I Entered the A to Z Challenge in January

Last year I could not be bothered to enter the A to Z Challenge. I had too much life stuff going on to be a nerd for a month of April. In any case, on previous occasions I had convince myself I would do a quick and easy, only to be bogged down at 11 p.m. the night before.

My experiment with freedom was brief. The A to Z challenge is like a circus. Like Nellie the Elephant I had ran away but it came back to get me. Once you have been a trapeze artist, it's hard to forge a living on Civvie Street. These are not transferable skills. I told myself, I was there at the inception in 2011 so surely I had a right to return to the high wire.

The button for the first one in 2011

Other than that I am a ho for hits and in recent months by blog's analytics have looked like the chart I presume Joan Rivers had at the foot of her bed. The only way is down. Now I don't spend every hour of the day looking at my blog's ailing stats but the long term trend makes depressing reading, particularly when we remember those feelgood articles we read half a decade ago written by someone whose blog started small but is now living in a beach house in Malibu off the proceeds.

Right now, I would settle for a beach house in Virginia Beach. Or an apartment that's a bit warmer.

We may not all be able to call on someone to massage our cold feet at 4.29 a.m. But when all hope is gone and the night is as dark as a big dark thing, we can thank our lucky stars there is the A to Z Challenge.

Tilly's Troubles

My 10-year-old daughter Zara took quite an interest in the 110,000 word manuscript of my novel and said she was determined to embark on her own. It didn't exactly make 110,000 words but I was impressed how quickly she cranked out her first novel and the fact it contained a life lesson somewhere in it.

TILLY'S TROUBLES

Once upon a time, there was a turtle named Tilly. Once Tilly's mother told Tilly to buy muffins from the market. Tilly agreed, and went on her way. Tilly got distracted by the cool river. It was a hot day and Tilly wanted to swim. "I'll only be a minute." Tilly said. Tilly swam in the river and saw his friend Otis the otter. "Hey, Tilly!" Said Otis. "Hi Otis!" Tilly replied. Tilly got so distracted she almost forgot what she was looking for. "The muffins!" Tilly replied. When Tilly got to the market, it was closed. "Oh, no!" Tilly cried. "I played around in the river so much I forgot to get the muffins!" When Tilly got home, her mother cried out," Tilly, where have you been?" " I'm sorry, mommy. I played in the cool river and got distracted. The market was closed by the time I got there. I'm sorry." " It's Ok. But we learned our lesson. No playing around when you're doing a task." mom said. " I learned that!" Tilly said. The END

Pet Peeve #45 - People Who Post Their Lurve on Facebook

I have really taken a strong dislike in recent months to people who post about their icky, gushing love for each other on Facebook.

It's not even that close to Valentine's Day and yet lots of people are posting their old wedding photos. Being fundamentally cynical, my reasoning for this is:

1 - They looked quite hot on their wedding day. The photographer may have also been rather skilled doing dog shows for all those years. Now their chins are sagging down behind their rear quarters which are sagging in some unmentionable place.

2 - Their marriage is on the rocks but they want to convince themselves and others they are love's young dream.

I really wish people would stop doing this and get a room instead. And while I am all for gay marriage etc. the same rules apply. Yes - it's new but who wants to see people in a bout of face sucking? I know I am cynical about the notion of people being genuinely happy in relationships at times that don't involve cake, but even if they are - on the off chance -  I certainly don't want to see it.

I find the case of Mrs. G particularly toe curling. Mrs. G has not been properly named here because it's rude and she might bite my knee caps.

Anyway, back in the days when I went through the motions of being a respectable member of society I would take the kids to the church day care and pretended to smile a lot. Believe me, using those facial muscles have caused all sort of problems for me later in life.

Often when I was walking back to the car I would see Mrs. G., taking her spawn out of her car. Invariably she was never smiling. Still, I would go through the motions of saying hello to Mrs. G. She would either blank me or she would grunt. She had the expression of a distracted guppy. I was really rather fine with that as I'm always looking for a legitimate scowl opportunity.

For some time Mrs. G's better half - the cliche is not wrongly used here - has been a Facebook friend of mine. He seems a nice enough guy, despite his penchant to take the kids to inhospitable places in tents at the coldest time of the year.

However, what kills me about Mr. G is the fact he is always posting pictures of himself with Mrs. G, including wedding shots, honeymoon shots and partial kissing shots. How he can do such a thing is beyond me, I can only conclude he is bullied into doing it by Mrs. G - what do you mean, he loves her?

The last one of my Facebook friends who took part in such a horrific orgy of lovey dovey photo posting is now getting divorced. It should serve a warning for anyone who is contemplating this most distasteful of practices.

Today We All Must Be Charlie

The shocking massacres of 12 people, including four acclaimed French cartoonists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, feels like a new chapter in the struggle between those who champion freedom and those who hate it, although the reality is this fight has being going on for decades.

