Why did you marry a Brit, Katy?

So there goes another promising Anglo American relationship – Katy Perry and Russell Brand are to divorce after a mere 14 months ending a relationship that had more promise than – I don’t know – Liz Taylor’s marriage to Larry Fortensky.


This one is somewhat shocking because Katy and Russell were seen as the uber cool couple. However, according to the Sun newspaper they had a “huge row,” – a good term that like their marriage, doesn’t translate – and Brand spent Christmas in none so hip Cornwall.

The Sun newspaper said a source told US Weekly mag the pair had a massive row, saying: "She was like, 'F*** you. I'm going to do my own thing'."

The source said that Russell replied: "Fine, f*** you too."

So in such profound terms one of the most talked about relationships of recent years ended…

If there’s a message to come out of this – and who knows if there is or not – it’s don’t marry a Brit. Americans may like the quirky, offbeat humor thing. They may have seen Notting Hill a few times but the reality is we are unreliable and crap and we’re not very funny after a couple of months. And we hate to put out the trash. We start to miss the strangest things like warm beer and fish and chips that don’t taste like cardboard and we realize we’d be happier watching Newcastle United after the fifth pint of Newcastle Brown.

In recent years we have seen a number of these Transatlantic gigs falter as surely as SkyTrain, which is a very old allusion. Take Madonna and Guy Ritchie, a union that straddled all the stereotypes from the obligatory vows in a Scottish castle to Madonna becoming an honorary Brit, owning horses and trotting round her Wiltshire estate blah, blah. For a while we adopted Madonna as real down to earth Londoner ignoring her obvious lack of any discernible sense of humor.

Guy, in contrast, remained being a regular Guy, albeit one from a privileged background, and later said he didn’t have any regrets, especially as the marriage improved his film career. Spoken like a true Brit.

Now I’m on to taking bets about how long Gwyneth Paltrow will remain with the ginger bloke from Coldplay.

While I never had much time for Madonna as an individual, although I have a soft spot for her as a singer, I have a soft spot for Katy Perry as an individual while I have no time for her as a singer.

I didn’t know much about Russell Brand to start with.  In fact I was rather shocked because I thought Katy, who is kind of cute, even if her eyes are a bit close together, was marrying Russell Grant.

Alas and Santa sucked too

As I predicted in my last post about the Tooth Fairy, Santa wasn't really up to scratch either. He forgot to put anti freeze in the sledge, the reindeer entered a parallel universe in which they believed they were workers at a French airport and promptly went on strike at the prospect of visiting x billion kids in just one night.

I wrapped presents with Zara the night before and we put out cookies for Santa; we even sprinkled reindeer food on the lawn late at night which seemed rather surreal with the neighbor's white car rumbling up and down outside as they went out on nocturnal drug deals.

We went to bed with some kind of vague idea of waking up at 4 a.m. to do the Santa thing but it didn't quite happen. The next thing I knew it was 7: 52 a.m. and I heard Zara yelling: "Has he come yet?"

Cue a lot of confused throat clearing and mumbling.

"Houston we have a problem."

Not only was Zara's door wide open but Santa had obviously been a no show and wrapping paper was lying around the floor.

We sprung into containment mode, locking down her room and finding her presents - no mean feat in itself because some were in the car, her new bike was in the shed and quite a few of them have failed to achieve lift off from the store, although to be fair her list amounted to two pages of A4 and contained a veiled threat that reindeer would be decapitated if Santa delivered the wrong kind of Angry Bird.

Still it was another great escape - albeit one without Steve McQueen and motorbikes. Zara fell for the fact Santa had really visited our humble abode and taken a bite out of the cookie, even though I still had the telltale crumbs around my mouth. Had she not heard the hasty rustling of wrapping paper or noticed it was the same stuff we had wrapped around presents the night before?

My colleague Joe who also has a 7-year-old child has an interesting theory on this. It's not actually that interesting and probably quite prosaic for anyone who doesn't have a 7-year-old.

A few months ago, he tells me, his 7-year-old David was asking probing questions as to the existence of Santa. Some of these questions didn't have easy answers such as what aerodynamic forces exactly keep reindeer suspended in mid air and how does Santa visit every kid in the whole world in one night?

