Chas Griffin

Have I died, or what?

2010-03-25T14:29:00.000Z

Help! What is going on?
Is this a new blog, or my old one?
What has a Google account go to do with anything?
And what happened to all that FTP?

Let's see what happens here....

Press 'Publish Post'....

Hello and quite possibly, goodbye!

2010-02-04T16:59:00.000Z

Hello bloglander…

I've always found Blogger impenetrable, I'm afraid. Most websites are, to me. I simply don't seem to have the right sort of intuitive powers to guess what the hell all those gnomically labelled buttons mean, and what they do and don't do. And, perhaps more importantly, I don't have the time or inclination to find out. Life's too short.
Once in a blue moon I come across a website that is a beacon of joy. The PLR (Public Lending Rights) site is one. The PLR look after the royalties payable to authors from public library loans. We get 6p a shot… which doesn't sound a lot, but it equals about a half of the royalty I get from the total sale of a book. Three loans and I'm ahead of a sale!
The site is an absolute model of clarity and speed. My 'broad'band trundles along at about half a megawhotsit, so everything takes ages, but zappo!.. PLR loads in a flash, and I can understand everything on it. Why aren't other sites like this? I've never actually asked anyone this question because there is no chance that I would understand the answer, and the information would be useless to me anyway.

Why am I telling you this? Because yesterday 'support' at Blogger sent me a full-page email explaining.. well… I've no idea what, frankly. Except that apparently I'm an FTP user (which I would deny vehemently in court) and Blogger are going to no longer service FTP. What? What?
As far as I'm concerned I click this then click that, and if I'm lucky, I've added a new posting to my blog. 'FTP' don't come into it.
The email then went on to describe, in admirable detail, an awful lot of things I didn't understand a word of.

Why? Seriously…. WHY do geeks send out this sort of garbage when they must surely know (mustn't they????) that not everyone is a tecchie-head, and in fact that most bloggers know very little of the tecchie stuff, and have no desire to. What we, as sensible, busy, and rational people want is a very simple Click This Then Click That list for a few basic procedures.
Want to add a posting? Then Click A, then B, then C.
Want to add a photo? Click D and F.
And so on.

Is that impossible? No... I don't think so. It might take time to design and implement though, as it would certainly involve speaking (gasp) to … 'non-tecchies' (ie ordinary people) to check that 'they' could understand it. Not a lot of chance of that, I would say. 'And tecchie shall speak only unto tecchie, and tecchiespeak shall come to rule the world. And none shall understand it unless he be a tecchie. And so the world shall perish.'
I did reply to 'support' asking for clarification of the email, but the mail was bounced. Well well… That's 'support' for you, I guess.

So… as far as I could make out, Blogger won't be using my FTP any more (so presumably I'll have to sell it, if I can find it and there's still a market for it), but it doesn't seem to tell me what's coming next. Not that I could understand, anyway.
So.. I can only assume that the plug will be pulled some day soon and that my blogging days, few and far between that they are, will be ended forever.

So… probably goodbye, dear reader. I wish you well in all your endeavours. It's been nice meeting you, so to speak, and thanks to everyone who has left a Comment. Always very interesting.

Now I'll get back to the Grand Oeuvre. The end of Chapter 27 is almost in sight. Just three more to go.
Maybe I should sign off with clip from Ch 27 On the Appalling Damage Materialism has Done to Society…

The Arts

I think these two pictures sum up the influence of Materialism on the arts rather well. Both are concerned with death, although one of them might just be concerned with schlock shock. One profoundly moving. One vapid. One a work of extraordinary art and craftsmanship. One involving sticking on sequins. One genuine. One cynical. One worth fifty million pounds. One priceless.
One Materialist. One Idealist. Take your pick.

Woops.. here we go again. The pictures in the text won't upload, and I don't know how to resolve this. No 'Click List', you see…
Try to imagine them: one is of Tutankhamen's golden mask, and the other is of Damien Hirst's diamond-smothered skull.

Bye Chas

Our new Vatican

2009-11-21T16:27:00.001Z

It struck me this morning that I've not written anything on this blog for a couple of weeks... which almost certainly means several months. Time flies like… mad, doesn't it?

I've not written anything largely because I've not had anything worth wasting your time with, but also because I've been flogging away at the Grand Oeuvre. I can't remember where I was up to last time I wrote anything here, but I'm now trying to sort out how to write Chapter 21, which will be the culmination of all the evidence I've assembled in the previous 20 chapters. I've delved into Magic and The Occult and come out smiling, and have, I hope, showed how Mind differs from Brain. All the while, I've been looking for flaws in the overall philosophy of Idealism… and have not found the slightest trace. (Idealism is the sole and automatic opposite of Materialism. Once you appreciate the fact that Materialism is irrational and unsupported by any evidence at all, then Idealism must replace it as a logical necessity. But don't take my word for it, or anybody else's; check it for yourself.).

And all the while, further elements keep dropping into place. It struck me all over again how science has replaced religion to such a degree as to be almost laughable. Scientists are now the fount of all wisdom. If we see a funny light in the sky zig-zagging about, we turn not to a priest, but to a scientist. Whether we find the explanation of 'a weather balloon' or 'Venus' any more satisfying than 'an angel, my son, an angel', is a moot point.
The parallel is greater. Both institutions speak from seats of power, 'ex cathedra', from either the Vatican or the Palace of Lambeth, or Oxbridge University. Both hold each other in either scorn or bewilderment, and occasionally both wear recognisable uniforms. Above all, both are quite sure that they are right, and thus nobody else can be.

What struck me this morning is that science now has its own brand new cathedral in the Large Hadron Collider. All wisdom will apparently now come from this new building, in a way similar to the heavenly revelations that Church buildings were once associated with.

They are looking for the Higgs boson, a so-far theoretical particle which will, they think, 'explain' gravity, and with luck, take us one step closer to a Theory of Everything.
Surely nobody seriously believes in either of these expectations?

If they do find a Higgs boson, it will not 'explain' anything. It will just pose more problems, and the issue of what caused what will just be pushed one step further back into mystery. Science, by definition, produces more questions than answers. It is a never-ending quest. Hence the silliness of… a 'Theory of Everything'. Even if we admit that the pompous title is an embarrassment, the whole mindset behind it is even more embarrassing.
A few of the things science 'does not fully understand' includes, mass, light, electricity, life, mind, and consciousness. A Theory of Everything would, naturally, explain all of these, plus other mysteries like intuition, creativity, how we see things 'out there' when the visual cortex is at the back of the head, and, a current favourite of mine, how a young man of normal disposition got an honours degree in Maths at Sheffield University in the 1980's while having a brain which amounted to no more than a rind the thickness of orange peel inside his skull. The rest was full of fluid. (Try googling 'Professor John Lorber', the doctor who wrote the case up). I can send you a relevant pdf if you like.

And then we have the problem of how the LHC experiments are to be run. As I understand it, they fire beams of fantastically tiny particles into each other at unimaginably high speeds. The ensuing collision will, they hope, produce a cloud of particles, including the Higgs boson.
What I find baffling is that his experiment is meant to mimic the Big Bang: the exploding singularity which is thought to have produced the entire universe from within its own pinprick dimensions.
Am I alone in thinking that if you wish to mimic the Hugest Explosion of All Time, you should not go about it by creating the Smallest Collision of All Time?

I've raised this issue with a few scientists and have not yet heard a convincing explanation. Perhaps you can help me out?
I'll summarise all responses as soon as possible.

Bearing all the above in mind, I find myself wondering how much longer we as a society will allow Big Science to spend untold billions of our taxes on ever more expensive machinery which can clearly never do the jobs they are designed to do, if a Theory of Everything is the target.
Big Religion used to be in this position, taking by right one tenth of all the wealth of the land. In Tudor times, while peasants were allowed by law, only three courses (including soup) at mealtimes, guess who alone could have nine courses. Yep.. cardinals.
The LHC has so far cost £4.5 billion (that is admitted to). It broke down immediately. The repair cost of £14 million has now reached £24 million. Will it ever break down again?

You could build a half-decent York Minster for that sort of money, or bring a proper education or fresh water to a lot more kids.

I do sense that times are a-changing, and that sooner rather than later we will start asking loud questions about what we want our tax-tithes to be spent on.

Incidentally, have you come across the Flynn Effect? Mr Flynn is a political scientist from New Zealand who noticed some curiosities in the statistics on intelligence. He did his homework and concluded that human intelligence is increasing at the rate of some 3% per decade, or approx 10% per generation. This is NOT directly tagged to education, nutrition, or culture, and is, frankly a mystery. His figures are accepted as accurate.
What does this mean?
I hope it means that as we get smarter we will demand more rational expenditure of taxes, and greater principle in government policy.

It might, of course, mean all sorts of other things as well.
Exciting times lie ahead, perhaps…

Carpe diem.

On economics

2009-09-21T14:19:00.003+01:00

Economics has been called the 'dismal science', and is something I know nothing about. What is eminently obvious to me though, is that nobody else knows anything about it/them either, or the Crash of 1928 and the Mess of 2008-and-counting would never have happened. Would they? These wonderful bankers (the collective noun for bankers, as in, say, a 'pride' of lions or a 'gaggle' of horse-flies, is 'wunch', I'm reliably informed) kept telling us that they needed to pay each other vast amounts because you need to pay top dollar '…to get the best brains'. These 'best brains' have just applied their top dollar expertise to bringing the world's economies to their knees. How did they pull off this remarkable feat? … more in a minute.

Meanwhile, what's all this about economics being 'a science'? A science is something that deals in empirically discovered Facts, allied to a rational Hypothesis (ie, 'hunch'), which combine to produce, with luck, a Theory. This Theory will apply in all cases in all places, and is thus held to be 'true' until it is superseded by a broader more all-embracing Theory. That's the scientific method; and it works (or should do).
Economics works entirely differently. It does not work according to empirical objective Facts and sound Theory; it hobbles along from day to day, lurching to left and right at each successive minute. Science does not do that. Why do/es economics lurch and stumble from pillar to post? Because it's all based upon human decisions in the first place and natural disaster in the second. Expensive mathematicians and deluded financial brokers keep trying to devise algorithms to predict market movements, (Why? To add stability, for the benefit of all? Hmm… how about 'to make a quick killing'?) but they will never ever find one, I can predict with fine certainty. They would be literally much better off studying the weather. A typhoon in Japan flattens a factory, and thus by the 'law' of supply and demand, the price of scraggle-tweeters quadruples overnight.
Hang on, though... 'law'? That sounds a bit like science, don't you think? A proper Law, like the Law of Gravity or the Law of Conservation of Energy. But the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing like that. It's not even a 'law of moral convenience' as passed by a parliament in a civilised society for the best protection of its citizens from the mad and the bad.
No, the 'law' of supply and demand is nothing but an observation of the near-universal practice of greed and venality in the world of commerce. If something becomes scarce, traders, merchants, cornershop wallahs and Top Dollar Bankers all react in the same way: they up the price as high as they can get away with. It's not a law; it's a dispiriting reflection on the human capacity for selfishness.

And there you have it: the economics of the entire world is run not on the basis of any Law, or indeed upon rationality of any sort: it is run on the backs of just two emotions: greed and fear. They call a market 'Bullish' when greed is in the chair and everyone thinks they can steal a march over the other guy and drain some extra cash out of the public commonwealth for their own Top Dollar bonuses; and they call it 'Bearish' when fear replaces greed, and everyone judges that the risks of allowing greed full rein are too high. Best sit tight for a while, until untrammelled greed becomes possible again. This is the condition we are in at the moment. The Great Brains of banking are biding their time. They were startled that the USA didn't bail out Lehman's (they were banking(!) on the Big L being so important to The Economy that it could never be left to go bust) and now they are hiding under their collective stone, waiting for us all to forget. Then they can return to plunder us once again.

