The Most Annoying Song of the Year = # Selfie

It's only April (I think it's still April); which is, of course, the cruelest month boasting the sinking of the Titanic, the Hillsborough tragedy, the Boston marathon bombing and the capsizing of a South Korean ferry, not to mention the A to Z Challenge. Have I smugly mentioned how I did not do it this year? Only 20 times, right.

Also by April I already have a winner for the most annoying song of the year. This one is a radio channel changer, one that makes me jerk my hand to the dial - or as my local radio station states "Put your Nob on Bob," and desperately switch channels as the car veers across lanes.

The song is #Selfie by the Chainsmokers and it sums up all that's wrong with our gadget, Instagram, Twitter, selfie obsessed society: "She's such a fake model. She bought all her Instagram followers." I also suspect it's something of a satire.

OK. Whatever. I don't have time to write anymore. I have selfies to take. Enjoy the video.

On Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie

If there is one song that sums up the madness and complexity of the world it has to be Ashes to Ashes by David Bowie.

I love this song, and not only because it reminds me of business as usual ie. that sense of walking on Mars feeling like a clown as a large tractor threatens to swallow us up but the fact it contains the line: "I've never done good things, I've never done bad things. I've never done anything out of the blue."

Well perhaps I have loved too much and too recklessly but at least I can say I have not hated with an equal vigor. Still I feel bad for making others feel bad and there's that proverbial thin line that stalks me in my sleep and threatens to flip me from one side to another like a shutter opening and closing -from good to bad, from black to white, in and out of the sun until I am dizzy from the infernal flickering.

Am I good or bad? The answer is probably somewhere in between but there is little room for shades of grey on a planet that's either cast in darkness or light - strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low.

So what is the meaning of Ashes to Ashes? I'm sure there are dissertations on this subject. I think it probably means Bowie had taken too many drugs when he wrote this. Still I will never get over getting my fix of this song.

Why You Are Totally and Utterly Mad

It occurs to me that you are totally mad. You know who I am talking about you. Loopy. Bonkers. Three bricks short of a load and the load was unstable to begin with. Don't get me wrong; I am not mocking mental illness, even if I am the only person I have met in this country who doesn't resort to a rattling bottle full of pills. Rather I have come to the conclusion, more through passing observation than an empirical study, that most of us are a bit off keel.

No, not that kind of madness - one step beyond

I have some examples.


1 He stands in my room and I see him shudder inwardly at the sight of my in-box. I know it has affected his equilibrium for the rest of the day.


2 She Tweets until 2 a.m. about the virtues of skinless cats. She complains about being tired the next day and bemoans the way her enthusiasm for the skinless cat is waning.


3 She talks to her feet on the sidewalk. When she sees I have noticed, she quickly pulls out her phone and pretends she was in a conversation with a party other than her toes.


4 She texts me and leaves voicemails in the night asking the price of my rental house, two days after I told her it was $999. She tells me she wants to strike a deal because she can't afford $30,000 a month and her grandmother has gout.


5 She writes on her blog that she won't be on her blog for a couple of days oblivious to the fact none of us are the sun and if we go out the whole world will die. Nope we are Pluto, lost, lonely, cold and insignificant out there fighting to be even recognized as a planet. But didn't we used to be planets? Just give me a week again as a planet damn it.


I can't chide people for being mad. There are seriously days when I look in the mirror and the lights are on but nobody as at home. Apart from the mice that have built a nice little home in my mind - thank you very much.

When in doubt blame Lana Del Rey. Gosh she is fantastic - when will I kick my obsession?

On Fossil Beach, York River

Zara wanted me to blog about her fossil hunting exploits. I was fine with the idea because it can be difficult to decide what to blog about, especially without the big pointy stick up the bottom that is the A to Z Challenge. But it's not all bad; I can lie back in a hammock and drink Margaritas, metaphorically speaking, while the rest of you wake up in the night in a cold sweat doing despicable things to your teddy bear, just because you have no idea what to write about for X.

Yesterday we drove up to Fossil Beach at York River State Park. The kids were initially disappointed because they had spent an hour-and-a-half in a car only to be faced by a half a mile hike and a tiny secluded beach on the river that was not full of ice cream stalls like Virginia Beach.

But the lure of finding fossils on Fossil Beach took over. There's a huge pile of them at the top of the wooden steps as well as a warning that you can't take them away, which must please countless parents who don't want to wake up next to a dirty great fossil, which almost leads me to that story about my room mate who got hideously drunk and ended up in bed with his grandmother - I digress.

Fossil beaches are few and far between but I like them because they awaken the collector in the young imagination. Who can forget the leaden grey skies and the crashing waves of Lyme Regis where we pulled fossils from the cliffs back in secondary school? Who can forget the day Johnnie Briggs stole my prize ammonite and the long and bitter wait for vengeance that came in the form of liberal coating of joke slime that clung as nicely to his backside as it did his classroom chair.

Zara liked collecting fossils anyway and had accumulated a hefty stash by the time the sun was falling low over the river. Jackson found one that promptly exploded revealing itself to be a lump of mud. The day was going splendidly until Zara trod on a sharp fossil, incurred a small cut on her foot, demanded a piggy back to the car and when I declined insisted on making a video to send to her mother about my cruel fossil hunting excursion.