But then a few weeks before Christmas David stopped asking questions and became unfaltering again in his belief in Santa. Because he wanted to believe he believed, Joe told me, even though his rapidly developing intellect was telling him otherwise. Kind of like God for grown-ups, I suppose.

Still Joe surmised that this would be the last Christmas his seven-year-old would believe. This made me sad in an indescribable and abstract way; our childhoods are less an awakening than a long series of realizations at how our parents have betrayed us.

Until the final betrayal when they leave us altogether but we have to fill our closets and sheds with their forlorn belongings - just because.

(the house is not ours BTW)

The tooth fairy as a slovenly bag lady

The tooth fairy was shambolic; she was more like a wrinkly old bag lady living in an beaten up car.

"Sparkle me some glitter dust on last night's beef and cheddar wrapper from Arby's will you love?"

Here I am back from another day of ever deceasing circles, orbiting around abstract meaninglessness and the shelves of a supermarket where I forgot to get half of the items texted to me on the list.

"Zara's lost a tooth - a big one at the front."

"Great. I'll check it out," I said persuading her to open her mouth and show me the gap so as I could laugh at the gap toothed effect so beloved of clowns and vagabonds the world over, peddlers of cheap mirth. (I could never see the point of Benny Hill).

"I can't believe you are laughing at her. She's been upset all day," my wife snapped at me.

"Oh." And I declined to reply that if diplomacy was my strong suit I'd probably be hosting Bill Clinton at some reception at the embassy in Laos hoping he didn't reach for the cigar box.

If the downside of losing a tooth is a disfigurement, the upside (at least for kids) is the visit of the tooth fairy. Don't ask me where this tradition came from but it's there and it doesn't seem to apply to the loss of other body parts. If Mike Tyson happens to chew off your ear there is no corresponding ear fairy to make you feel better. If Lorena Bobbit ... well you get the idea.

Zara demanded $20.

"Get out of here. I could fly to Hawaii and stay there for a week," I said somewhat insincerely. But hey - I'm cheap. If you can chase the roaches around the hotel room it saves the cost of a safari.

The morning rolled around, as it tends to round these parts, and my wife was rushing around and tearing apart my wallet. Zara had woken up and the tooth was still under her pillow. The tooth fairy was in serious big shit, banged up in some cell facing a DUI charge and getting unsettling looks from an overweight and brutal looking deputy.

We managed to salvage $3 and a mittful of quarters (which sounds like a low budget remake of a Clint Eastwood Western) that were wedged under some books on the floor. And by a somewhat shambolic sleight of hand the tooth fairy rearranged her dishevelled  dress and slipped the filthy lucre under the pillow.

Zara was none the wiser and swallowed the tale that the tooth fairy leaves behind large teeth for unspecified scientific purposes, but it's to be hoped that Santa puts down the crack pipe long enough to get his act together for Christmas Eve.

Try to remember you're a Womble

I hanker for Britain when I read stories like the one about the Womble removing his head before the cameras stopped rolling and wrecking a lot of kids' dreams. Good old Britain - so progressive and yet so caught in a time warp.

London may have unnerved me last time I was there because everyone was so young and so trendy and so obvioulsy un-British. And yet the Wombles - those loveable rubbish (sorry not garbage guys) collectors from Wimbledon Common are still in vogue.

In fact they are so current that a new generation of children believe they are real. So when Mike Batt removed his head before the cameras had stopped rolling on a recent TV show there was an outcry from children and their parents. It was as if someone had stood up and declared: "Santa Claus is really your dad," and your presents don't arrive in a sledge but a Fort Fiesta.

This story stops me dead in my tracks because I grew up with the Wombles. The song "Underground, overground, Wombling free," was the theme of my childhood in suburbia. And yet the Wombles are not only still living and breathing but kids believe they are real an dthey are in with a shout of being Number One at Christmas - another great tradition that's lost on Americans. But if you are British Mistletoe and Whine is ... well a sort of gawky part of your heritage.

The Wimbledon Guardian reather alarmingly refered to the Womble incident as the "Womble 'severed head' debacle."

The other remarkable thing about this story is the fact that it mentions DJ Simon Mayo; someone who was a fixture of my adolescence if not my childhood. It's extremely reassuring that the likes of Uncle Bulgaria and Orinoco are still ambling around Britain which makes me wonder if Dougal and the Magic Roundabout and Bagbuss are doing the rounds still, although surely not the Clangers, who I tried to introduce to my daughter recently only be be told they were "boring and lame."