Or can they? Have we finally learned some sort of lesson? That Rampant Capitalism is no good for anyone? Have we finally learned that a civilised society is not one in which every man is for himself, and himself alone?.... the message that Milton Friedman and Reagan and Thatcher rammed down our throats, and which our public services have been shattered by ever since? (Remember Thatcher's famous 'There is no such thing as society'?)

Have we learned that enormous private wealth for the few at the expense of public squalor for the many is not a good exchange? That a vast wage gap between the highest paid ('earned' from such useless things as property speculation and currency manipulation) and the lowest paid (doing such essential jobs as sewage work and producing food) is bound to breed ill-feeling all round and to greatly diminish such things as civic pride and social cohesion, not to mention national morale?

I doubt that we have learned. We might tinker a little at the edges, and might try (unsuccessfully I would confidently predict) to appeal to the better natures of the Greed Merchants in finance and banking, but overall nothing will change. Greed and Fear will remain the Laws by which the world runs its economies. Until, one day….

… one day the Common Man will say 'enough is enough'…. And politicians will be forced to rein in the Men of Greed. Then maybe economics will slowly change from being run at the whim of personal greed-driven twitches and lurches, and begin to be run as a service to everyone on the planet: fairness will replace greed; everyone's basic needs will be addressed and met; long-term social investment will replace short-term profit rip-offs; huge wealth will be looked down upon instead of looked up to; we will honour each other instead of despising or envying each other. We will be judged by our values and not our value.
And on that day, the Fat Pigs of the City will finally learn to fly.

Until then, we will just have to remain angry at what they've done, and feel more angry because there seems to be no will to change it at the top of governement, and even more angry because we at the bottom feel powerless to change this. And that's the way it will stay until enough of the public get fed up with being swindled and decide to act.

Meanwhile, the Co-op Bank was not involved in any sleazy activity, and is never likely to be, as it is run not by Top Dollar Greed Merchants for their own interest, but by and for its own members: it's a co-operative. You might like to consider this when wondering where your money will be safe in the future.

Rant over. Back to work… Finally finished Chapter 16. About to broach The Occult: toads, newts, skinny blokes with bass guitars hanging below their knees, zombies and all….. but underneath all the nonsense there are some gems of wisdom. More later.

Types…

2009-09-15T15:16:00.001+01:00

I spend the best part of my working day sat in front of a computer screen, reading, or if I'm lucky, writing. It can get monotonous, even though I have a big window obliquely to one side of me, which gives out onto the garden. Thus I can occasionally vary my focus and watch the butterflies on the buddleia, or the eucalyptus tickling the breeze; occasionally a scruffy ginger cat, with a dog-end in its gob and a battered trilby, looking for something beautiful to kill, or once in a while, a magnificent pheasant, strutting his technicolor stuff.

But mainly… staring hopefully at a screen, wondering whether I will ever be able to find the right way to finish the chapter I have stalled on halfway through, yet again. After several years of screen gawping I feel I'm something of an expert on how to cope with it, and would like to pass on what I think might be one or two Handy Tips on the subject of fonts.

I use three fonts for different things. For writing, like composing this blog, for example, I find Times New Roman to be unbeatable. The letters are big-bodied, meaning the ascenders and descenders (the tops of 't's and the bottoms of 'g's, for example), are relatively small. Think 'Vanessa Feltz'. Thus, you can fit a lot of easily readable text onto the screen. I use 14pt if I want a quick overview, but mainly I enlarge this to 150% when writing. At this size I never have to peer, and never feel I'm straining my eyes. I can read entire books on my 17" screen at this level of enlargement, with no trouble at all. Recently I read the Torah, the four Gospels, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada like this, one after the other. No problems.

The other onscreen font I use is Comic Sans. This is best, I find, for emails. TNR is too black and formal and in yer face. Comic is more relaxed and really pretty friendly (think Paul Merton, or possibly Joe Pasquale). It is roughly a million times better to write in and a trillion times better to read than that godforsaken and soulless Arial that so many of my incoming mails are in. A font size of 12 or 14pt seems to be about right to me. Why, I wonder, do the Arial fans also favour 1 or 2pt? It's a skinny typeface in the first place and is virtually invisible in small fonts, never mind unreadable. And why do so many of them favour pale blue as a colour? A boring, tiny, skinny font in a virtually invisible colour? Please reconsider if you are an Arial user!
Comic Sans, at 12pt, in navy blue, makes a mail a joy to read, even if it's only another attempt to flog me stuff to make my willy yet another three feet longer, so I can strap eight more counterfeit watches to it to boost my self confidence. But spam seems to inevitably arrive in boring Arial or similar. Suitable for the sad little lives spammers live, I suppose.

You may have noticed that a lot of website pages are set up in either Arial (or one of its clones) or Comic Sans. The former are tiring to read; the latter are a pleasure. Would you agree?

The third font I use is Garamond. This is wonderful for printed text, because it is of slender body, and uses about a half, or less, of the ink TNR would need. Also, TNR on a printed page is downright threatening, I find. It's the stuff of Summonses and Subpoenas. Garamond, however, leads the eye gently across the page, and never demands an effort of the reader. Think Darcey Bussell or Leslie Caron. It dates from the seventeenth century and has never been bettered for elegance and economy. I use 12pt for printing off documents as my printer needs only one pass to print a line, so it's light on ink and takes little time, and the results are beautifully readable.

A further possible Tip is that if you have, as I do, all your colours in one basket, so to speak, and don't do much colour printing on account of the outrageous cost of the ink, and when you do dare to print off a photo, you run the constant nuisance of having to replace all three colours when only one has run out… well…. maybe this will help…
You can keep your jets clean by occasionally printing off in 'brown'. As far as I know, brown is made by mixing all three primaries (it always was at primary school, anyway, so most of my artistic efforts ended up as being pictures of bears hiding in ploughland, or soldiers huddling face down in shell holes on the Somme) which means all three colours get drained at the same rate. And, surprisingly, the result is quite readable, printed in 12pt Garamond, naturally.

***

Yes, you've guessed. The reason I'm writing this now is because I've stalled, yet again, on my current chapter. It's supposed to be about Vibes, Instinct, and Intuition. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, you might say. I thought that myself until I started on it. After two days I had 2,000 words on the page. They read quite well, but there was a certain something missing. I spent an hour trying to work it out. Eventually intuition told me that I had been tackling the issue from the wrong end. Thus, my 2,000 words were not exactly irrelevant or wrong…. but would need a complete re-jig, with extra bits adding here and there, sometimes in mid-paragraph. In other words, the sort of editing I absolutely hate. Too complex to hold in my mind, and too ambiguous at too many points. What goes where? Why? Why not there, instead? But if there, what about X and even Y? And where the hell has Z got to?
At the rate my tiny mind can process stuff, there are several days of slog ahead, and even then it won't feel right because it will have all sort of rough edges and little gaps in the flow and so forth, and so will need constant re-visiting. Bah.

No butterflies out today: raining. No scruffy cat; probably off somewhere dealing dope. No pheasant. He must be in either his Winnebago or a fox.

Anyway… back to staring at my screenful of Times New Roman, wishing I was somewhere else.
It'll pass…. And the chapter will somehow get finished.

Then it will be onto the next chapter: The Occult. Oh, mercy…..

Please don't…

2009-08-31T15:33:00.002+01:00

I zapped across to BBC2 last night. The Proms were playing. I'm not a huge classical fan, but I know what I like, which is mainly Bach, mainly on the guitar or cello, and in moderate doses. Other composers I will give a try, but Beethoven frightens me, Mozart gets a bit plinky after a while and Stravinsky sets my teeth on edge. Anything later than Elgar sounds to my cloth ear like stuff falling out of cupboards or a slow train crash.
Yes, I know.. I'm a philistine, and I don't care. I occasionally spend a few moments listening to people talking about the music during intervals, and I am bewildered. I have ears, like them, and a brain, like them. How is it that they seem to be hearing something entirely different from what I do? I know my sense of pitch is dodgy, as is my memory, so I am largely incapable of remembering a theme from the first movement twenty minutes ago which has just been cleverly repeated by the eighth bassoon, counterpointing the fanfare by the trombones and piccolos. But if I were capable of remembering it.. so what? What is so special about repeating a theme, inverted, backwards, and with a flattened fifth and denatured ninth, seventeen bars, or indeed seventeen minutes later? I don't get it.
I do sometimes wonder if I'm missing something, or whether talking about music is simply an easier way of earning a living than working. Writing music isn't easy though. I know that. So why do so many people feel compelled to write music that I find…. deep breath… pointless or even painful?

Some of it definitely falls into the same bag as Modern Art, much of which is genuine garbage to my finely-tuned mind. I don't have much time for the genius of Andy Warhol, but I think he spoke a great truth when he said that 'Art is what you can get away with'.

Anyway… I zapped into the Proms… and what did I see? A couple of operatic types belting out a popular song from the 1930's, with facial expressions which were clearly meant to signify enjoyment, but which somehow only conveyed condescension and lack of understanding. It was like watching a sort of puppet show. What was going on? I checked in the Radio Times.
It seems the Proms are either making themselves more accessible, or dumbing down (rather like 'A' levels), depending upon your point of view: so they were putting on a programme of songs from MGM musicals.

I caught a bar and a half of an old favourite (oddly my memory refuses to remember what the song was, for purposes of mental hygiene, I suspect) and zapped away as fast as possible. Show songs do not improve by being sung by Great Voices. Kiri te Kanawa should NOT sing I've Got You Under My Skin. Operatic voices are the way they are so they could reach the back of the stalls in the days before amplification. Thus impresarios could build bigger halls and pack more bums onto more benches and thus make more lolly. The Voices have remained with us ever since.
Personally, I don't much care for the strangulated foghorn effect, especially in a language I can't understand, with lyrics that frankly don't seem to be worth the effort (if I've understood the plot of The Ring correctly). If you like it, fine. I wish I could join you, really I do. It would give me a touch of class, so sorely needed. But I can't. I've tried many times, and failed.

However, I do like many of those magnificent songs from the twenties and thirties. The tunes are perfect and elegant and the lyrics poignant and ingenious, and they refer to the concerns of real people in language I can understand. The great crooners made them unforgettable and eternal.
But only people who can sing a little like Sinatra or Ella should attempt them. Dieter Fischer-Diskau should not. These songs are intimate and personal and do not gain a thing from being bellowed into the gods, even sottissimo, which still sounds impersonal, mechanical, and contrived.
So please leave popular music alone, O Great Voiced Ones. This includes modern pop, of course, unless you can do the moonwalk and crotch-grabbing to go along with the full orchestral version of Thriller, falsetto squeaks and all, preferably echoed by the blokes on the kettle-drums.

And this plea includes folk music too. I once heard Bryn Terfel (I think) singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and almost cried. It was pitch perfect, of course, and every phoneme was enunciated with crisply starched clarity; and the piano accompaniment was academically spotless. But forgive me Bryn, if indeed it was you… it was soulless. And we poor cloth-eared plebs like our folk songs to touch us, as they were intended to, before they were Collected and sanitised and incorporated into symphonic scores by Great Composers. Folk songs are meant to be scratched out on cheap guitars and accordions with a couple of reeds missing and sung in pubs by people who can barely stand, and who have a vocal range of almost the full octave. The thing is, it's not about technique.
The Foggy Dew is a song of Life, as meaningful in the 15th century as it will be in the 25th (I've no idea when it was written, incidentally, and don't care. Quality is ageless.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that his idea of hell would be to be left alone with himself for eternity. I reckon he could improve on that by having to listen to a loop of Pavarotti singing Where Have all the Flowers Gone? .
Long time passing, indeed….

Not terribly green…

2009-08-28T14:23:00.002+01:00

Today I received a notification from the Nationwide building society in a long white envelope. The information was on a slip of paper (a quarter of an A4 sheet). Good thinking Nationwide! Cutting back on wasted paper. Excellent!
However... the slip was enfolded inside a full sheet of A4, bearing the words
PLEASE DISCARD THIS INSERT.
ENCLOSED FOR PRODUCTION PURPOSES ONLY.

