Category: Cassandra

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Coffee Angst

‘Stay alert.’ Your country still needs lerts.

I won’t make political observations on this blog, unless it becomes unavoidable.

How is the world this morning? The sunshine has returned, after a day’s conspicuous absence, but the wind is rough and bitterly cold. Probably no breakfast in the garden today.

My stovetop espresso pot has let me down twice in a row. I am concerned. Did I just not screw it up tightly enough? Twice in a row? Does the seal just need a good clean, or replacing? I used to have a spare seal, among the stuff that got moved from place to place, one of those things that you don’t expect to use so shove it somewhere and forget about it. I’ve checked the kitchen drawers, it’s nowhere obvious. It came in a pack of two from the Italian supermarket in Bedford, reminder of happy times in my first flat. I wonder if it’s open? Not that I can drive a 250 mile round trip to buy another even if so. I can’t remember how old the pot is, but it’s had a long and useful life, maybe time to let go. Once I was surrounded by coffee-making devices, but all I can find now are the Portmerion cafetiere, which is too big for one person, and the Tassimo, which requires pods, and I have a limited supply. Anyway, the espresso pot is my favourite. I will check the Caffe Nero and Whittard’s online shops, though I wonder how much they charge.

Coffee is important to me, it contributes significantly to my quality of life and sense of wellbeing, but when I start to think about the conditions of its cultivation, processing and transport across half the globe I feel a sense of gloom and angst stealing over me. Tea is probably no better, not to mention chocolate. We take these things for granted, these products from the other side of the world, we expect to pick them off the supermarket shelves in their shiny packaging and not give them another thought.

The mug from which I’m drinking bears the message: ‘Save water, drink Prosecco’. Enough said. I am lucky, I have a good life, I like to think I am a good and thoughtful person, I like to laugh, I like to drink coffee and eat chocolate and enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. Sometimes I get a glimpse from another place and think: is this a fools’ paradise I’m living in? Am I part of the problem?

The wind howls and rattles its way round the edges of the window, the wires radiating out from the telegraph pole vibrate ominously.

I don’t know where these thoughts come from, or what I will write when I sit at my computer in the morning. Every morning it happens this way. I may plan one thing, but I ride the current and it takes me to another place.

Happy Monday friends, and always remember: our country needs lerts.

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Thinking About Thoughts and Other Stuff (tbc)

How can you tell the difference between denial and acceptance?

How can I learn to control my thoughts?

No, I don’t like the word ‘control’. How can I learn to cope with, manage, ride the waves of my mind? ‘Manage’ is also too strong. Manage the way I react to the vagaries of my mind? But what is there to do the ‘managing’ if not my mind? What is my ‘mind’ anyway?

I like the idea of riding the waves. I’ve never tried surfing, never even felt a desire to, but I enjoy the sensation of floating on waves – I also like riding in a hot air balloon (an experience I’ve had three times in my life and would happily do again). A balloon pilot or surfer (or sailor, wind-surfer, hang-glider, glider pilot etc) cannot control the movements of the wind and/or waves, but can control the behaviour of his or her craft in response to the conditions that it’s experiencing.

I did something sneaky earlier by referring to ‘thoughts’ in the second paragraph then going on to talk about ‘mind’. What’s the difference? Is it that my thoughts are equivalent to the wind and waves, and is my mind the sum total of all those thoughts, or is it the mechanism I use to ‘manage’ them? Isn’t it both at the same time? Not only that, but if the ‘management’ I’m referring to is about choosing the best responses to the thoughts that arise, what do those responses consist of? Okay, sometimes they may be physical, like getting a drink in response to the thought ‘I’m thirsty’, but don’t they also involve thoughts, at least initially?

Ah well, I’ve just done another sneaky thing (or my ‘mind’ has done it without me noticing at the time) by introducing the word ‘choosing’. How much choice do we have over our responses? Choice is the essence of freedom, but it is also a tyrant (‘…the crazy you get from too much choice/the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’ Joni Mitchell, I think it’s from The Blonde in the Bleachers).

That’s what I was thinking of when I sat on the edge of my bed an hour or ago, the comfort of routine versus the panic of having to make a decision. Should I go straight to the shop and get cat food, or give Miko the only stuff we have left, which is a choice between meat in jelly (bought by mistake) which she refuses to eat, or fish in gravy, which she also turns her nose up at? That led into a whole can of worms (which I don’t think they sell in the pet shop, but I’m sure she wouldn’t eat anyway.)

Enough, or I’ll miss my word limit. I’m trying to show that decisions (however apparently trivial) scare me because of the possibility of getting them wrong. It’s not just other people who do that to me, I can do it to myself.

Hold that thought.

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Rhythm, Rhyme, Alliteration

Outside my window,
two women, two dogs,
and a child in a buggy.

White van, grey car,
man jogging in shorts.

You can make a poem of anything if you let your mental flow flow itself into certain rhythms – but why would you bother? Those first three lines could be a haiku in form with the removal of one syllable and transfer of another between lines, but it wouldn’t be a haiku in spirit.

When I was checking up on terza rima last week, I was interested to learn that Italian lends itself particularly to rhyming forms because it’s quite a pure language with very consistent word endings that provide lots of rhymes, whereas English is more of a grab bag of influences from all over the place, and notoriously inconsistent when it comes to spelling, pronunciation and word forms – though by the same token we have the most gloriously extensive vocabulary to pick from. Plus, of course, where they have Dante, we have Shakespeare, who revelled in blank verse, playing games with words, and, when he couldn’t find the one he needed, inventing new ones of his own – which after four hundred years are so deeply ingrained that we take them for granted – I’ve probably used a few already this morning, without even knowing (not the child in the ‘buggy’ or the man ‘jogging’ – or maybe he did use them, but with different meanings).

