Mobiles

In America, I believe that they are known as cellphones. Over here in the UK we know them as mobile phones - or more latterly, "mobiles". Whatever they are called, I hate them.

I have never owned one myself and I hope to end my days having never felt the need to purchase one of these moneysuckers. And yet I seem to inhabit a world where just about everybody else is glued to the damned things. In the morning, as I drive to work, I see people walking down the streets, standing at bus-stops, sitting in cars or buses, all gabbing into these technological comforters. Who the hell are they talking to anyway? At eight o' clock in the morning, I don't want to talk to anybody.

At night-time, there are ads for mobiles on the television, programmes sponsored by mobile suppliers - while at the pub, twenty-somethings arrange flashy mobiles next to beermats - waiting for Wall Street or lost cousins to call. Surely, this defeats the idea of going out - to get away from it all - instead these people are sending out a visible message - what I'm doing now is not enough, I need a call from outside to spice up the moment.

Then there's texting. Millions of messages in moronic English, dancing through the atmosphere -"cn i c u?", "lol", how r u?" reducing our wonderful language with its endless possibilities to ugly, functional soundbites.

It used to be that when a telephone rang, there was an insistent and unaltered ringing call that endured through the years. Now all these annually updated mobiles have their own "ringtones". I have lost count of the number of meetings I have attended where mobile interruptions have occurred. Pretending embarrassment, phone owners scuttle for their bags to the sound of "God Save The Queen", "Crazy Frog" or "Greensleeves". They grin their sorries while the rest of the meeting grins back as if to say - "Oh it's happened to me before now - aren't they devilish little things?" - all except me - glowering back as if to say, "You f***ing moron! Next time make sure that goddam thing is switched off and change your f***ing ringtone to a tune that fits your personality - you know something like Three Blind Mice or The Death March!"

In my house, I am afraid I have to concede that there are currently three mobile phones. Shirley, Ian and Frances each have them. With Ian especially, having a mobile has been like agreeing to tax himself further each month. He pays out around £2 a day. The bloody thing is always going off. He has texted so often I am surprised that he hasn't got repetitive strain syndrome - you know those delicate little muscles and tendons at the base of the thumb - they surely weren't designed for all this activity. It's a health timebomb.

I'm thinking of forming a terrorist group to rid the world of cellphones. Dressed like masked superheroes, my followers will snatch the offending articles wherever we go. We will scramble all text messaging so that readers only see Martian like symbols and nobody will be able to register any ringtone other than The Birdie Song and the powers that be that are tracking our every move through mobile phone location, won't be able to find us any more.

Cartoon

I post this cartoon at great risk to my personal safety, in the full and awful knowledge that it will cause enormous offence to any visiting Christian bloggers. As word gets round about my heinous offence against the Almighty, I fully expect crowds of placard carrying religious zealots, nuns and Seventh Day Adventists to crowd outside in the street chanting for my blood. But I don't care - publish and be damned is what I say! There God sits at his computer, playing with our destinies like a teenager zapping aliens in a shoot-em-up computer game. This isn't the benign, all-seeing God of the established church and The Bible but a mischievous technological overseer - "as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport". Yes, I know, I'm wicked! Perhaps this is because long ago, men in longboats came from Denmark and colonised Yorkshire. The evil was already in my Viking veins... (Pause) Oh Beelzebub! They're already outside burning the Yorkshire flag and smashing my car with baseball bats, grey haired women in cardigans, choirboys, Catholic priests and charity shop helpers shouting "Death to All Cartoonists!". Gotta go...

February

"February made me shiver/With every paper I delivered"

They said this British winter would be one of the harshest on record - by "them" I mean the meteorologists and the dumbass newspapers. I wish I'd kept some clippings of their scaremongering reports. We're into February now and to me the winter has seemed pretty mild, rather green with very little precipitation in January. Okay tonight it is chilly - my thermometer is saying minus one - but to some people that's camping weather!

I have become a little obsessive about feeding wild birds. Lord knows when this habit crept in to my daily schedule but for months I've been out there night and early morning replenishing the bird table and scattering leftovers in the middle of our lawn - well out of the pouncing range of local moggies like our Boris. Even though we're only a mile out of Sheffield city centre, we get a good variety of birds. My nourishment campaign has attracted a growing gang of sparrows and there are wood pigeons, magpies, a jay, blackbirds, a little wren, a robin, bluetits, collared doves and crows. If I ever miss a day, I feel guilty:-

SPARROW LEADER: Hey guys, where's the seeds today?
SID SPARROW: Lazy bastard! Bet he was up late for work again.
BRAD SPARROW: No time to chuck us a few scraps.
SPARROW LEADER: Ever see that Hitchcock film, "The Birds"?
MAGGIE MAGPIE (circling menacingly) Now there's an idea!

With February, the days lengthen. Even this morning as I stumbled into our bathroom, I noticed that the grey light was less grey and when I got downstairs the birds were already beginning breakfast. Far ahead I can see summer barbecues and me lying on the lawn again staring up at swallows dancing on the air under cauliflower clouds. Time moves on, day by day. It's hard to believe that my brother in France will be fifty five this week. It seems like yesterday when we were all boys and there was mum and dad and Oscar the cat and Joe Grubham swept the village streets and Mrs Austwick sold us homemade sweets and fireworks ahead of Guy Fawkes Night and we made dens in haystacks and there was Doctor Baker and Mrs Jordan with her rosy cheeks and the summers were golden and endless... but this was all long ago, long ago.