One step forward; four steps back. Presumably nobody had worked out that it would have been cheaper in time and paper to print the info on the big sheet and not bother with the slip at all.
The problem obviously lies with their envelope stuffing gear, and no doubt they will be working on that and get it right one day. We hope…
Meanwhile, I wonder how many hundred thousand people will be getting a sheet of completely wasted paper in their post today? How many trees does that represent? And how much wasted fuel in the cutting and transportation etc?

Just by the by… do you, dear reader, buy jotting pads? Surely not! If you take a sheet of one-sided A4 scrap (or two-sided if it's from Nationwide), you can fold it in half and tear it. Then fold the halves into three and tear again. Thus each bit of rubbish paper gives you six handy jotter-sized slips. I use them by the thousand in my writing, and by the dozen for shopping lists and aide memoires. In the kitchen we have a wad secured by a bulldog clip, with a pencil attached to the clip by a piece of string. It never gets lost, and every time I use it I get a warm glow, knowing I've recycled a bit of otherwise wasted paper. Eventually the scraps get burned on the Raeburn, so they are used yet again, and I get an even warmer glow. Wonderful things, Raeburns.

Wonderful…

2009-08-25T14:33:00.002+01:00

I've just taken a few minutes off from Sigmund Freud and Chapter 15 of The Book. Freud was a determined Materialist, which means that his underlying premiss is flawed, which means that by definition we can't rely on any of his conclusions. If you start from the wrong assumption, you are going to get things wrong, aren't you? So does that mean that everything he wrote must be wrong? No, I don't think so. But it must surely mean that things won't dovetail neatly. And neither did my writing about him. Grr…

Anyway… I was getting a bit fed up with banging the same old drum all the time and happened to look up and out into the garden. The buddleia is in full bloom, and finally the butterflies have turned up, after being absent for all of the 'summer' so far. One cone of purple florets had five on it: two admirals, two tortoiseshells and a peacock. I had to dash out with my camera.

Is there anything lovelier than a peacock beauterfly? Except perhaps a peacock bird? The tones and designs on its wings are unbelievable. And they are remarkably tame. I could get my macro lens within a centimetre and they wouldn't budge. Admirals are a bit more nervous. They either flap off when you get a bit close, or at least close their wings up. Tortoiseshells are bold as well. One jumped up off the flower and onto my hand. A peacock brushed my ear. I could hear it.
Then a couple of painted ladies joined in. The little buddleia had something like fifteen items of mother nature's jewellery on it, along with three or four 'penny whites'. Plenty for all, of the bittersweet nectar. Everyone getting tanked up as fast as they could.
Just wonderful…

People who think that butterflies just flap about aimlessly have never seen one pick its way faultlessly through a forest of grass stalks in an overgrown meadow, or watched a courting couple in flight. The leader jinks and jiggles 'randomly', but the follower jinks in perfect tune, and instantly, and stays at a constant distance. That isn't random flapping. It is extreme control and intent.

So back now and mentally refreshed; ready to do battle with Freud again. All good stuff, but I'll be glad when I've finished.
The next subject will be 'Hypnosis'. Materialist science hasn't got a clue how it works and thus does its best to avoid dealing with it at all, but it does work and won't go away. How shall I write about this, I wonder?

Onwards…. Have a great day Chas

Hi Pegs!

2009-08-21T19:49:00.002+01:00

Good to hear from you, Pegs. glad you're enjoying 'Scenes'. Good luck with navigating Blogworld. It baffles me, I'm afraid...
Have a great weekend Chas

Intuitive chemicals are already here… Watch out!

2009-08-21T10:45:00.001+01:00

A friend recently sent me a couple of books to help me with my researches into the truth about ghosts.
So far I've discovered, among several other things, that the reason Big Science doesn't recognise the existence of anything remotely paranormal, is that Big Science has done a Bad Thing, and has adopted a dogma.
This dogma is the Hypothesis of Materialism, which claims, as one quite famous scientist once patiently explained to me, that 'everything is mineral'. 'Even this conversation? Mineral?' I asked, but he was not to be tricked like that. I was dismissed.
This enormous blind spot in 'scientific' logic has a long history (which I'll be addressing in the book), but it largely derives from Darwin's day.
It hinges upon confusion between Evolution and Origination. No serious person doubts that the Evolution of bodily forms is pretty much of a certainty. But development is absolutely different from origination. This fact is what Richard Dawkins and co seem to have wiped from their minds.
By adopting Materialism as a Truth, ie, as a dogma, scientists like RD have painted themselves into a series of corners, all similar to the 'Mineral conversation' above. Clearly, by no stretch of the imagination, can a conversation be called 'mineral', except by someone preferring dogma to reason. It really is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes… and nobody seems to have noticed. Quite extraordinary.

Materialism claims that everything has derived from the mineral world: ie, from chemicals: from 'mud and lightning', if you like. Therefore, as this is taken as an axiomatic truth, it stands to 'reason' for Materialists that everything non-mineral we see and hear and feel must have derived from minerals. That's the 'logic' they follow. Thus Life, Mind, Consciousness must have 'evolved' from chemicals, with no external input of any kind. Ask them 'Do the chemicals contain Life Mind and Consciousness in the first place, then? Or not?' and you won't get a straight answer. Lots of waffle and fancy verbiage, but no straight answer. And the answer must be 'yes' or 'no' must it not? 'Emergence' is no answer: it's just ducking the issue, because for something to 'emerge' it must have been there in the first place. That's what the word means. Try it on a scientific friend... all good (mineral) fun. Gets the (mineral) mind working…

Which brings me back to the book my friend sent. It's called What We Believe But Cannot Prove and so far it seems to be a list of Materialist propaganda. I suspect we won't be seeing any entries from anyone of a religious bent, or even a non-Materialist scientist (and there are quite a few, but they are more or less bullied into silence by Mr Dawkins and co).

Here's the quote from the book I'd like to pass on which illustrates another of the corners that Materialism has painted itself into:

Unlike religious dogma, no matter how fervently a scientist may believe that something is true, his or her belief is not accepted as a true description of reality until it passes every executable test. Nature is the final arbiter, and great minds are great only insofar as they can intuit the way nature works and are shown by subsequent examination and proof to be right.
Carolyn Porco, Ex-Nasa.

An excellent description of the scientific method and process, I'm sure you'll agree. Apart from one thing…
Where does that most un-mineral of entities, 'intuition' derive from? Science has no answer, except ultimately… 'minerals'.

Over to you, dear reader…

Have a lovely day (mineral)Chas

Incidentally, if you are a Materialist-by-default, as most Materialists are, having never properly debated the matter, you may well have written me off as some sort of mad fundamentalist-creationist. I'm not. My faith lies in logic, and nothing more.
If you are genuinely interested in what makes the universe tick, as opposed to defending an unconsidered dogma, please consider that because something is not black, it does not therefore have to be white. It might be grey or striped, or multicoloured. Think Plato; think cave...
You might also like to dig out for yourself, as I have done, whatever evidence you can find for the Hypothesis of Materialism. You might be surprised by what you find. I certainly was.

A Strange Moment

2009-08-16T14:13:00.002+01:00

Broad daylight. About 10am. Overcast but bright. No wind. Me taking a leak against the currant bush, as is my wont.
Something catches my eye. Falling from the sky, about twenty feet up and twenty feet from me, is a large feather. It looks like a flight feather from a pigeon, say. Quill type rather than down type. I would guess it was about five to eight inches long, and of a greyish colour. I couldn't really see against the grey sky, but it wasn't brightly coloured.
It is tipping and spinning a little, and generally falling to earth the way you would expect a feather of that size to.
However, there are no birds in the sky, and the speed the feather is falling at, plus its closeness to the ground makes it surprising to me that no semi-nude bird is visible.
'Well that's odd,' I think, and continue blessing the bush.
Then I go to find the feather, which had landed in/on a patch of calf-high grass about fifteen feet away.
No sign of it. I hunt carefully and systematically. No feather. It had definitely landed in that area. But still no feather.
'That's still odd,' I think, and indeed confide as much to the apple tree. Then
I go and have a cup of tea.

Vicars and the Other Thing

2009-08-16T11:08:00.003+01:00

Hello eReader…

I keep meaning to write something else on this blog but Life keeps getting in the way.
However, I've just been cobbling together something in response to a BBC programme called 'Sunday' which I thought might interest one, or possibly two, other people.
So I'm just copying it below.

Any interest?

Best wishes to all my reader….

Hello, 'Sunday'...

If I heard you right this morning.... you are putting together a programme based around the antipathy between personal individuation and traditional religion.

The issue here is one education, it seems to me. Christianity (and Islam and Judaism, more or less) is a religion of Belief, not of Understanding. In medieval times, the masses were coerced into religion, and did not have the education or critical faculties to question what they were being told or threatened with.
Over the last hundred years or so, people have become far better informed about the world in general, and have had their ability to think critically sharply developed. Thus, people are no longer satisfied with being told what's what by a bloke in a purple frock; especially when there is no rational explanation supplied for any of the doctrines or dogmas. Hence the rise of Richard Dawkins.

However, education, which encourages individuation (think for yourself; nullius in verba; etc) does not automatically turn people into atheists. The religious impulse, as someone has called it, or the philosophical impulse if you like, will not go away. Hence, many people find themselves in a limbo: religion is more baffling than satisfying; Dawkins can't explain Life; philosophers churn out garbled nonsense... What's a chap to do?

The obvious thing for many is to look for a system that relies not upon Belief, but on Understanding. This is found in the philosophies of Yoga and Buddhism. Thus Buddhism is expanding in the UK (even among prisoners, I believe) while the C of E finds its attendances continually falling and Catholics can't fill their seminaries.

All that is being 'lost' by individuation is the slavish obedience that The Church has become used to over the centuries. The solution would be for The Church to become more 'explanatory' rather than exhortatory. But this won't happen, I don't think, because The Church doesn't actually seem to understand what it's talking about. I saw Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury in casual debate once, and Dawkins won hands down as Mr Williams lost himself and his listeners in a fog of verbiage.

Meanwhile, those of us who have chosen Understanding over Belief are happy bunnies. The universe does make sense after all (and, rather to my surprise, and as a result of what I've learned via the path of Understanding, so does Christianity, deep deep down).. but to become a happy bunny you need to work at it, and take personal responsibility for your own thinking and understanding, rather than being spoonfed paradoxical medieval pap by well-meaning but puzzled clerics (or rationally-challenged scientists, if it comes to that).

Society is, I think, moving from the need (if there ever was one) for 'vicars' and towards the more meaningful condition of personal individuated quest and understanding. The Church will continue to slowly fade away until its clerics understand this, and make it their business to address the issue by personally pursuing Understanding as well as devotion and Belief. Personally, I can't see this happening for a number of reasons. But I hope I'm absolutely wrong.
Please forward a copy of this note to Mr Williams if you have his address! I wish him well!

I look forward to your programme.

All best wishes to all at 'Sunday'.

Chas Griffin

Chas Griffin
CEO, MD, Janitor, Third Leaf Books
www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk

RE: Gibberish

2009-07-13T15:10:00.002+01:00

Hello Ben...

Thanks for your perceptive comment. 'All that stuff I don't need to know' (to paraphrase Socrates).
I'm still trying to get the feel of it all. So much effort going into so little....

I'm enjoying Google Earth though. The Sahara looks much as I'd always imagined, I must say.

One thing that constantly surprises me is the poor level of communication between most websites and their visitors. Somehow you are expected to magically know what all those buttons will do. Personally, I haven't got a clue about most of them... and I guess I don't need to.

Wikipedia is astonishing. And the Gutenberg Project. No doubt many other gems await me.

Meanwhile... it's raining, which means I can't mow the lawn. It's now nearly up to my waist in places.

Onwards...

Thanks for your notes: and the Future...