And what of Captain Pugwash? - and was it really an urban myth that this show was pulled off air because it contained characters called Master Bates and Seaman Stains.

Of course if you talk to Americans about furry Wombles and Dougal they tend to look at you in a funny way and you can see that look pass over their face as they desperately seek the phne number for social services to dial up a restraining order.

Which is the way I like it, really.

Swept away by the sea - Kitty Hawk pier

I was glad Nancy's memorial service was by the sea because the sea puts life in perspective.

Men and women live and die and the sea simply turns its rounded shoulders, shrugs them and sloughs off, pulling the sand beneath it. About 70 percent of the earth is ocean. As land dwellers we are clinging to the edge of a great watery abyss; we are as insignificant as the grains of sand on the beach.

And as we pass on there are many to take our place. I'd like to say I was moved during the memorial service and I was in places but I spent most of it trying to stop Jax Jax screaming out. BlackBerry therapy only worked to a point - and that was the point where he texted a particularly bad tempered councilman who I had last spoken to on acrimonious terms five years ago.

But beyond the pier house with its Pepsi signs that evoked jaunty times by the sea so many years ago, the great waves crashed on and on, oblivious. They pulled us to the ground where men once made flight.

Funny how our parents always took us to the sea when we were kids. Without fail they would head to the coast as if they had ran out of ideas and wanted to slip off the edge like pre Columbus sailors. And at the first sign of the water my father would strike up the familiar mantra: "I can see the sea through the trees."

And still we see the sea through the trees, although we have long ago departed our childhood selves who would get giddy with excitement at the silvery water and the smell of brine in our nostrils. I wonder if we all remember that time when suddenly we were on the beach with our parents and we didn't want to be there anymore. I recall looking around at the flat dull expanse of the sand and seeing the resort for what it really was, a crumbling piece of nostalgia that I didn't want a part of anymore.

My daughter can spend hours on a chilly beach while I chafe with impatience to leave. But one day she will no longer care about her bucket and spade and something will die inside me. Just like the days when I raced my dad and one day I won and saw him panting and suddenly I was sorry I had won.

Back at the house with the death of Nancy a tie had been broken, a cord that held a bundle of letters has snapped, sending correspondence scattering to the ground.

The order was gone and photograph albums lay haphazard on the floor, some of them spilling pictures - my wife as a kid, paddles and trees and inevitably the sea. And it seemed strange how I felt those childhood days would never end - like the trails I carved in the sand as the sun slipped low over the Cornish coast. Or the day when the fog lay low over the rock pool and I jumped on and on, across briny pools until I came across a huge red crab, magnificent and triumphant as the sun came slanting through the mist.

But to grow up was to lose the randomness of rock hopping and to forget the impetuousness of youth. Yet back at Nancy's house something had slipped; suddenly the children were taking over. There were screams and possies of them and menacing figures in the yard clutching huge plastic guns and whatever they could plunder from the house.

Like a revolution there were forces we could no longer control. It was time to move over or to be swept aside.

Leave it to Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Casey Anthony

It's been a tough week following the sudden death of my mother in law and I can't thank my blog followers out there enough for your kind comments that I will respond to shortly.

It's also been a week when I have been rethinking a lot. It occured to me this week that giving 120 percent all the time at work can be rather unproductive. You still end up being kicked around while the people who give 20 percent will be promoted. There was a tale, that may be urban myth, about a worker who died at his desk and nobody noticed for 24 hours. It struck me that this could easily happen to me; in fact people would probably have one sided conversations with a somewhat dead me and not even notice until I failed to comply with a piece of unnecessary paperwork.

So it really is time to revamp my life but how? I have read about people whose blogs make them vast amounts of money but I can't really see how this would happen. Brits experienced something of a spike in readers just over a year ago, and slid down the virtual Matterhorn to level out at a respectable but hardly earth shattering 150 or so views a day.

I think Brits isn't going anywhere fast because I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough. I know a bit more about who he is than a year ago and I still can't see the point. But I have forgotten the mantra and neglected Bieber. Have I said I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough.