The other thing I wanted to say about English is that it is very rhythmic, and it’s thought that the popularity of iambic forms of poetry in English (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables) is because that is the natural rhythm of English speech. It can be very banal (tum tee tum tee tum tee tum) like nursery rhymes: ‘Mary had a little lamb’ or sublime: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

Anglo Saxon poetry, like ‘Beowulf’, had no truck with rhymed line-endings, but was based very strictly on maintaining the rhythm, and also on alliteration – more emphasis on words beginning with the same sounds than ending with them.

Well, this is just me talking off the top of my head from my interest in poetry and language in general, no references, no citations. Just interesting nuggets that I’ve picked up from reading, listening and generally being interested in this stuff. But after having spent three weeks writing poetry every day, I suppose I’ve started to think more about where it comes from. It’s always been a bit of a mystery for me, how words come into my head and settle themselves into certain patterns. Because of the way my brain works, all my writing feels like taking dictation – the words come, then I write them down, or I don’t, and they wander off again.

Maybe in a past life (if I believed in such things) I was a bard, declaiming the old stories in a smoky hall, feeling my way through the rhythms and the sounds of words. I like that idea.

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Roads Not Taken

Shopping day disrupts my routine. I had breakfast when I got home, in the garden, trying not to think about the fact that I hadn’t done my yoga/tai chi routine or my writing. Well, does it matter, when these routines are self imposed? That’s the slippery slope, you let yourself off for one day and then down and down you go till suddenly you’re back to… well what? Formless chaos, a sense of emptiness, hopelessness, pointlessness… are there any positive words that end in ‘ness’? Goodness me, I can’t think of any.

There are the things I know need doing, and the tasks I’ve set for myself, and the overwhelming temptation not to do any of them… Just to sit in the sunshine, making another scarf, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, ignoring the weeds pushing up through the gravel and these thoughts popping up into my awareness (oh, note to self, that one’s fairly neutral). Kindness, hopefulness, carefulness, busyness – I wonder why business is spelt the way it is? Or should that be: pronounced the way it is? English is wonderful, actually all languages are wonderful, and fascinating. In some ways I wish I’d followed the path from mathematics into linguistics, rather than into statistics, when I chose my first university course. Maybe if my sixth form had been able to accommodate my wishes to do double maths and German at A level, instead of having to compromise on double maths and economics, I would have done it – though I considered applying for a maths and linguistics course anyway – I can’t remember where that was, but it wasn’t Southampton. The road not taken – I would probably still have ended up going into computer programming after graduation, but I would be in a different place, with different people – and that would have made all the difference – I assume.  But how much of what I’ve done in my life has been down to the inherent personality and characteristics that were laid down in those first eighteen years of life? Maybe things wouldn’t be as different now as I think – different places, different people, yes, but thinking about the last fifteen years or so, the different places and different people don’t seem to make that much difference to the inner me.

Ooh, this a bit deep, and it’s starting to give me vertigo. It goes back to my ideas of the Crystal Space, the paths we take and the ways through the mirrored labyrinth, the network of possibilities, probabilities and improbabilities, the book that I’ll probably never write but that haunts every now and again.

Well, I came back from my shopping expedition and now I seem to have written quite a lot after all.

I’ve even got a poem, of sorts, which I cobbled together yesterday from a cluster of little poems or ideas which had popped up at different times, each too long to be haikus, loosely connected but all a bit rough and ready – as my poetry often is.

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Unknown unknowns – or are they?

I had an idea for the start of a poem in the shower, but as I mentioned the other day, poems don’t tend to come when I’m already writing, so not sure what to do about it. Not sure I even remember it now.

Something about balance, and equilibrium, and the middle way. No, even the first couple of lines don’t seem to be coming back. Bugger.

Maybe it was: ‘We live on a knife edge’ – no – ‘Life is in the balance…’ No, because I thought it could be the start of a haiku, and that’s too many syllables (whereas ‘Life is balanced’ is too few). ‘The balance of life…’? That’s about right. Then I followed it with a few comparisons: ‘Freedom and security/Joy and despair…’ That sort of thing.

Pretty trite stuff anyway.

Might have to leave it and see if anything else comes to me.

A friend keeps asking in emails if I’ve seen the Bill Gates (I think it was Bill Gates, somebody like that anyway) TED talk from 2015. I haven’t – not recently at least – but I think from the context I can guess what it’s about.

Something to do with the fact that scientists have been predicting a global pandemic for years, and how devastating it could be? It could have been SARS, it could have been swine flu (or was it bird flu?), it wasn’t, but it was inevitable, it was overdue, and it would come suddenly without anybody taking notice of the warnings?

I’m being completely honest here and the video might be about something totally different, but I have been aware of the science. It’s not that obscure, it’s one of those things that comes up on the news every couple of years, then everybody goes back to whatever the current worry is, and forgets about it – except the scientists directly concerned, and people like me (who as it happens made a detailed study of individual and societal reactions to this kind of high-cost –low-probability risk in the 1990s, and was awarded a PhD on the strength of it).

It’s the same psychology that brought us the 2008 banking crisis and is bringing us climate change and Brexit (don’t forget they’re still lurking in the background).

Twas ever thus.

If I have to sum up my PhD thesis in a single sentence I tend to compare it to Murphy’s Law, with a corollary: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything to stop it until it hits the fan’. No amount of forewarning, scientific investigation or crisis planning is ever quite enough to forestall disaster when it comes. This is where my alternative person, ‘Cassandra’, comes from. However we think we can manage and prioritise our lives, there’s always something that creeps up on us that we’ve avoided addressing. Emergencies emerge, that’s what they do. Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for warning about the ‘unknown unknowns – but even when they’re ‘known’, reactions depend on who they’re known by – and who chooses how to respond.