2009-07-12T14:57:00.003+01:00

Hello Sonia T and AC.... thanks for your comments on my recent Birthday Out blog. I can't reply personally as I don't know how to contact you. Still can't make much sense of Blogger (or almost everything else on the www). Boy, there's some serious drivel out there, isn't there?
AC... Glad you enjoyed my books. You are only the third person I know of who has got the Dwlalu joke. Have a banana. Thanks for your kind wishes too. Much appreciated.

To my amazement and modest delight, we now have broadband, after a seventeen month wait while BT did everything in its power to avoid actually spending money on one of its customer. The Post Office, who is running our bb, has been mixed over the past almost year and a half. But on balance, they've been pretty good. A couple of their agents have been first rate, once I learned to tune in to their Norn Irish accent. So if you are thinking of getting bb or are fed up with your current supplier, I would say you could do worse than condsider the Post Office. At the very least THEY talk to BT on your behalf. That must be worth quite a lot in itself.

So... maybe I'll write a bit more on this blog in future. Don't know what about yet.

I'm still waiting to hear back from my agent about whether he thinks my organic gardening book is any good.

Has anybody out there read any of Paul Brunton's work? I've just started volume 2 of his Notebooks. Grand stuff. If you don't know of PB and would like to read something to make your hair stand on end, try his A Search In Seceret Egypt... the bit about spending the night alone in the Great Pyramid.

Right... time to get on...

Hope the shakes never come back, Sonia!

Best wishes to all Chas

A Birthday Out

2009-07-10T20:07:00.001+01:00

We don't get out much these days. This is because we need to be on hand almost permanently to look after two aged and infirm (not to mention quite badly demented) parents. My Dad needs attendance three times a day for me to get him some food and his pills, and Anne's Mum needs more or less constant supervision due to her continuing obsession with her bowels and her inability to learn how to cope within her own powers.

So... Anne's birthday on the horizon! With a fair bit of foresight and a fair bit of luck, Anne had got her Mum booked into the local care home for six days' respite so we could have a birthday out together. My Dad would probably be OK on his own if I left him a ham sandwich and a piece of cake for lunch, all concealed under a mug of water with his pills balanced on top, and a note saying 'One O'clock Pills'. All on a chair directly in front of him, so he couldn't easily forget it.

We thought we'd go to Aberglasney Gardens to see what was blooming, and for lunch in their neat little restaurant. Something of a treat, this, as our normal meals out consist of bacon egg and chips when we go to the dentist in Cardigan every six months or so.

The weather held up, and the gardens were beautiful. Early lunch. Anne had the roast pork, and I had the ratatouille. Cup of tea.

Ten minutes later, after wandering through the little beech wood, I developed an itch on my chest that wouldn't be scratched away. Then it spread to my back. Anne checked... no rash on the chest. Then it spread to my backside, which seemed to have become completely corrugated with bumps. Then my hands began to feel nettled and tingly. Anne, being a woman, had a couple of potions in The Bag and gave me an antihistamine. We sat on a bench for a couple of minutes then moved on. Within twenty paces I was feeling woozy. Then went down on my haunches. Then had to lie down on the path, feeling very faint. When it was clear that this wasn't going to go away in a few moments, Anne fetched help and rang for an ambulance.

The lady from the bookshop (Vanessa?) gave me her coat for a pillow (thankyou Vanessa, for your kindness) and was clearly concerned that she ought to keep me talking. I felt my vision fading. The leaves of the beech tree above me were turning from green-against-blue to a strangely solarised or posterised effect. The leaves were black, each surrounded by a grey-beige outline. The sky was just... pale.
I remember saying to Anne 'I've been poisoned'.

I don't know how long it was, but the paramedics turned up with the sort of stretcher that would have served well as a trans-Antarctic sledge. Not that I could actually see it at the time. All I could see was the posterised filigree above me, and the face of the medic. He asked me a few questions. No, no breathing problems. Just... very very weak. Funny vision. Itchiness.
He checked my chest and confirmed that there was now a rash. He slipped a mask over my face and turned on the oxygen. I feel I ought to say that it helped, but it didn't. I just felt as though I was on the verge of... what? Sleep? Faint? Death? Well, if this was death, it wasn't so bad. Better than a poke in the eye, at any rate, and I speak from experience. But who would get Dad's pills? And how would Anne manage two geriatrics without me? And who would finish the book I was writing?

The paramedics were very kind. No rush, but constant appraisal. I think I began to feel a little better, although I can't positively remember this. I must have felt stronger though because I found the energy to roll onto my side and vomit into the hostas. Mmm.... a genuine pavement pizza, with little chunks of Mediterranean veg in a slew of tan gravy. I remember someone saying 'Do you want to lie back, Chas?' and replying 'No thanks. I'd rather look at my vomit.' Quite why, I don't know. It wasn't that interesting.

They lifted me onto the trolley and wheeled me off, past the little knot of visitors who had gathered round. Gentle concern. Gardeners, you see…

I was definitely picking up by now. Perhaps the oxygen was helping after all? I can remember the medics launching me and the trolley down a grassy slope towards the carpark. We agreed it was straight out of Last of the Summer Wine. When I say 'launch', I mean 'guided', really.

In the ambulance they hooked me up to a tube and Things That Go Ping and we waited there for a while. Anne came in and sat in the guest seat, looking perplexed. I had a catheter in the back of my hand, accepting a drip of some sort, and an injection of, I think, hydrocortisol, to act as a further antihistamine.. but don't quote me on that. I've always had a gift for immediately forgetting or confusing everything I ever learn in the medical sphere. I'd have made a poor brain surgeon.

They got me back to Carmarthen Hospital, with Anne following in our car. We had eaten at about twelve, so I guess it must have been about two by now, but really I have no idea. Maybe it was three. They trolleyed me into A&E and then trolleyed me back out and into the ambulance again. 'Full.' We sat and sat. In my case, lay and lay. 'My' shift of paramedics said goodbye and left. Another shift arrived. We sat again. Eventually a doctor called Nigel turned up, and re-checked a few things, including my blood pressure. It was getting back to normal, at about 120. I gathered it was down to 87 when they first tested me. That sounded low. Later on, as I felt more like myself, I read the instruction note stuck to the ambulance wall, near my head. It said, if I remember rightly, that the Trauma Team may be called if a road crash victim's pressure dropped below 90. Oh. Right.

At 4.30 they wheeled me into a casualty bay. A nurse and her assistant, who looked too young to be out by herself, wired me up to a heart monitor thing. Electrodes stuck on everywhere. The nurse seemed to not have the information that the doctor had got about me. Why not? I wondered. Maybe talking is more reliable than notes. She took the catheter out and wadded the little wound. 'The doctor will be with you soon.'

Anne meanwhile had set off on the fifteen mile drive back home. She would get Dad's hot meal for him, and give him his tea-time pill. And she'd feed and pill her Mum, and clean up whatever parts of her needed cleaning up, hoping that Mum hadn't fallen (as in 'slid to the floor') again trying to get back from her commode to her chair. If she was on the floor, Anne would not be able to lift her without my help. No... wait.... Mum was in respite. No problem there. Just my anxiety speaking.

I was still in the ambulance when Anne left. The radio was on. Splutter scratch splutter... and a report of a traffic accident in Cynwyl Elfed, a village on the A484 that Anne had to go through on her way home. 'Too soon for it to be Anne?' I checked with the medic. 'It said 'a single male'.' I told him of how someone had once pulled straight out of a notorious junction in Cynwyl and had driven smack into the side of Anne who had the clear right of way. 'I bet it's that junction again'. 'No... it said something about trees and being trapped.'
Not Anne, at least. Some other poor sod.

I was feeling pretty chipper by the time they got me inside. In fact I wanted to go home, but they wouldn't let me until the quack had written me off, to coin an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Doctor Nigel did eventually return and confirmed that I was fine to leave. What had caused it? The best he could offer was a 'vaso-vagal event', which I think means.. 'Er... you sort of fainted'. But what about the itches? Surely this was an allergic episode of some sort? He agreed, but couldn't suggest anything helpful. After all, what could be wrong with ratatouille from a respectable establishment? What indeed? Incidentally, the joke about basil being in the ratatouille turned up three times in the course of the afternoon. Some gags will never die.

And that was that. Anne got back home late, as the accident on the A484 forced a long delay and then a long diversion. Dad didn't want his hot meal as he 'had that at dinner time'. This wasn't deliberate bolshiness. It was just his extreme conservatism showing through when Change loomed.
So Anne left him with a slice of bread and ginger jam, and at his request, a mug of tea.

I sat in the picture window of A&E, on a wheelchair, and went into a gentle meditation. I felt fine, if a little weak. What could have caused it all? I had no history of allergy. I had touched none of the plants, so it wouldn't be that. My breathing was fine, so it wasn't going to be pollen, and anyway I'd been to the Gardens several times before with no problem. What else? It could only be the rattytooey, with or without basil. Complicating factors might be the pills I'd been put on a month before following a strange five minutes when my wrist suddenly lost all presence. The GP thought it might have been a mini-stroke and stoked me up with pills and booked me in for scans on my head, heart and neck. So... pills plus ratatouille equals....what? Widespread itch, plus dramatic drop in blood pressure? Didn't seem reasonable. But the ratatouille wouldn't go away, except for the pizza I'd left behind in the hostas, which by now would have been discreetly interred somewhere less obvious, to return its elements to the elements.

Anne finally came for me at six o'clock. Rather than be officially diverted, she'd opted for the longer alternative route back to town from the start. She'd brought a bag with pyjamas (I own pyjamas?), my book of the moment (about the history of world empires; very good: I 'd already learned from it what made the Holy Roman Empire tick), my little blue netbook, and, bless her, my mp3 player. But not needed. Home James, and would you mind driving? 'I was going to, anyway.'

We went home, again via the long route. Anne had driven 70 miles that afternoon, sorting me and Dad out.

Dad hadn't eaten his sandwich or drunk his tea.

Still none the wiser. Aberglasney were most helpful and sent me a full recipe for the ratatouille, including the sources of their ingredients. Nothing to catch the eye. 'Mushrooms' would surely have meant 'Bog-Standard Mushrooms', and not 'Something Weird Picked by Trolls from the Swamps of the Styx'. 'Mixed Herbs' would surely not have incorporated 'Hemlock' or similar, or somebody would have already noticed the pile of bodies in the yard.

Our GP confirmed that it did indeed sound like an allergic event, but had no further wisdom to add, except that I should carry some antihistamine with me and call an ambulance if it happened again... Assuming, presumably, that I am within five minutes of a telephone (or am in a mobile-useable area, and can remember how to use my phone), and that the ambulances are not all parked up outside A&E because of another administrative log jam.

So where does that leave us? Should I be more careful? Of what? How? Should I never eat out again? Avoid ratatouille? Avoid herbs? Mushrooms? Aubergine? China bowls? Forks? Cups of tea? One of Anne's friends loves the Aberglasney ratatouille, and has it every time she visits. It's fine. It certainly tasted terrific. Yes, I recommend it.

It's a funny old world.

A Busy Sort of Day…

2009-03-14T14:52:00.001Z

Normally my days are quiet and very routine. Up at 7.30, junk about 100 spams; porridge and coffee; up the hill to wake Dad and get him breakfast and pills; back home and start work on The Book. At lunchtime a bowl of soup and a couple of last year's scrawny apples, then up the hill to get Dad his lunch and pills; back to the computer; tea time, up the hill again; eat; evenings crashed out: rarely anything on the telly, so it's reading or music.
Anne's day is similar except she's looking after her Mum.

But yesterday was different…

Some months ago we passed on our lovely old grey Fergie tractor to a friend who is going to renovate it and use it. Excellent. It was just slowly rotting in the open shed and there was no way I was ever going to do anything about it.
Doug turned up with his two neighbours, Orfyl and Arwel and kicked a few tyres as per normal. 'No way we'll get a trailer down here. My wellies are past the ankles already. Look… We'd be stuck. Sure to.'
So Ken next door came to the rescue with his big Zetor. I sat on the Fergie and steered while Ken hauled and slithered Fergie out into the yard. Even the Zetor got jammed in the mud once, but with a bit of intelligence (lengthening the towing chain by a couple of feet; think about it…) we got moving again. The tyres were virtually flat but Ken inflated them from the Zetor's built-in pump. Amazingly, they stayed up.