Next week stay tuned for croc taunting in the Congo....

A Tale of Three Camdens

I always liked Camden Town in London even if it made me feel old and terribly untrendy. Camden is grungy and edgy and full of street markets with New Age clothes and girls with dreadlocks and nose rings. The pubs are raw and ready and one strep away from spit and saw dust.

There are the catacombs which are not catacombs but grimy old railroad arches that host a dazzling array of the weird and wonderful accessed on the rickety Northern underground line. There are the railroad lines and the canals and the skeletons of heavy industry that has been refashioned as arts venues in cases such as the Roundhouse - a former railroad turntable converted into a theater. I visited it once to interview the director longer ago than I care to imagine. When the same sex marriage ban was overturned in England, Camden raced to be the first place to hold a ceremony.

Camden made me think of fuzzy nights out; the mingling of smells, beer on the pavement and the remote hope of bumping into Damon from Blur.

When I found myself in rural North Carolina reporting on the trivial doings of Camden County, I rued the comments of my friends who made the London comparison. Camden was and still is a backwater. Its politicians looked at me as if I had fallen from Mars and some of them made a policy not to speak. My backside bears the scars of long nights on the hard benches of the court house, listening to their deliberations about landfill applications.

Although I have left it behind I am still haunted by the lonely swamps of Camden and find myself driving on its empty roads.

Then there is another Camden where I might think twice about setting foot in. Survey after survey highlights Camden, New Jersey as the most dangerous city in America.

"The first thing you notice about Camden, New Jersey, is that pretty much everyone you talk to has just gotten his or her ass kicked," reported Rolling Stone.

Camden is Detroit without the saving factor of tall buildings to avert the eye. It's drugs and gun shots and unemployment and racial tensions.

"It's an un-Fantasy Island of extreme poverty and violence where the police just a few years ago essentially surrendered a city of 77,000," the magazine reported.

Suddenly those quiet swamps don't seem quite as depressing.

BTW - good luck to all of you who are doing the A-Z blogging challenge. Thanks for the mention Jean about how my piece about not being bothered to do the A-Z Challenge, inspired to do it and good luck to Juliette for doing it on err umm doors. Also good luck to my old pal Mark who has taken the plunge from his Greek Island...

Lessons to Learn from Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's Split

So the latest Hollywood spit - oh no I stand corrected "conscious uncoupling" - is between actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay singer Chris Martin.

What exactly can we learn from this beyond the phenomenal success of relationships between American woman and British blokes - Madonna, Katy Perry blah. I assembled a panel of eminent relationship experts and compiled a list. Then I abandoned the list and concluded simply...

If two people as mutually smug as Gwyneth and Chris who name their kids after electronic products cannot make it work, what chance is there for us mere mortals?


Although we may go into marriage with the bestest of intentions, marriage, in fact, stifles the very factors that fuel it in the first place due to the imposition of routines and over familiarity. The passion, the longing etc. Only when we start to come out the other side do we see beyond the insignificant things that madden us to get an appreciation of the whole picture of what we had as it slides away. You don't appreciate paradise until someone shoves a parking lot up your rear quarters etc.

I'm not sure about "conscious uncoupling." I am more of an advocate of "unconscious uncoupling" as evidenced by my newly found and rather surprising mutual fixation with a Baptist.

Perhaps things make more sense in Gwyneth and Chris' world as depicted in the actresses' blog Goop where rebranding seems to be the order of the day.


“Youthful Journey-Finding” = When daughter Apple says “I want to go to Dad’s house where there’s candy!”


“Maintaining Post-Pleasure Tranquility” = translated as make sure my new boyfriend sneaks out before kids wake up


“Embracing Joyous Change” = Introducing kids to new boyfriend


“Accepting a New Element” = Introducing kids to dad’s new girlfriend


“Intergenerational Quality Time for Love and Learning” = When Grandma shows up for two weeks so you can go to Fiji with new boyfriend.


And so on. You get the picture...

Five Reasons Why I'm Not Doing the A to Z Challenge

I feel happy not to be doing the A to Z Challenge this year. I took part in the challenge in its first year and the two after that. On each occasion I was confident I would knock out posts in about 3 seconds and devote time to other fascinating pursuits such as watching goldfish. How wrong I was.

This is bittersweet because I made some great blogging pals along the way. However, there comes a time in everyone's life when they have to turn around and say no to A to Z and I am at that parting of the ways. So long and thank you for the fish.

My five reasons not to do the A to Z Challenge:

1 I can't be bothered

2 My theme this year was going to be Aspects About the Inside of a Ping Pong Ball, which may have been challenging

3 I became tired of trying to knock out posts about exotic forms of armadillos at 11 p.m.

4 Good concept but it may have had its day. Do you ever see people still doing the Rubik's Cube?

5 I can't think of a 5. If I can't think of a 5 how could I think of an A to Z? I would seriously consider doing an A to C Challenge. Where can I download the badge?