5000

Just looked at my visitor counter and I'm amazed to see that I'm just short of five thousand hits. That's brilliant! One of the things I love about blogging is bypassing publishers to get your own words out into the world for other people to read and this is one of the things I love about the internet as a whole - it's so anarchic - so free. You can go anywhere, find out anything.

I'd like to say thanks to everybody who has visited my site - especially regulars like Amy (Friday's Web), Dawn (Retarded Rugrat), Blog By George and Brad The Gorilla. These relationships are kind of weird - not like meeting someone in a pub or in the course of ordinary life - but in a way more intimate and open. And I'd also like to say thanks to the eggheads at Google for hosting Blogger and making the practical business of blogging so easy compared with how it might have been five years ago when you had to be some kind of geek to create a website.

Five thousand and I don't know when I will ever tire of this medium. There's always something new around the corner but at the core of life there remains an urge to connect with other human beings, to make better sense of this world that we are living in. So I'll shout it from the rooftops - Blog on!

Tagged

Well, I'm not sure what this tagging thing is all about. I was tagged by "Friday's Web" and I guess the idea is you get other bloggers to address the sub-headings. Whooa! Such fun!
4 Jobs I've Had
1. Turkey farm general assistant
2. Pop singer
3. American summer camp counsellor
4. Foreman of Crown Court jury
4 Movies I can watch over and over (I very rarely do this)
1. Schindler's List
2. Once Upon A Time in America
3. Midnight Express
4. Five Easy Pieces
4 Places I've Lived
1. Stirling, Scotland
2. Leven, East Yorkshire, UK
3. Rotuma, Fiji
4. Newbury, Ohio, US
4 Places I've Vacationed
1. California
2. Ios Island, Greece
3. South Africa
4. County Clare, Ireland
4 Of My Favorite Dishes
1. Battered cod, chips (fries) & mushy peas
2. Chicken balti and egg pilau rice
3. Greek salad with feta cheese
4. Full English breakfast
4 Non-Blogger Sites I visit daily
1. BBC News
2. Hull City AFC
3. smile.co.uk (bank)
4. Ryanair
4 Places I'd Like to Visit
1. Antarctica
2. Easter Island
3. Goa, India
4. China
4 People I'm Tagging for this Meme (What's a meme?)
1. Brad the Gorilla
2. Just Jane
3. By George
4. Retarded Rugrat

Guitar

He, she or it - I think I prefer "she" - hangs on the wall in a corner of our back room. I bought her perhaps eight years ago. She's an Almansa classical guitar made in Spain by Manuel Rodriguez - number 2012. I loved her smooth tone from the moment I first played her. She's only the second guitar I have ever owned.

I bought my first guitar when I was fifteen with part time money I earned at a turkey farm. There were hundreds of them, turkeys not guitars, white-feathered and identical. You'd bring sacks of feed into the sheds to top up the feeding hoppers and they'd be at you, pecking at your legs. In nightmares you'd see yourself stumbling in the wood shavings and they'd be on top of you - suffocating, pecking the life out of you.

That first guitar is upstairs. My son plays it from time to time. I took it to the other side of the planet, played it through university, made many songs with its help. Sometimes it sat there untouched for months and then I would return to it, picking it up each day, enjoying the relationship between my fingers, those strings and the words and tunes in my head. It was also a classical guitar. I never got used to narrow necks and with large fingers I guess I'm resigned to the easy width of the classical fretboard.

In the last year or so, I seem to always have my capo on the third fret. The sweeter tone has brought a whole new bunch of songs out of me. Mostly I play the songs for myself. I might play them alone at night with some beer in my belly and sometimes that's the best time, the words and the chords melding together in a magical whole which occasionally takes my breath away - as if I am just the vehicle for songs that had simply been waiting to be heard.

Being alive is a wonderful thing. But when do we really feel that truth? I might feel it swimming to the buoys off some Mediterranean beach or I might feel it when I'm enjoying a meal with my family or tackling pub quizzes with my friends or in that orgasmic moment when Hull City or England score the winning goal but I tell you, for me one of the clearest times is when I'm playing that guitar and creating songs. It's like something above and beyond me.

I can play Dylan, The Beatles, old English folk songs, Donovan, Jackson Browne, John Denver but mostly I prefer to play my own stuff. Usually, I have five or six songs in my head and then another one is born and before you know it I have forgotten one of those I had been playing for weeks. I have a dictaphone and sometimes I try to capture my songs like insects in amber - so that they do not slip away. I rarely talk to anybody about my clandestine song making so it comes as something of a surprise - even to me that I'm here at my keyboard blurting this out to the strangers who inhabit blogworld - perhaps a good idea for another song!

Trivia

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Yorkshire Puddings!

1. If your ear itches, this means that someone is talking about Yorkshire Puddings!
2. Yorkshire Puddings are the only one of the original Seven Wonders of the World that still survives!
3. If you drop Yorkshire Puddings from more than three metres above ground level, they will always land feet-first!
4. Women shoplift four times more frequently than Yorkshire Puddings!
5. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball then Jupiter would be the size of a golf ball and Yorkshire Puddings would be as small as a pea.
6. All shrimp are born as Yorkshire Puddings, but gradually mature into lobsters!
7. Yorkshire Puddings can sleep with one eye open.
8. Ninety-six percent of all candles sold are purchased by Yorkshire Puddings.
9. The porpoise is second to Yorkshire Puddings as the most intelligent animal on the planet.
10. Yorkshire Puddingicide is the killing of Yorkshire Puddings.