Doug and co turned up again a week later with a big posh flat-bed trailer with its own little winch and Fergie went off to her new home. I almost wiped a manly tear away. People get very fond of Fergies.

Doug sent snaps of the restoration process. It was just a little like watching an operation on your child. Pipes and tubes; things exposed that should never be; surfaces and areas that were clearly not healthy; tales of needing ever bigger hammers to free up the pistons; rumours even of welding pneumatic valves on, to force pistons free, a little like an air bomb (mercifully that idea was scrapped, as would Fergie undoubtedly have been if they'd gone ahead with it).

One or two bits of giblet in the gearbox looked over-tired, so Doug called me back to see if they could come over and collect the other Fergie we had bought in for spares some twenty years ago. It had always been called Scrapper, and had laid in the same spot, facing Fergie in her shed, festooned in huge swags and swathes of brambles for a fifth of a century.

Again, Ken came round with the Zetor to haul Scrapper through the mud. This time it wasn't so easy, as both rear wheels were locked and one tyre was a tattered rag. Still on, but cracked and utterly flat. This was to be a problem later. And, of course, to add to the fun, Scrapper was facing the wrong way and would need to be hauled backwards.

Ken hooked his chain up and heaved. Nothing happened, apart from the Zetor moving slowly an inch or two sideways through the morass. This was partly because Scrapper was on a bit of a slope. Ken re-manoeuvred his dinosaur and hooked up again. This time Scrapper moved a couple of inches, but those wheels would not turn. I was perched on the back, standing on very flimsy rusty footplates, hanging desperately onto the steering wheel. I should point out that Scrapper lacked a seat, so I felt a little like Charlton Heston in Ben Hur, except that I didn't dare take one hand off the wheel to grab the whip. Grunging noises; 'tunk' noises as the tow chain strained; gulping noises as I tried not to think of what might happen if the chain broke; … and inch by inch Scrapper moved. It took a quarter of an hour to haul it twenty yards to the point near the end of the track, where we were to leave it for Orfyl to back up to it with the big trailer. En route, Scrapper had collected behind its back 'wheels' a thick wodge of brambles, prunings, reeds, mud, and a small willow tree which had foolishly taken root in the boggy bits.

Two weeks later (ie, yesterday) Doug and co returned, along with Raymond, Doug's brother. A very smart move, as it turned out.
We'd fixed the date a week previously. Would you believe it, the day before Doug and co were due to come, we got a phone call from Heinz (yes, he's from Lancashire) and Vincenza his wife (Staffordshire, I think) to ask if they could come round in the morning to finish felling and logging a couple of trees they'd made a start on six days ago.
Well.. should they come or not? Our lane is narrow, twisting, and difficult. We wouldn't want anyone to be faced with the prospect of having to reverse up it, particularly with a trailer. On the other hand, Heinz might not be able to come on any other day for a month and the sap was beginning to rise already. It's hard work sawing a sappy tree, and, once felled, it's wringing wet and takes four times longer to dry out. 'OK Heinz… we'd love to see you.'

The woodfolk arrived at about ten, and set to work. We'd warned them not to touch the three 8" sycamores in the drive until the tractor gang had arrived and left again. That still left plenty to do for four of us. Heinz knocked 'em down, the women hauled the brash to a bonfire site, and I hand-sawed the pole-sized pieces that are a pain for the chainsaw.

At 11 the tractor team arrived. There were four of them which seemed like overkill. One to turn the dinky little winch and three to stand by and applaud, surely?
Not a bit of it. It took four of us, pushing against various points of the carcase to move Scrapper a single millimetre, and that was after Doug had hacked away all the trash from behind the wheels. The hand winch just wasn't up to hauling a dead weight through mud. And things weren't helped by that flat tyre that acted like a skid mat, absorbing whatever forward energy was generated and using it instead to slew the tractor gently sideways. 'Levers, boys! Chas? What've you got?'
Orfyl followed me to the woodshed and we hauled out a couple of handy baulks, about four inches square and six feet long (ex-floor joists, rescued from a demolition site twenty-odd years ago. I knew they'd come in handy one day, according to Rule One of the Smallholder's Handbook: 'Never throw anything away. Never… ')
Yes.. they helped. We moved Scrapper all of an inch and a half, but it was still slewing off beam. 'More levers!'
We found an old iron pipe, 2" by about 7', part of an old milking parlour. Arwel stuck it under the back axle. 'Good, boys.'
We fixed Doug up with an old railway sleeper (farms are treasure troves of social history…) and we tried again. 'Heave!'

Yes! Another inch gained. 'Heave!' four men straining moved the brute a further magnificent inch. 'OK. Rest…'
It took the best part of an hour to move Scrapper the necessary couple of feet onto the trailer. After every inch gained, Raymond twizzled the little winch to take up the pathetic amount of slack. More than once he had to flick the release thingy so Orfyl could adjust the level of the flatbed. It was only when you heard the safety lever snap off that you realised what a risky job Raymond had. A titchy little cable, under great stress…. We joshed him boyishly about whose job it would be to pick his head out of the shrubbery should the wire snap. Oh, what fun…

Yes, eventually Scrapper was hauled safely aboard. I would never have believed it could have taken so long. But we'd enjoyed it. We'd faced a silly problem and had beaten it through intelligence, strength, and perseverance. And we'd worked well as a scratch team. No bullying; no bossiness; no back-sliding. Great stuff. Everyone was listened to. Every idea tried. Perfect.

I left them to the final job of tying Scrapper to the deck for his journey to Doug's shed.
The woodworkers were in the kitchen, clearly glad they weren't part of the tractor circus and only had the mundane jobs of climbing trees with a chainsaw to deal with.
A quick cup of tea, and I'm off up the drive to get Dad's lunch. Orfyl was ever so gradually hauling the Land Rover and trailer round the 90 degree angle from the track and onto the drive. He had about three inches total clearance to juggle with. 'Whoa!! Back! You're going in the ditch!' Try again…' Whoa! Stop!! The trailer's climbing the bank… the Scrapper's going to slide….'
I left them to it.

Ten yards up the lane I met a new Vauxhall coming down with a beautifully coiffed young woman in it. 'Hello?' 'Oh.. am I in the right place? I've come to do Mrs Harrison's hair…'
Oh yes, Anne had told me about her Mum's hair appointment.
'Yes. Right place, but er….' And I pointed behind me to the Land Rover rig which had finally got itself straightened out and was slowly hauling towards us. 'Oh…' said the lady.
'Well, one of you is going to have to reverse,' I thought. 'And it ain't going to be Orfyl and his whopping great trailer.'
The hairdresser tried valiantly, but almost went into both ditches within twenty seconds. The next time she stalled. Clearly, she was about to panic. I did my best and calmly waved her back, but we both knew…
'OK, I'll have a bash.' Mucky wellies onto pristine car mat. Can't be helped. Easy to start… now where's reverse? Ah.. it's written on the gear knob.. right…. Blimey.. what a flippin gearbox. I'm used to my Kangoo box which is light and very positive; this thing was like a jam jar full of knuckles…. Push…pull… what gear's that? No idea. Lift and pull back for reverse.. Wow! Got it! And after only one embarrassing diversion, I wound the ten yards back up the pitted windy drive to Dad's entrance where I could pull out of the way.
The convoy passed, waving and tooting, as convoys do. Orfyl couldn't resist pointing out to the hairdresser that older drivers were better. He meant 'men'. She knew.

There we are then. All we need now is for me to reverse onto the track and let the hairdresser continue down into our yard on her mission of mercy. But could I find that blasted reverse gear again? I tried six times. Lift, pull back; pull back, lift. Lift harder and pull back…. Not a chance.
In the end the lady got back in, fluttering about whether she'd broken her nice new car (I don't think reverse had ever been used before, frankly). And lo… in first time and away…..

Today has been very quiet.

Chapter 12 and serious drive troubles

2009-03-07T11:34:00.000Z

Hello again, if there's anybody there!

I've been meaning to write something else for ages, but simply haven't had the time. We've

had health and family problems (we are now caring for two 89 year old parents) and

maintenance problems around the farm.

We had a freak storm a month ago that completely washed out £60 worth of tarmac that

we'd just spent a whole morning tamping into the worst of the pits and potholes on our

drive. The force of water was so great that a mass of stones, up to 4" across, was swept

right down to the bottom of the yard, and left there in shoals. It looked like Brighton

beach in places. All this scouring meant that the holes in the drive were now even more

cavernous than they had been before. How could we fix them? There was no point in

spending hundreds of pounds on more tarmac, as another storm would just wash it all

away again. It needed more profound attention.

The problem is that the drive is in the wrong place and can not now be moved somewhere

else. Back in the Good Old Days, someone decided that it would be a good idea to divert

a natural drainage runnel into a concrete pipe or two, and turn the age-old water-cut

groove in the landscape into a useful tarmacked track. Perhaps it used to work back in the

Good Old Days, but since we've been here (some 27 years) we're spent more time on the

drive than on any other part of the establishment. Mainly, putting in bigger pipes to carry

the run-off from the field on the right (which is not our field) under the drive and into a

big ditch; and in filling and patching potholes further up the drive, also caused by runoff

from the field on the right... but also, occasionally when the drain at the top of the drive,

at the junction with the council lane, gets blocked, and, well... you can guess where all

the storm water off a hundred yards of road goes, can't you?

Our efforts have all helped the problem, but it'll never go away. My fear is that one day

we'll have another super-storm which will wash the drive out so badly that we won't be

able to get the car out or a van in. It could happen. And even quick fixes will not be

quick, and will cost a lot of money, and will by no means be permanent, and might need

expensively repeating a fortnight later. A 'permanent' solution would need a hydraulic

engineer (I'm not kidding...) and would cost a fortune. It's a bind....

But Kevin-up-the-road has been a terrific help. He borrowed a JCB and spent an entire

morning hacking out the reeds and shrubs (trunks up to 4" thick) from out of the ditch by

the wet field on the right. That should allow the most urgent runoff to reach the Big Pipe

inder the drive, and let it rush away to the river, about 200 yards away, steeply downhill.
Another small step forward... we're hoping....
And Kevin wouldn't accept a penny for his labours, skill, time, or diesel. Ain't living in the

country wonderful!

***

The other reason I've not been a-blogging recently is that I've become engrossed in writing

The Book.
I think I was just starting Chapter 3 when I last blogged. Now I'm up to Chapter 12. It's

hard work in many ways, but also enjoyable, seeing the ideas slowly trot out onto the

screen, and checking them over for cohesion and reason.

So far, no snags. I still can't find anything that calls my main thesis into question. If

anything, more and more things are tumbling into place, which always seems to me to be

an indication of being on the right track ('Only connect'.... as EM Forster said).

Chapter 12 is proving to be a bit of a challenge in that so far I've needed to read the

Koran, the Torah, and the Four Gospels. What extraordinary documents they are. If

you've never read them, I do recommend trying them. The first five books of the Old

Testament are sometimes called 'the Pentateuch', and are the basic Jewish holy book: the

Torah. The four gospels are the original writings of the New Testament.