Still, it was liberating to see squares across the western world fill up with crowds holding banners with the words Je Suis Charlie - I am Charlie, after the attacks in Paris.

In the wake of the attacks we all need to be Charlie. The alternative is to be enslaved, or in the words of Stephane Charbonnier, a cartoonist who was killed in the attacks. "I would rather die standing than live on my my knees."

Sadly, more than half a decade after the world powers tried to build a new order based on human rights after the demise of Nazi Germany, millions of people live on their knees. The war against terror did not end with the death of Osama Bin Laden - indeed he was already becoming irrelevant by the time of his death.

Just a day ago a street magician was beheaded by Islamic State for entertaining crowds in Raqqa. The city of Raqqa was once in Syria but today i'ts the headquarters of a movement that routinely beheads, crucifies and intimidates its populace with its extreme version of the Koran. IS rapes and imprisons women and puts those who fail to convert to its extreme creed to death. IS has a built up a virtual nation state across thousands of miles of Syria and Iraq, but those who vowed to wage the War Against Terror post 9/11, merely tinker with air strikes around its edges.

For the humorless despots of IS or indeed the regime of North Korea that the FBI accuses of cyber hacking over its efforts to disrupt the showing of The Interview, satire is a dangerous instrument because it threatens to expose these evil regimes as ridiculous and to shatter their brittle shield of fear.

However, the motto of Je Suis Charlie needs to go wider than this. It's tempting to see the world as the good guys who believe in freedom being lined up against those who would behead and shoot those who practice free speech. America is built on the foundation of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but the Edward Snowden debacle shows free speech is only free up to a point even in the Land of the Free.

Je Suis Charlie is about the pen being mightier than the sword or the AK-47. It's about our basic freedom to express our opinion however unpopular we may be. Today I am Charlie. We have to be or we will wake up one morning being less than Charlie.

Have a Hairy Christmas Everyone

So 2014 is coming to a close and it's time to execute my cunning concealment plan. Soon I will be in my new manifestation as a taxi driver called Mehmet with a plastic super hero filled with incense on the dashboard and a Persian rug in the back.

Facial hair is a funny thing and there is nothing as strange as the furry rat under the nose, otherwise known as the moustache, caterpiller, lip foliage, nose bug etc. If you think about it the moustache is a strange contradiction. Relentless warlords such as General Kitchener sported one to demonstrate his awaesome masculinity as did evil dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein. However, moustaches can work both ways - there was nothing particularly dictatorlike or manly about the  guys in Village People with the handlebars and the leather hats.

My uncle who was the rebel of the family also had a moustache, as well as a bright yellow Ford Capri. Both were consigned to the 1970s.

My own experience with facial growth has been limited. I tried to grow a moustache when I was about 17 but it was a flimsy kind of half-hearted affair. It didn't help that I weighted about 120 pounds so it was shaved off when people made the inevitable comparison with Mickey in Only Fools and Horses.

I have chosen to live for the next few decades cleanly shaven - until now....

Kim Kardashian's Backside - a Dubious Cultural Icon?

To get over the morose tone of my last blog post I thought I would write about something more light hearted and totally ridiculous - Kim Kardashian's backside.

The first thing we should know about Kim is she's not a real person. A recent interview in a magazine revealed she looks exactly the same in real life as she does on TV.

However. she's a bit smaller than you imagine. This does not surprise me because most celebs are. I once met Angelina Jolie and thought somebody must have shrunk her pre-interview.

Papermag said of Kim she is smaller than she appears in image "with tiny, almost doll-like ears and feet and hands." It describes her bambi-like hands, eyelashes like feather dusters and compares her to a "beautiful anime character come to life."

The exception here is probably her ass which is about the size of West Virginia. I digress.

However, Paper appeared to be saying nice things about her. Anyone would have thought she had just agreed to take off her clothes on their cover.

Kim recently appeared on the cover o revealing her famous backside although it was curiously shiny, reminding me of those conkers we would buff up back in the day before going out to do battle with other conkers in the playground. Although it would be difficult to say anything profound about Kim's over-exposed bottom, a number of media organizations did, suggesting it might be a cultural icon.

The BBC reported a discussion thus.

"Amid the jokes, there has also been a serious discussion about whether the image plays on crude stereotypes of black women. Kardashian is Armenian-American. The French photographer who took this picture, Jean-Paul Goude, is also known for his work featuring black women, including a shot from the 1970s that features a remarkably similar pose to Kardashian's photo. That has led some claim that there is a racial subtext around these images. A blog to this effect, entitled 'Kim Kardashian doesn't realise she's the butt of an old racial joke' has been liked more than 36,000 times on Facebook."