Good luck to all of you who are doing it. I offer consultancy services and counseling at a reasonable rate.

My Yellow Life in Instagram

I really decided it makes better sense to live life through Instagram. It cuts down on unnecessary conversation and it's pretty. It helps you drift away. Ever wanted to be in a meeting and when you are asked a difficult question to answer with a pastel like image? It keeps our mystique don't you think? Keeps our layers from being stripped away from us.

I like the idea of life through a variety of filters. We can take away the ugliness and give it the Mayfair treatment. Mayfair is classy. The second someone lands on it, you can hear their backside sizzle. Well that's not a classy notion.

My Instamood today is yellow. It's a color of awakenings and new beginnings, like the daffodils struggling to survive in the cold. Back in the mobile classroom some years ago there was a color wheel and they asked us our favorite colors. I rose my hand for yellow but I was alone in my choice. I liked it that way. Generally speaking you can live you life in yellow as long as you avoid yellow snow.

It's advice as enduring as the yellow sand dunes that stretch away for hundreds of miles in the Sahara of my imagination.

The Dismal View From Here

The view from here is baleful with a green hue. Cold splinters drip from the sunshade. The snow is back but the memories of soft edges are long gone. Now the snow is bitter and remorseless, scything on a slanted wind like with the force of a catapult in the hands of a spiteful child.

Yesterday I sat on a porch in shirt sleeves; today I am under covers.



The tiredness of too much ice is on me. There winter seems to have lasted a year. I wonder at the fate of the early daffodils in the botanic gardens. Now the sunny weekends seem like a quirk and a mockery and notions of spring are deferred. It makes me wonder about places that cling to the Arctic Circle; about people who carve a half life in the half light on the ice flows.

Baffinland - it's a tad chilly and the tapas bars aren't the best

There's a madness to the snow, a blindness that makes us want to wander until we white out in the great overexposed. We are snow blind to possibilities and trapped behind walls.


My grandfather told me once about the day he went to Murmansk. It was 97 years ago or thereabouts. There was a small war in Russia at the weary end of the big war and the army of the whites had been send to avenge the reds. My recollections are hazy here and mixed with notions of Dr. Zhivago and the hunger that overcame love. Somewhere out there in the white wastes there was a train with a red star, stamped like an ugly welt on its hideous black boiler. There was a one way trip north to the camps where the ice never melted.


The seasons eventually turn around, but there are places that remain always in the cold.

Mindless Facebook Quizzes and Why I Don't Want to be Pennsylvania

Has anyone taken that dumb quiz on Facebook that tells people what state they belong in? Basically you select things you like, such as fast food chains from a list and faces of babies (inexplicably) and you can find out whether you are the Union's finest or if you are Nebraska.

So it turned out I was a powerful leader type and I belonged in Pennsylvania. I was bemused that the quiz told me this in glowing terms. There was no button to say 'Dude. I don't want to be in Pennsylvania. I have been scarred for life by the gas station with the grey window panes and the largest number of men with missing teeth and rat tails I have ever seen in one place.' Somewhere on the desolate road to Erie I believe.

Why so pretty Pennsylvania?

Lots of people have ended up bemused by this quiz because they have posted things such as Wisconsin - WTF?

So why do we spend our precious time on such nonsense? Probably because we can and we are just curious.

Even now I am looking on my Facebook feed and seeing My iPersonic Personality Type: the Spontaneous Idealist posted by someone. On come on. You know who you are Ms. Spontaneous. You follow this blog.

I have to say I draw the line at some of these time wasters such as the "Which Star Wars Character Are You?" A few weeks ago Facebook friends were falling over themselves to do this, clearly not recalling that everybody did it four years ago. I was Yoda. I am fine with Yoda and don't want to be that hairy character.

But the worst test I have seen anybody doing was the "What Girl Scout Cookie Are you?" quiz. This is really tantamount to admitting you don't have a life and never will have one. It didn't stop some people posting excited updates on how they were macaroons and thin mints.

Mini rant over. Forget about blog for another week.

Re-Introducing Wayne and Waynetta Slob

I have an odd system of memory in that I can sometimes forget a task I have been reminded about half an hour earlier and yet then something odd and random can catch me unawares. This applies to British comedic characters. The U.S.seems to lack comedic characters and has to make do with real life ones like the hairy homophobic bloke from Duck Dysentry.

Anyhow I was somewhere the other day when I saw a couple and instantly thought of Wayne and Waynetta Slob from the Harry Enfield show back in the 90s. I may have said as much to my daughter, who looked at me blankly for obvious reasons. In fact, after a particularly adolescent type outburst a few days earlier I had suggested she was Kevin the Teenager from the same show, an allusion that again fell on deaf ears.

At times like this I wonder if I am frozen in the 90s - a decade my daughter describes as a "long time ago." I have been known to pull up Oasis on YouTube from time to time.

Wayne and Waynetta, in their own way are classics of British comedy, although not in the classic classic sense of Fawlty Towers. Still worth a watch. For some reason they appear with alarming regularity in my head every time I am lucky enough to find myself in Wal-Mart. Oh and having it off means ... well you know.