My special interest at the moment is in the paranormal elements contained in these three

whoppers. Here's a couple of samples:

•The Koran mentions various angels, including personal guardians for every soul; djinn

(spirits created from 'subtle fire'); the creation of humanity from clay, 'moist germs', and

breastbones; 'those who conduct the universe'; possession; Houris (ever-virginal

non-carnal maidens); the fact that God is the Lord of Sirius; the notion of multiple Satans;

a competition between magicians;

• The Old Testament is packed full of paranormalities. Here are just a few, pretty

much at random, from the Torah: God planted a garden and walked round it, talking;

there were giants in those days; the Sons of God bred with humans; Jacob wrestles with

someone he thinks is God; a rod turning into a serpent and back again; a hand that turned

'leprous as snow' and back again; magicians producing hordes of frogs;

• The New Testament: just a few examples from the four gospels, again, pretty

much at random: baptism with fire; disease cured at a touch or at a word; remote healing;

possession (quite a lot of possession and dispossession); becalming a sea storm with

words; 'devils' trying to bargain with Jesus; multiple possession discharged into pigs;

raising the definitely dead, amidst laughter from the crowd;

That's enough to be going on with. There are many more. What I find incredible is that

nobody seems to have picked up on these phenomena as a launchpad for further

investigation into the paranormal at large.
Perhaps it's simply that our current intellectual masters, the Materialist scientists say 'It's

all rubbish' and that shuts everybody else up.
I do wonder why the various Churches don't investigate though. After all, even the staid

old Church of England has a couple of exorcists in every diocese. They don't do that for a

purpose that doesn't exist.

Next on the list is the Hindu 'Bhagavad Gita'; then something substantial from the

Buddhist canon. Don't know what yet.

When I've done all that, the fun will begin of finding the common threads between these

five great religous doctrines (and there are far more than most people think, it seems to

me) and in seeing if I'm any nearer to understanding what ghosts etc are.

Incidentally, I wonder why the Lord Yahweh forbade his chosen people the relish of a

mole or lapwing sandwich? Or a nice owl stew? And why was he so insistent on

specifying every tiny detail for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and the

tabernacle that surrounded it, even down to the shape of the handles and the colour of the

curtains?

It's a wonderful world!

Have a wonderful day Chas

Big Bang goes OUT … Little Protons go IN (Homer Simpson would understand)

2008-09-13T15:01:00.001+01:00

Please sir! Sir! Sir!
Yes, Triffid, what is it now?

Please sir! I've had this spiffing idea sir!
Oh no. Not another perpetual motion machine is it?

Please sir, no sir…
Go on then… what is it?

Well sir… this Big Bang thingy…
Yes, what of it?

Well sir.. why don't we try and simulate it by banging protons together sir?
Say that again…

Copy the Big Bang by bashing tiny little things into each other. Like this… POW!!! POW!!!
Yes. Please. That's enough. Look, Triffid... Have I got you right? Do you understand what the Big Bang is?

Yes Sir. Of course sir. It's the theory that the universe and everything in it.. all the stars and everything… all suddenly came from out of nowhere in a huge big BANG! POW!! Whoosh!!!
There are how many estimated stars in our galaxy, Triffid?

Oh.. about a hundred thousand million sir. Everyone knows that.
And how many other galaxies are there estimated to be?

Another hundred thousand million sir! My cat knows that sir!
Making a total of about, say, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars?

And loads of gas and stuff…
Weighing about what?

Well… a whole universe full, I suppose.
Right. Now then Triffid… tell me what you know about protons…

Gosh! Tiny tiny tiny!
Billions would fit on a pin head would you say?

Never counted them sir!
So.. on the one hand a whole universe, and on the other hand something vanishingly tiny. And you're suggesting that whacking a few tiny tinies together is in some way relevant to how a whole universe suddenly appeared?

Well, yes sir. How else could we do it?
Now think.. a Big Bang is a colossal explosion, yes?

POW! BANNNG!!!
And.. please don't do that. And an explosion is matter travelling outwards from a single point at high speed?

POWWWW!!
Whereas colliding particles together is a matter of matter travelling inwards at high speed, yes?

POW!! WHOOSH!!!
Big Bang equals colossal matter moving outwards, whereas proton collision equals miniscule matter moving inwards? Can you explain how the latter might bear any relationship whatsoever to the former?

Erm.. well…. It would be a jolly big feather in the school cap, sir? I mean… St Darren's down the road have only got a wind tunnel sir. A new cyclotron would look terrific on the new school prospectus, sir..
Triffid… you are a moderately bright student as you are well aware. So I am surprised and a little alarmed to hear that you think that stuff moving inwards is somehow comparable to stuff moving outwards. This is the stuff of fantasy, Triffid.

But sir…
.. and I am not going to recommend the £5bn bursary you are asking for, plus God knows how much a year to run your ridiculous scheme, from the School Fund.

But sir..
No 'buts', Triffid. I do understand your youthful enthusiasm and your insatiable curiosity. Most commendable. But I strongly urge you to think out your experiments more clearly in future. When you grow up and go out into the big wide world, you will find that things are very different there.

Yes sir. Sorry sir.
No. Don't apologise. Just trot off and come back after tea with a list of ideas for, oh.. how about 'Ten Ways of Spending Five Billion Pounds Usefully'?

On science, sir?
If you like. Off you go…

Whee! Whizz!!!
Children, children…

Broadband and Richard Dawkins

2008-08-21T20:14:00.000+01:00

Hello again... if there's anybody out there…

Gosh it's been along time since I wrote anything for this blog. This is mainly because my broadband still hasn't arrived, after seven months of promises. It seems BT needs to dig up most of Wales before I can get even a very slow link. But 228Kbps would be ten times faster than my dial-up link, and I can live with that. I only need to access text, on the whole, rather than five thousand pixellated phone clips of drunken teenagers splattering each other with food in a like totally awesome kind of way.
Actually, the timing of the broadband is almost spot-perfect, in a like totally surprising sort of way. Here's why…

For about 15 years now I've been working on plans for my Great Work, which will, if I get it right, show how Religion and Science can be re-united once more. Nobody I've mentioned this scheme to believes a word of it, it must be said. Even people who know I'm not actually barking seem to suddenly remember a dental appointment or a funeral that they are expected at, so they can swig back their glass of Chardonnay and zoom away up the drive, waving furiously, and no doubt hoping that the ambulance will arrive for me soon.

But I'm quite serious. I really can show how this age-old split can be healed, and, what's more, I think I can show how the split arose in the first place.
Mainly it's just a question of simple logic; that's the essence of it, anyway. (Anyone who has read Scenes from a Smallholding will perhaps remember the last chapter, called 'The Tale of the Kale', in which I outline this logic. [A few first editions are still available from www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk])

Anyway… over the past couple of months I have amazed myself by actually making a start on writing this Oeuvre, instead of just worrying at it and letting it keep me awake at night. The breakthrough came when it occurred to me to write the text on the RH pages, while writing notes, extended arguments, a glossary, cartoons etc onto the LH pages. This would mean that the reader can pick and choose how to read the book. I will personally recommend that the reader reads just the RH pages for the first time through. If they've had enough by then, one way or the other, well that's OK. But if they find they want to know a bit more about say, the Aristotle/Copernicus split, or about papal infallibility, or about the link between Isaac Newton and the doctrine of Karma, or how the Enlightenment relates to science… well, they can re-read the book, picking stuff off the LH pages as they go. It's a sort of 'personally tailored' approach I'm after, the aim being to make the book as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

I sent the first chapter to my agent. To my astonishment, he liked what I'd written and wanted to read more. (Usually he doesn't like what I've written, usually because he doesn't think anyone will want to publish it. And usually, I suppose, he's right.)
That was the good news. The bad news was… that he didn't like the LH/RH thing.

Bah! I'm sticking with it. We can argue later. Meanwhile it helps me get a sense of proportion into the topics I'm dealing with. That's what has been bugging and delaying me for so long…. How much weight to give to each point I want to make; and also, maybe even more importantly, what order to put the myriad points into. What I'm nervous of is that I'll start at point A, which might interest a scientist, say… but which might be completely hopeless for a religious person, and put them off altogether. The LH pages can help me out here, as I can add reassuring little messages where I think someone might be losing interest or becoming confused.

Now I've written the first two introductory chapters, and am about to get into areas that need more close attention. This attention will involve quite a bit of research on the internet. And guess what… broadband should be arriving almost bang on the button. Great!

But first I'm tackling a tricky subject in Chapter Three: Richard Dawkins. This is a man of huge enthusiasm and learning, and indeed of intellect, but who has one blind spot, which is the cause of a lot of confusion among people I've talked to. This same blind spot has also been the cause of untold misery for millions of people, when viewed over the last hundred years or so.
What is this blind spot? Any offers?

It is this: neo-Darwinists, of whom RD is the most zealous, make three essential claims:
1. The bodies of living things have evolved and changed by very small increments over time, and were not created once off, perfect.
2 The mechanism by which Evolution operates is the grim and glacially slow process of Natural Selection, which is a process part random (genetic mutation) and part rational (the slow and feeble don't survive to pass on their feeble genes).
3 Life arose via some unknown incremental process of random self-assemblage of molecules.

Which is the odd one out? Please.. take a minute to look at all three points carefully before reading on….

Tum ti tummm ti tum tum ti.. tummm………

*********************

Yes. It's number 3.
While 1 and 2 have a lot of evidence to support them, and a logical framework too, number 3 is just a dogmatic assertion, based on no more than the triumphalism of having more or less proved The Church to be wrong about Creationism.
There is no evidence at all for Life having originated in this casual 'incremental' manner, and if you look at the statistical unlikeliness of even a few of the necessary conjoinings having occurred at random.. well, numbers like 10 to the power of 30, 40 and 50 turn up pretty soon. And even if all these grotesquely unlikely conjoinings and associations actually did occur by chance.. there is still no logical mechanism by which abiotic (un-alive) chemicals could have spontaneously transformed themselves into something recognisably biotic (alive).

Here's the essential point: in the tradition of science, any theory which has A) no rational basis, and B) no evidence to support it, should be discarded as fantasy. But neo-Darwinists continue to trumpet spontaneous creation as Fact and Truth…. Not out of malice, but because it has become a blind spot…
The blind spot has become so powerful that Mr Dawkins seems to have completely forgotten that his hero, Charles Darwin, mentions 'the Creator' several times in each of the editions of 'The Origin of Species', and then RD makes things worse by saying that the need for 'a Creator' is 'transparently feeble'. That's one in the eye for his hero, then. But again, RD doesn't seem to notice. Blind spots can take you over if you don't keep your wits about you.

This why anyone who watched RD's first tv programme on Darwin the other week would have noticed that some of the teenagers he was gently haranguing didn't seem to immediately fall into line with what he was expecting of them.
RD thinks: 'Natural Selection and Evolution are Truth. Why on earth don't people just accept it?'
The kids think: 'Hmm.. interesting. Lots of evidence.. fossils and so on… but I dunno.. something funny somewhere….'
Most people think the same way as those kids, to the total bafflement and exasperation of Mr Dawkins.

The 'something funny' that the kids aren't knowledgeable enough to pick up on, is that they don't see how Life Mind and Consciousness could have spontaneously generated out of mud, rock and lightning, never mind how many trillions of years these 'components' had in which to spontaneously assemble themselves.
The kids, and people in general, intuit that there's something fishy going on here, and they instinctively then transfer this suspicion to everything else RD tells them, fossil evidence or not.
This is normal sensible human behaviour: if you find (or intuit) one flaw in what you're being told, you quite rightly suspect everything else. Estate agents are slowly learning this.
RD can't see this problem however, and thinks that people who don't fall into line with his own (in his view) perfectly sensible explanations must be irretrievably stupid or wilful. Hence his edginess and niggly tone.

Presumably, neo-Darwinists think that this selfsame intuition that their critics feel, also spontaneously generated itself out of chemicals. What does your own intuition suggest to you about that?

Right.. back to Chapter Three…
If you, dear reader, would find it interesting to read about how the book is coming on, drop me a line and I'll post an occasional progress report on the blog.

