Just a quick note, no blArt this week cos am off to ma birthplace in Glasgow first time in 62 years! Am going on to Mugen taiko to do a weekend japanese drum session.
I have sent out the first chapter of my book to be The Shrewd idiot on Dropbox, so if you’d like to see it drop me a line. Then I can send yu a link to the file which is 137MB. The book will be different again cos i have to reduce the wordsize so the scans of the typescript look better on the page.
Below is a previous blarty pants winge about the driving on Britain’s roads.
My life may have been in jeopardy thrice last week. I was on me way to Tai Chi, a peaceful martial art practice when going down this back country lane I saw a tiny car coming toward me in a one and a half car road and they could have pulled over in to a carpassby which was on their side (two women in blue short sleeved shirts which indicated they were in some kind of uniform) but seemed to want to squeeze by me in non-existent space. As the layby was on their side I just continued driving which seemed to rile the driver who glegged at me aggressively. I drove on and stuck my arm out of my window pointing to the layby. THEN, she stopped and began reversing at speed. Nutter?
Next I was returning home and as we approach a right turn into our village there’s a bend up ahead which cars come round that we cannot see but so long as you don’t dawdle, if there’s no sign of a vehicle as you look normally there’s plenty of time to whip into the right turn. Not that near fateful day! Noo Noo. The only way a car is going to crash into me is if they’re going over the 30 limit and CRASH he nearly did! From around the bend around which he cannot see either and he should be taking due care as it is well into a 30 limit, came flying a big four by four with some sort of caterpillar truck in a trailer on his back end and he didn’t have time enough to stop. I had stopped, thinking, “If I carry on I’ll run into him”. I was now in his lane. He then did a manoeuvre which was the only one which could save his trailer going into him and him and all going head on into me. He turned his wheel right and went into the opposite lane where luckily the other cars hadn’t arrived yet. So we all escaped serious injury and that. But people do drive too fast and I am probably guilty of same sometimes altho I try to stick to speed limits and drive with care. But many don’t, then they wonder why the ditches are so frequently occupied by cars with ‘police aware’ signs?
Then there’s the danger of trying to fix a long broken double glazed window. That may seems fairly straightforward yes but not so when you got to be standing on the top of a pitched conservatory roof. Our window’s been damaged for years. I never contemplated mending it cos I cannot do plastic double glazing can I? Or can I? Nowadays we have utube vids to tell us how to do it all. And kind glaziers who’ll give advice in the knowledge that when you fail after hours of heartache they’ll be called in to fix it. And hours of heartache it was. I mended the locking mechanism so that the handle works for the first time in years. I got the replacement window for a good price. Then you just pop out the stays and drop in the window and pop back the stays BUT it doesn’t say in the vids that those stays won’t snap back into the corners very easily, nor do they tell you that they won’t easily pop back into the tinychannels they’re supposed to snap back to. And trying to do it while balancing on an 18cm bit of wood beneath which the glass beckons. And trying to force plastic which won’t be forced into gaps that seem too small and you have to bend the stay out and try to get it into the mitred angle of each corner and if one isn’t in perfec the rest don’t stand a chance and you’re pushing against a half open window and then the stay pops out suddenly and you lunge forward and the stay drops and slides down the roof and you have to go thru th’open window down onto the chair, down the stairs and out in the yard to retrieve the stay then retrace yer steps back onto the roof and after doing that twenty times three of the four stays pop out at once and slide in different directions off the roof and you have to ask yersen do I call the man in now or do I have just one last, a hundredth last, go? And on that go the thing just slides gently into place and you can clean the window and go off to Zumba which you nearly forgot about.
If you don’t at first succeed try try again.
Or maybe call the man in earlier?
I was going to compare all three jeopardies to things I have had to deal with in the art world but that’s too much of a manoeuvre and the analogies wouldn’t necessarily be understood. Except the last one maybe, “If you don’t at first succeed try try again”? Well I applied that so many times I believe that’s why my wife finds me always trying.
But, ‘you win some, you lose some’ may be a better analogy?
So, I’ve survived long enough for this my 200th blArty piece. And it’s the first without any images…unless of course you see words as images…well some folk do.
Well alright I succumbed and put some images in.
And am wondering if I shud start a crusade or maybe nowadays the word campaign is preferred to crusade? A campaign to slow cars down on all our country roads. It’d be to little avail cos drivers out there all think they are Stirling Moss still, don’t they. And the bigger the truck the faster they drive?
Which reminds me I saw a lorry take the (blind from both directions) bend nearest the letter B, he took it so fast he went about 2 metres over into the other side. Luckily the woman coming the other way was far enough back from the bend that he did not hit her. It was not a small truck, it was BIG, am sure it shouldn’t be on that road. I happened to be going his way and he sped all the way to Colchester then, when it drops to a 30 mile per hour zone he continued well above that, I lost him cos I stuck to the rulkes. I know I never stick to the rules in ‘art’, well it’s not going to kill or maim anyone if I delibritli Miss Spell, is it?
So an old friend of mine who read ma blArt sent these words today, “I find it very interesting how much danger centres round transportation and the acquisition of a vehicle licence [it seems?] is a licence to kill!… It does tend to be a good argument for an expanded and free safe public transport system…. maybe in another millennium? The frustration and anger folk express through their vehicles has always fascinated me…the shift in personality which a vehicle seems to exacerbate in a negative way I find quite extraordinary.”
His idea for an expanded and free safe public transport system may be possible in some parts of GB but no way can I see it ever coming to Essex where the local bus picks up in the village once in a blue moon, AND they threatened to stop that service recently! Publice transport and cycle safe roads? maybe in another millennium!
apulhed tingling 