The other odd thing about Kim is it's hard to think of her as a real person. The more exposure she gets, the more you end up thinking why is she getting all of this exposure. I had a moth eaten old sofa that was more interesting ... but then I suppose I'm the one writing about her. Gah.

December Existentialism

There is a reason why someone out there took the dark and mysterious pagan festivals in the middle of winter and wove them with the Christian ones to create Christmas.

Just pause for a minute to think of December without Christmas, of a month as bare as the trees and a pale wind that whips through your bones. Then imagine no holiday, no turkey stuffing or presents and no chance for a good family fight.

Normally by about now a great existential crisis sweeps over me and this December is no exception. I am going through the motions. I am competent but the great ideas were left behind in some warm haze. In middle age even the lures of clandestine meetings and warm contact is dulled. I think of the glassy eyes of professors from so long ago, of how their great writings were so at odds with their wretched spirits.

Perhaps too they realized the leaden nature of December and the inconsequential nature of the layer of glitter on the foul smelling grey shore lapped by the river. Ha - for this is no Victoria Falls or mighty Amazon, but a brackish river that flows behind the identikit houses. One day years ago an engineer looked proudly on at his dull retention pound behind the gleaming roofs of the homes that are now discolored with age. The engineer is long gone, his obscure name occupying a small plaque on a bench where the kids smoke joints and feel each other up.

Still I wonder about our bench and if you ever think of it and occasionally on the footpath I stop to look at the cool inland waterway and the back yards, with my hand resting on its back. Then I think about dialing the number but your name in the directory gives me pinpricks and I put my phone away.

Instead I go on and the pattern becomes a to and a fro, an in and an out, through the tunnel and into the city with a quick glance at the cranes and back again. And beauty and its pale thin curves fall further away from my mind as if I am recalling someone else's life. Still I think of a gold dome and the thin blue sea and the smell of the lemon grove on the cliffs. Then I imagine myself a specter among the lemons suddenly light and free of December.

Five Quirky Facts About Thanksgiving

Collective groan. It's that weird holiday I don't understand again when people do that turkey thing a month before Christmas - just because. Don't get me wrong. I can understand July 4. I even celebrate it. We escaped home out of the mosquito-ridden swamps to get some decent tea. But what's with Thanksgiving?

Still, at some point in the early afternoon I'll be invited over to the ex's to be quizzed on the whereabouts of the turkey and reminded about how I forgot to buy rice crackers in July, 2013. I will then be forced to point in the direction of the 40 pound cat.

Nope - thought not

If you want to know more about the historical roots of Thanksgiving you can read my blog Why I'm Still Feeling Queasy after Thanksgiving.

If you can't be bothered here are Five Quirky Facts about Thanksgiving...

1 Hundreds of Thanksgiving days were observed in New England in the 17th Century. Only one church record refers to a feast and there is no further record of a feast for 150 years. Stop stuffing yourselves people - it's historically inaccurate.

2 Although pumpkins have their origin in the New World the first recipe for pumpkin pie appeared in a British cookbook...so naaaaa

3 Sarah Josepha Hale is credited with making Thanksgiving a national holiday. In the days of slavery she believed the holiday would break down America's sectarian tensions - a move that has clearly worked perfectly. She was one of the first women to write a novel and is credited with the verse Mary Had a Little Lamb But She Ate Her Pet Turkey Instead.

4 In 1835 the doctor William Alcott wrote that he was opposed to Thanksgiving on moral reasons as well as medical reasons, lambasting it as a carnival loaded with luxuries. He was also a vegetarian.  if he were alive today he would probably be breaking out the Ramen Noodles - just not the chicken flavored ones.

5 The most famous Thanksgiving poem was written by Lydia Maria Child. It's called "The Boy's Thanksgiving Song" and is best known by it's first line "Over the river and thro' the wood." Nope - sorry - never heard of it but will probably be heading for the woods by 6 pm.

Bill Cosby - American Icon. Rapist?

I haven't worked in marketing for long but long enough to have started waving a red flag at the notion of Bill Cosby's latest Twitter campaign. I don't always do these things as forcibly as should so I would probably be standing meekly at the back of the Cosby suite, waving a small red flag and mouthing the word 'no.'

But it would certainly have been red. Not even remotely orange.

So here's a man who has been accused of a number of  rapes. Oh well then - let's invite people to form a meme campaign around his glittering, sublime, oh so funny, and not in the slightest bit scary date raping personality (allegedly etc).

The results were a bit predictable...

Although this post is in a semi lighthearted vein there's nothing funny about the accusations leveled against Cosby. They date back to the 1970s but only now are they gathering momentum. One of his alleged victims Barbara Bowman claims Cosby drugged her and raped her.