All best wishes to all, including Mr Dawkins, of course

Chas

PS: RD also says that Darwin's explanation for all the improbable creatures we see in the world around us is that they came into being "by gradual, step-by-step transformation from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance".
This, I'm afraid is simply not true.
Not only did Darwin require 'a Creator' in all editions of Origins, but he also states quite unequivocally '…I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.'
Check it for yourself: 1st paragraph, Chapter 7, 1st edition; or 1st paragraph, Chapter 8, 6th edition.
Blind spots can lead you into error; sometimes into serious error.
The Materialism that underpins conventional neo-Darwinism has led us all into serious error. More on this some other time.

Why All Writers are Millionaires: (apart from a few who aren't): part 8

2008-04-23T19:55:00.000+01:00

My wife Anne, ('She who Understands Things'), has just done our annual accounts, and tells me that my earnings from writing for the last financial year were 'almost £1,300'.
This would buy a decent lunch for two in Chelsea, I believe, but it doesn't seem a lot for the hundreds of hours spent hacking away at the keyboard over the past twelve months. How did it come to be this way?

Firstly, my sort-of novel, called 'Your Dog as Philosopher' put my agent into a tailspin.
What I was trying to do was to write a funny story about a man left on his own for a week with his feisty toddler daughter and his flolloping dog, and to blend it with an easy-reading introduction to Yogic philosophy (a subject that I think every thoughtful person deserves to have access to).

Stan read it and said 'Sorry…'
I said 'Oh surely not..? I thought it was quite funny. Don't you agree?'
'Yes', said Stan, 'the book is funny; and yes, it is interesting and informative and stimulating, too.' But the problem was that no publisher was going to touch it, because you can't have a book about philosophy that is funny.
'Who says so?' I asked. 'That's not the point', said Stan.
'Did I succeed in what I was trying to do?' I asked.
'Yes, you did,' said Stan.
'Well then?'
'Why don't you listen: NOBODY WILL TOUCH IT.'
This exchange went on for some time. Stan was quite right, of course, once I thought it over a bit. Publishers and editors everywhere endlessly claim that they are looking for 'fresh' or 'original' material… but don't let them fool you. They are not. What they want is something very very similar to the last thing that fluked them a lot of money. Original is RISKY; and there's nothing a modern publisher hates more than the 'r' word.
Stan's solution was that I should remove all of the story element from the book and try again with it.
This depressed me rather, but I had a go. Stan played his part, and took the time to supply a bare outline for me to start from, and Anne had a go as well, but after a week of trying, I shelved it. I was just too close to the original to untangle the two strands of story and content. And I kept becoming unsure of what was 'story' and what wasn't. I ended up in a fuddle. The file is on my C drive, awaiting further attention one day.
A couple of people have read the text, meanwhile, and have reported favourable things back to me, but Stan is still adamant that no publisher will give it house room. I'm sure he's right, still.

So.. no success there, then.
My next effort was a self-help book called 'Guide Yourself to Happiness', a subject close to my heart, as I am endlessly happy and have long been puzzled why so many other people seem not to be. I sent Stan the first chunk, and he came back positive, so I went ahead and wrote the book.
Stan read it and was still positive. He sent it off to half a dozen publishers, including Piatkus, who we thought would definitely like the look of it.
Responses came back, slowly, which is never a good sign. One house said no thanks because only published a certain number of UK titles per year and they'd already filled their quota. I can only assume that this was a polite brush-off; otherwise it suggests that timing is more important to them than quality.
Two other houses said it was a good book (in fact nobody had a bad word to say about it, except one editor thought it might be a bit 'stronger', by which I think she meant 'more sensational'.. the very opposite of what the essence of the book is about) but they couldn't take it on as 'the author doesn't have his own radio or tv show' to launch it from.
Sleb culture rules OK?
We never heard back from Piatkus at all, despite several approaches.

So no joy there, either.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd try my hand at drama again, for a couple of Amateur Dramatic friends, and wrote a three-acter called 'Upper Nattem's Little Piglet: or Hamlet, the Panto'. I thought it worked ok, and sent off to a few friends to read. Reports back were positive so I sent it to my 'clients'. They didn't like it.

Three down. One to go.

That left something I'd been pottering along with over the year: a series of short stories, or vignettes, each based around a day in the life of twenty different dogs. The stories were loosely connected, and intertwined here and there. I asked an artist if she'd like to draw for it, and she came up with a couple of preliminary drawings that looked good.

'OK, Stan? What do you think of 'Dog Days'?
'Er… sorry, Chas… but no.'
'Well why not? I realise some of the stories are a bit 'dark', but they are realistic, I think. Don't you agree?'
'Well yes, I'm sure you're right.'
'So do you want a couple of more cuddly stories instead?'
'Er… I'll come back to you.'
In the end, Stan just didn't feel right about it. Again, he didn't think a publisher would want it.
In my heart of hearts I wasn't surprised. The stories weren't cuddly enough for conventional requirements. To publish them would be….risky.

So.. four up, and four knocked down! I guess that's why not all writers are millionaires! The message, for any wannabe writers reading this is.. if you want to sell a lot of books, study the market, and write something almost, but not quite, exactly like something that has already sold a million. It will probably be rejected on the grounds that it is too like the book you copied, but if you show any promise as a writer the agent will work with you and encourage you along suitable lines for your next effort.
If on the other hand, you want to do something original.. be warned. Unless you name is Wayne Rooney or Paris Hilton, don't even consider writing a funny philosophy book!

On Materialism and Idealism...

2008-04-10T19:39:00.000+01:00

Hello Omnist...

Good to hear from you. And thanks for all the information, too.

It comes as a shock to learn that Darwin used 'the Creator' even in the first edition of 'Origins'. I have clearly been misinformed by other sources, but upon checking in a couple of recent reprints (Penguin 85; Wordsworth 98) I see you are indeed correct. Thankyou for this.
However, I'm still left with the puzzle of why anyone should want to re-publish the first edition of a Great Work rather than the definitive last edition. I still smell a wish to mislead, I'm afraid.
The essence of the matter is that Darwin seems to have been a clear and honest thinker, and thus made a distinction between the logical need for an Ultimate Cause of some sort (his 'Creator') and the subsequent bafflingly irrational and apparently unfeelingly cruel 'God' of The Church.
It's my impression that modern neo-Darwinists have not taken this into account when they decided to abandon all non-Materialist elements from their dogma, and are thus embarrassed that their figurehead should mention 'the Creator' multiple times in the final edition of 'Origins', even in his famous last sentence: 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with it several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…'.
By re-issuing the first and not the last edition they have reduced the damage to their dogma as much as possible, short of actually editing the embarrassing 'Creator' out completely. As it is, I've read (and heard) many a review of the great man and his book which quotes the last sentence as 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one..'. These reviewers have clearly read the reprinted first editions and have thus been subtly misled. By whom? The publishers? Or the scientists who write the introductions, and who presumably choose which edition should be published?

Of course, by showing a belief in 'the Creator', Darwin would not be eligible for membership of the neo-Darwinist movement, which ought to be a great embarrassment to Materialists, but never seems to be such. Certainty is not embarrassable, as history endlessly teaches us, from the Inquisition to Hitler and beyond!

You suggest that Materialism and Idealism are not opposites. I disagree. Of course, you are right in saying that under the terms of normal discussion A being wrong does not automatically make B correct; for example BigEndians being wrong does not make LittleEndians correct; and because 'Communism' is wrong, that does not make 'Capitalism' right; etc etc. No argument here.
But in such cases we are speaking of the relationship, or more accurately, 'non-relationship', between two separate propositions. My case is that Materialism and Idealism are not separate propositions, but are intimately linked and that thus A being wrong does (must) make B correct, by a process of logic. Why do I think this?

As ever, it depends upon our starting definitions.
Can we agree that the fundamental puzzle is 'How does Mind relate to Matter (by which I mean 'Matter/Energy' in the normal physical understanding)?'

Materialists claim that Matter came first and that Mind derived, by accident, from Matter. (I'm using 'Mind' here to include 'Life' and 'Consciousness' as well. Ridiculous, I know, but time-saving, and the distinctions are not necessary for the argument to hold.) There's the link I'm referring to: Materialists claim that Mind 'derived (or arose) from' Matter.
Conversely, Idealists claim that Mind came first and somehow created Matter. Again, the link between the two elements is stated.
Either way, the one, it is claimed, gave rise to the other. Linked.

Can we agree on these definitions, which might be summarised neatly as: either Matter → Mind or Mind → Matter? It seems to me that we must, as these equations state the barebone essentials of the question, and any attempt at modification of them is really only a fudging of the issue.
If we can agree that the above equations do state the barebones of the issue, then we are thus faced with a rare but genuine 'either/or' for us to choose between, according to the requirements of logic.
Thus, according to normal historical ways of thinking, we may choose via logic, whether Matter came first or Mind came first (I'll return to an alternative theory and way of thinking in a minute).

It is the link that matters in all of this. It is there, whether we like it or not. Either Materialism is right in its claim that Matter alone gave rise (spontaneously) to Life Mind and Consciousness from within itself alone, or it is wrong. If it is wrong, then there must, by definition, be an element involved which is extra to 'Matter alone'. That non-Matter element is the element Idealism is concerned with. Thus, if Materialism is wrong, Idealism must be right. What comes after this necessary recognition is another matter, of course.

To expose the falsity of the Materialist case again: if Matter came first, then Mind must have arisen spontaneously and purposelessly from within such Matter, because, and here's the point, there is absolutely nowhere else for it to have come from, is there?
Whichever way you try to twist it and think around it, you must invariable come back to this: that in a universe of 'only Matter', then Mind must have somehow arisen from only Matter.
The problem is that 'only Matter' is by definition, not alive, or mindful, or conscious. Thus, a Materialist is asking us to believe that our own fundamental qualities of Life, Mind, and Consciousness, arose spontaneously from Matter.. the same Matter which does not contain them.
This is clearly irrational nonsense, and requires at the very least that the universe be based on magic: ie a locus in which something may arise without cause, from nothing: the very thing Science itself is dedicated to scourging from our thinking, and quite right too.

Thus.. if Mind did not arise spontaneously from Matter.. where else could it possibly have come from? The only logical answer to this is 'not-Matter'… which is precisely what the Idealists claim.

However… given that what I've written above is just a matter of simple logic, and not a question of 'philosophy' or opinion of any sort…. Where does that leave us?

People are apt to leap to irrational conclusions, are they not? And many thus assume that because Idealism might be easily shown to be rational while Materialism is not.. they leap to all sorts of horrific assumptions, the main one being that if Science is wrong then The Church must be right. Not so. For a start, 'Science' is not wrong; only 'Materialism' is wrong; and The Church is not the only opponent of Materialism by a long shot. As you say so rightly above: A being wrong does not make B right.. in this case, Materialism being wrong does not make The Church right. There are many alternatives to be explored.

To most people, however, including just about all scientists I've met, 'The Church' is the sole perceived opponent of Materialism. Many people thus think that abandoning Materialism would mean having to adopt the wild flummeries of The Church. This is because they know of no alternative to 'The Church' as an opponent of Materialism.

For its part, The Church seems in general to have not distinguished clearly enough between Science ('Good'!) and Materialism ('Bad'!).
People in general are confused, and find no help in any of this, governed as they are by their own psychological tendencies to see the world in terms of black and white, right and wrong. Is Science right? Is Religion? Neither of these august institutions seems able to put a persuasive case to a genuinely rational thinker.

This mess puzzled me for a long time. Then I started to read around, and discovered that there is a way of thinking that is alien to most of us in the West, but bread and butter to Indian schools of philosophy (and various others). These understandings might be best labelled as the Esoteric view.
In a nutshell, the Esoteric view is that all Matter/Energy is alive in some sense, from the lowliest atom (and, I presume the quark and quantum) right up to Man and beyond. The creative force in the universe is Mind (coupled with Will). It is, of course, a profoundly Idealist (and therefore 'rational', as proposed above) view, but with a most interesting addition, as it provides a non-paradoxical hint of the nature of the connection between Mind and Matter.
What's more, the need for Will as a vital component in the creative process should be of considerable interest to a quantum physicist.
The Esoteric view also proposes multiple habitable dimensions other than our own local three dimensions, and thus dismisses the now-traditional notion of Time being a fourth dimension in itself.
I have also found that the Esoteric view makes sense of the whole issue of whether 'Science' or the 'The Church' is 'right'…. And much more besides.
You suggest that 'a compelling case can be made for a reality in which, like quantum particle-wave dual-unity, there is no actual difference between materialism and idealism, except in our limited and misinterpretive understanding of reality. It seems to me that the Esoteric view might support you in this.

