valar (Melkor) starts to sing discord into the great song, thus falling into pride and anger and thus becoming Morgoth (the enemy).

Having been first introduced to Tolkien 46 years ago and reading something of his at least every few years I would now offer an opinion that Tolkien crafted a great story based on an entire world building and language creating exercise but also that his writing was often on the clunky side. Reading the Silmarillion again I can now see why maybe I didn’t finish it or don’t remember much about it – possibly I just didn’t have the discipline to work through things that didn’t engage me and that is perhaps why I didn’t do as well as I should have at English (or maths btw).

A new year.

Iv’e been thinking about this year and the previous year quite a lot over Christmas because part of what I do now is review my blog statistics to see how the blog has done and as with this year when my views and visitor count have both declined to think what I can do about it and how I can improve. It’s possible that my views count is down because so much of my blog has been taken up with stuff that is really only of interest to a few other builders or hardcore masochists !.

Iv’e been working hard at my blog for several weeks now while my build project is under wraps for the winter , such that iv’e written, edited and scheduled 8 new posts for 2023 and at a time when I will be working hard on the boat again and where can also concentrate on producing several new video segments in the build and fit-out series. It has always been a work of discipline to sit at the computer and write – or at least to produce my ‘graffiti with or without punctuation’ , discipline also to take the time to film as I work and then again to spend hours editing when it doesn’t come naturally.

In 2020 I thought that I would use the time when I couldn’t even access my own boat to finish my book writing project which has sat on my desktop since 2019 – rather than that though I found that I couldn’t apply the blog writing discipline to that project but that what I wanted was easy entertainment via YouTube. I don’t know why or how it is but building the boat has also been a 2 year work discipline and it has had the effect, I think, of rescuing and sharpening every other faculty such as serious reading for example.

So….my resolutions for 2023 are to finish and fit out the Pathfinder and take it for it’s maiden voyage, to then set out on ‘the journey’ around the UK while also filming it and trying to produce engaging, informative and entertaining video segments and then also to take up serious reading once again.

How was your Christmas btw ?

Year one – Graffit with punctuation and boatbuilding.