The episode makes me think of Sir Jimmy Savile and anything that makes me think of Sir Jimmy Savile is not good. The famous British DJ and TV host was lauded as a character while he was alive. The stories about little girls were laughed off. Sir Jimmy was influential and did lots of good work for charity. After the death of the venerable Sir Jimmy, the lavish commemorations and the commissioning of statutes of the great man, those allegations of sexual abuse came into the open. It was later revealed that Sir Jimmy had sexually assaulted hundreds of victims of both sexes from the ages of 5 to 75. Sir Jimmy's tawdry soul got away with it because he was a star.

I'm not equating Cosby's alleged acts with those of Sir Jimmy who may have been one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders. But there is a certainly a similarity in the willingness of the establishment to turn a blind eye.

I Miss Our Little Talks

I have always loved this song because I miss our little talks by Of Monsters and Men. Even when I first came across it I knew a time would come when I would miss our little talks.

I also loved the song because of the feeling of northern solitude it gave me; it make me think of Beowulf and the frigid forests of Scandinavia. It made me think of lands where monsters came out of the mists. It made me think of the fearsome Norse Gods and the long ships on the freezing waves. It makes me want to drive to the nearest IKEA and to buy a van full of uncomfortable beds called Bjorack, or something of the like.

I miss our little talks but know now I was shielding myself from a truism - namely that the heart isn't a coherent whole. It can be divided into many pieces, each one attractive enough and shining like pale glass on the beaches of a fjord on a bright morning, but ultimately as illusive as the sun in these rarified northern climes.

It's a great song whatever you read into it...

The Sirhowy Arms Hotel Cannibal and the Map of Love

When I read about Matthew Williams who attacked and ate a woman at the former Sirhowy Arms Hotel in Argoed, Blackwood, I was forced to pull up a Google map.

Where in the world was Argoed and how could such an unsettling thing have happened? The news reports pointed to somewhere in Wales. The former Sirhowy Arms Hotel was now a halfway house for homeless people. I had written about such places in sleepy communities across Britain back in the day. Local people never wanted them on their doorstep, thinking they would encourage undesirables. The normal reaction was to label such folks NIMBYS (Not in My Back Yard) but some of the elderly residents of Argoed, may have had a fair point after Williams' sickening attack on a woman he appeared to had a relationship with.

Some locals said the halfway house had been the source of trouble. "We's even had people sleeping rough overnight in the hedgerows," said one villager. I was a bit perplexed by that comment as sleeping rough in a hedge did not seem to be up there with cannibalism.

The Brecon Beacons

In my efforts to find out where this had happened, I pulled up the map and expanded it. The familiar shapes of the Welsh valleys came to me and Cardiff and the majestic River Severn. It was close to the place I had grown up and I was surprised by the feeling of homesickness that swept over me. I remembered that gray day, when the water was as a gray as the milky sky and the mud lapped on the Severn and we pulled a mighty fossil from the river bank, the mud lapping on our shoes. The ammonite fossil was a relic from a prehistoric sea that had lapped here long ago millions of years before Gloucester was the great strategic crossing of the Severn.

I had never thought of Gloucester as a lovable place but slowly it unfolded in the map of love. When I grew up in Gloucester it has lost the strategic significance it had in Roman times when two roads crossed at The Cross, In Medieval times a vast cathedral had risen in Gloucester but it seemed out of place back in the days when I wandered through the avenues of quietly crumbling half timbered buildings past the largest expanse of stained glass in Europe.

The serrated green lines to the north of Blackwood marked the Brecon Beacons, where majestic hills rose like a whale with a smooth back. To climb up their expanse on a sunny day was to ascend to heaven and to look down on a lake like a mirror. The long contours of the mountain range proved to be a map of love and hate. On a day when the mist hug heavy over the mountains I had ascended into the dankness with V. hoping the breathless heights would revitalize our relationship, only to be met with a litany of complaining and the inevitable downward descent.

Llanthony Priory

But to the east the map proved to be more sunny. I saw the Black Mountains and the ruins of Llanthony Priory, one of the prettiest places in all of Christiandom. The memories came flickering back - a smile and a sea of purple flowers winding away to the high hills.

Then I thought of the Golden Valley and how we had woken to see the mist drifting down the river. We had made a pilgrimage here after seeing the movie Shadowlands. The Goilden Valley proved to be illusive and beautiful in an understated way associated with places off the beaten track. We drove through small villages and ate in stone pubs and heard the lilting accents of Wales just over the border. The land of song and dizzy heights.

Raglan Castle

Then we drove along the border past the savage ruins of castles that marked the days when this place was the Gaza Strip of its age. When you walk through the old gatehouses and see the holes where burning hot ash was dropped on attackers, you feel a chill even on the warmest of days.

Perhaps the map of love is not so far removed from hate and cannibalism - the flip side of the human condition that we don't want to contemplate.