From your letter, it seems you have not come across the Esoteric view of things. Might I commend you to it? I'll be happy so suggest a few references that I have found useful.
Incidentally, the Esoteric view is fully supportive of the 'freewill and reason' that you suggest that theologians of The Church have no time for. Anything that favours reason over dogma is worth looking into, in my book!

Thanks again for taking the trouble to write. Much appreciated… not least for correcting me on 'the Creator' in the 1st edition.

All best wishes Chas.

Gosh! A production!

2008-04-06T10:37:00.000+01:00

Hi again, Linz…

Wow! Somebody actually wants to stage 'How Come I'm Feeling Fishnet Tights and Rotten Cardboard Boxes?'! Great stuff!

What sort of production do you have in mind? Is it part of a drama school project? ('Director's log' sounds as though it might be.) Where are you based?

Yes, of course. If I can help in some way, please do ask.

Have you been to my website ( www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk ) ? The books are autobiographical, if that's any help.

Anyway.. I look forward to hearing from you and to hear about your production. Do you think it might be better to communicate via email (see website) rather than on the blog? Or do you think other readers might be interested in the ins and outs of putting on a stage production?

All best wishes Chas

Feeling so Rotten!

2008-04-04T19:47:00.000+01:00

Hi Linz…

Great heavens! I thought 'So How Come I'm Feeling so Rotten' had sunk without trace! How on earth did you come across it? It was languishing at number 1,786,000 in the Amazon Hot Million, last time I looked.
Just for my own amusement, I've recently changed the title to something I hope might be a little more encouraging to a casual reader, namely: 'Fishnet Tights and Cardboard Boxes' … I wonder if anybody will ever notice!

All best wishes Chas

ME, rats, & chemicals.

2008-03-31T20:08:00.000+01:00

Hi Michelle…

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to write. Sorry to hear that you too are bothered by ME.
I'm also sorry to hear you come into contact with rats.

Being on a farm it’s inevitable that we should be in second-hand contact with the dreaded rat. They pee on things, and leave no visible trace.
I don't think my own case is connected to rats though. When I was first diagnosed, they ran a lot of tests for things like brucellosis and Weill's disease and they all showed a negative. But who knows…
The chemicals may have been contributory, however. Anne, my wife, strongly suspects so, at least. Our smallholding is organic, but when we were keeping sheep we needed to obey the law of the land and dip the poor beasts. Sheep dip derives from chemicals developed as nerve gas, and I was not best protected from it. (I go into this a bit more in 'Scenes'.)

I think my own case probably followed the classic path of nervous exhaustion followed by a flu virus. The exhaustion lowered my defences, and thus the flu got a deeper grip than it should have. So it seems, anyway… but illness is a very strange business. Nothing would surprise me.

Thanks very much for the hospital tip. I think I'm so much improved however, that I would only be wasting precious time in seeking treatment now.

For what it's worth, I think a strongly positive mental attitude is one's best ally against the debilitation ME brings. This doesn't mean railing and forcing yourself, but relaxing, accepting, and doing what is possible and worthwhile, in a gentle and attentive manner. I guess a Buddhist would put it more elegantly, but that's near enough!
More and more, since my own experiences, I'm drawn to the feeling that ME is Nature's way of drawing one's attention to the way we are living our lives, and encouraging purposeful introspection, as in Socrates' famous saying that 'a life unexamined is a life not worth living'. I can see what he meant now, whereas I don't think I did before I got ill.
For me, the resolution is summed up in the phrase 'I am a human being, not a human doing'. This sounds very trite and Christmas-crackery, but deep within it, it contains what I now think is a very deep and valuable truth.

Thanks again for writing. Have a great day.. and try to keep away from rats!
All best wishes Chas

A few comments on M.E.

2008-03-28T19:39:00.000Z

It's come back again this afternoon, out of the blue. No apparent cause. No warning.
I'd been active in the morning, hacking and lifting some pretty heavy matted ivy off the yard, and carrying poles and posts around, and sawing a bit of firewood. But nothing excessive.
Soup and apples for lunch, as per usual.
Had a half hour sit, reading an old paper.
Went out to join Anne in sorting boxes of apples, as arranged. The apples have been over-wintering in the packhouse, and many of them have either begun to rot, or have been nibbled and destroyed by voles, or rats, or something. We wore latex gloves to protect against Weill's disease, carried by rat piss.
I carried a few tubs of damaged fruit to the compost heap, then suddenly felt weak and incapable. I recognised it as the M.E. paying a visit.
It's not like ordinary tiredness, or even ordinary exhaustion. I feel my energy just draining away, and I'm left in a sort of limbo. Not tired enough to sleep, but not awake enough to actually do anything. Physical work just seems impossible, especially if it requires attention or judgement. I'm likely to make mistakes and make silly decisions. I don't handle sharp tools at times like this.
If it's a bad bout, I can barely read. Well, I can read the words, but they don't make much sense. At the moment I'm reading a book called 'The Essence of the Gnostics'. It's not a particularly difficult book, but you need to be alert to cope with the ideas. No point in trying to read this now! I'd simply be wasting my time.
And I'm not alert enough to try the general knowledge crossword. I look at the clues and note that some of them I don't properly understand, although they're not in code or cryptic: just straightforward questions. Other clues I do understand, but I'm aware that although I know I know the answers, I also know that the answers will not be delivered up to me. My recall is on go-slow.
It's as if there's a sort of blind been half-drawn between my mind and me. Or should that be 'my Mind' and 'Me'? Yes, I think so. Or 'my brain' and 'Me'? Mmmm…
Nothing feels right. I have an overwhelming feeling that I ought to eat something that will make everything all right. From previous bouts I recognise that this is a snare. I find myself eating nuts or sweet things. Sometimes muesli. But nothing works. Sometimes a shot of scotch will do the trick, but it's not my favoured remedy, as I know it's only short-term, and if I have more than two shots I'll pay for it later by feeling extra drowsy in the evening or worse, waking up in the middle of the night, with a pounding heart and then be unable to get back to sleep for at least an hour. And quite often it only makes things worse, right from the start.
No.. nothing works. But all the time there is this powerful urge to seek out the magic mouthful that will bring energy and relief from the woozy fog within. It's very hard to resist. So I've just had two sticky bars. No.. they didn't help. Now I just feel stickied up and guilty too, as my weight has gone up again recently despite my previous triumph of losing three stone.
I wonder about picking up the 'Pickwick Papers', which I started last week… but I can't be bothered with it. This is no reflection upon the book, but upon the fact that I don't enjoy fiction much any more, not even now, when I can't read a 'proper book'.
This is another irritating effect of this sort of attack of 'M.E. Lite': a feeling of frustration that I can't be getting on with something worthwhile or meaningful.
So what to do?
Play my guitar? No.. don't be silly. You don't have the strength or focus (you know this from previous experience) and no inspiration will be forthcoming. You'll just scratch away at a few chords, but it will be unimaginative and unfulfilling: just more frustration.
Listen to a bit of music: 'Yes, but…'
'Yes but' is a very common reaction to all suggestions when the M.E. strikes. Nothing is quite right. Nothing will hit the spot. Not food. Not reading. Certainly not creativity.
Alright, let's try listening to some music.
My musical taste are pretty catholic, so I riffle through the CD's to find the right thing. Unsurprisingly, nothing seems to hit the right note. Lively or quiet? A sampler of African music picked up in Oxfam yesterday? No.. too… I dunno… too 'in yer face'. So what about the Schubert string quintet, also from Oxfam? OK… let's try it.
Yes, it's fine, but I feel myself being picky. Isn't that cello just a bit strident? And suddenly the whole piece seems to be merely trying for effect, whatever that means.

The good news is that this is just a mild bout, and I can be pretty sure that it will pass in a few days. It might even have gone by morning, as suddenly and mysteriously as it arrived.
If it were as severe as when I first 'caught' it, I'd be lying in bed feeling just completely bloody awful (a medical term). Curiously, though, I wouldn't be feeling frustrated, as I am at the moment, because I would know I was properly ill, and doing anything other than Lying in Bed Being Ill would not appear on the horizon.
The other good thing is that there is no pain, or any other symptom other than debilitation, associated with the sort of M.E. I get. I just need to ride it out, and smile.
So.. I smile, and ride it out.
It's a damn nuisance to Anne, of course. She's just come in after sorting all the rest of the apples herself. It took her a couple of hours. I could have saved her a lot of effort.
No.. no I couldn't. And that's that.

I wish I could pin down what brings these bouts on. Anne is very good at spotting trends and possible causes, but it's defeated even her over the past twenty-plus years. It comes. It hangs around. It goes.

I'm continuing this the following morning…because lo! The M.E. has retreated again. How? Why? No idea. But at the moment, 8.30 am, I'm feeling fine. A bit sleepy but not ME-ish. How do I know this? I cast my attention around my head, and can feel that the fog has shifted. I'm not positively thinking when I do this casting around; just sending a little shaft of focus around my brain. But somehow I can tell that it has turned up for work again.

Strangely, I sometimes have a feeling of gratitude associated with the M.E. For a start, all I get is exhausted. Some people have terrible headaches or joint pains, and heaven knows what else. This of course leads one to wonder what on earth 'M.E.' is, if it can present in so many different ways. Personally, I think it's just a name made up in desperation by the medics, as a great big blanket to throw over a raft of oddball issues they can't cope with. Thus, perhaps, you really can say that 'M.E' doesn't exist. The effects definitely do exist though, so perhaps what we need is a more careful analysis of the symptoms and a careful re-naming session or two.
Mainly, though, what we need is some sort of understanding of what brings it on.

This gratitude also shows up when I realise that I am currently much better that I have been for twenty years. These days I actually expect to be able to put in a half day's work, most days. I can mow the lawn, saw firewood, and help Anne to beat back the encroachments of Nature. This takes a bit of the work off her, and some of the responsibility, too. She has her own problems and needs all the help she can get. So I'm glad I can do a bit more.

I'm grateful too in an unexpected way. Before the M.E. arrived I was flogging away at all hours, growing top notch veg for an uncaring society, as represented by Tesco and Sainsbury, who paid rock bottom prices for top quality goods. We were pretty well trapped in this unwholesome relationship (I go into more detail of how this trap works in 'Scenes from a Smallholding'.) Was the illness a sort of breakdown brought on by overwork and stress? I think there may be some truth in this.
Anyway… once I'd got over the worst of the exhaustion, I began to read again, for the first time in many years. I remember deciding to read the hardest things I could, to keep my mind alive. This meant, to start with, Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson: books about anomalous events, and sheer weirdnesses, written by responsible writers. This led on to a decision to try to find out what Religion was all about, and why Science wouldn't speak to it. Any why, for heaven's sake, would Science not even talk to psychical researchers? That was ridiculous to my eyes.
So I did a lot of reading on science, religions, psychology, history, psychical research, philosophy, mythology, and anything else I thought might offer an insight.
And I'm very glad I did. I now feel more than a little wiser. In fact… I'm grateful to the M.E. for giving me the time to read and think.

Odd, eh?
And, of course, I'm grateful to the M.E. for making it possible to write my books. If I'd been growing veg all day every day, for peanuts, I could never have found the time to write anything.

It's a mysterious universe, don't you think? 'Grateful for being exhausted'!

I guess it's an example of clouds and silver linings.

Right. So. The M.E. has buggered off again, for which I'm truly thankful today. In fact, I'm grateful for it.
Now let's lift some more of that ivy, and saw a bit more firewood..