But a lot of people have him on their easily distracted little minds a lot, it seems. A recent survey found Bieber was the most searched person on line in 2011.

And the second most searched person I'm quite mortified to say was Kim Kardashian, a character who gives the Biebs about as much depth as Albert Einstein in comparison. Kim and Justin don't have a lot in common but they do succeed in looking rather like waxworks of themselves.

The most searched news story was the trial of Casey Anthony and somewhat surprisingly the most searched for sports star was Maria Sharapova.

The most searched for musician was - I don't need to say, of course - and the most searched for show was American Idol.

This list is somewhat depressing because it reveals how shallow we have all become; if we weren't that way to begin with. It's the stuff of reality TV junkies and disaffected bloggers desperately seeking a bit more SEO juice guv.

In Memoriam

I had to get away from it all. So I walked. My gait was halting in last night's shirt and Bill's crocks that were too large for my feet.

But the small beach was close and the weather strangely warm for December. I could hear birds whittering away in the trees, three whispy clouds were painted on a peerless blue sky. Such a cruel day to die, although technically the time of death was the night before and the small neighborhood beach ten worlds away from the sterile room at the back of the hospital.

It was the first time I had stared at the work of death, waxy, yellow and undone and while I was grateful for dodging death for half my life, it had caught up with me. Still the words of John Donne marched around my head.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

Death struck me as a sickly and a mean thing, not at all mighty, a hobgoblin panhadler that had stolen the vibrancy and magnificent from her face.

And death left me speechless, weak and wavering. Absent minded and wandering, mouthing at cupboards. I was lost unlike my dear wife who put up with so much but complained so little.

Only the beach drew me with any purpose, away to the small jetty and the drifting blueness of the sound. Souls drift away on such days and we can only watch and wonder at the ebb and the flow. I recalled a sunset when I was here before. Noah threw stones in the water and Rob showed him sticks. Still the distance between us went well beyond the beach. Rob was already drifting away and soon would be a name without a face. And the child was an adolescent now, although I had not seen him for a long while.

From a house on the bay I heard laughter from a yard sale and remembered a similar sale here two years ago when we had laughed as I picked up a bulky JVC camcorder for $1 only to throw it away.

Now these people were separated from me both in time and mood. In a way I wanted to be anonymous as if this small beach was a microcosm of the desert island I longed to be a small black figure on, lost in sunsets, like driftwood on the rocks. My mother-in-law could be difficult but she had a big heart; at least until it packed up.

The occasional spats were as insignificant as fragments of shells in the bigger picture of the world, so why did we let them fester? And the words of one of the saddest songs caught in my throat.

Of all the things I should've said,
That I never said.
All the things we should've done,
That we never did.
All the things I should've given,
But I didn't. 

More than 40 years ago there was a wedding of college sweethearts. I don't know the details but picture a small white, clapperboard church. I picture hope springing from the roadside verges. But they went their separate ways and their paths seldom crossed and only bitterness grew from the verges. At least until they were reunited within the year - walking down a valley where we assume there is no sea. A place from whence no traveler returns.

This woman's Work - Kate Bush

Why I'm still feeling queasy after Thanksgiving

I kept rather a low profile during Thanksgiving. To be honest I’ve never really seen the point of this schmaltzfest, unless you happen to be a turkey farmer in the US who gets to hit pay dirt twice in the space of a month. And what kind of an American expression is pay dirt, anyhow? What does it mean? You get paid so you have to go out and do something really dirty. Which may ensure you don’t get paid again for a while. Apparently it refers to gravel with a high concentration of gold in it; not like any gravel you get round these parts.



In short I didn’t post anything on Facebook saying 'I’m so Thankful.' That’s partly because I’m a curmudgeon, although I am thankful I don’t live in Syria or Somalia, even though I have this recurring dream that I have been transported to a war zone. I'm not even sure if the feeling of peace and thankfulness was enduring because sometime overnight on Thursday it was replaced by the urge to get a cheap flatscreen TV or pair of designer sneakers and not care if it involved trampling a few elderly women half to death to get them the next morning.

But really I don’t like Thanksgiving (apart from the day off work, of course) because it’s one of those glib and smug rewritings of history for the benefit of people of European descent so that we can pat ourselves on the back about how great America is as our stomachs grumble for the rest of the afternoon parked in front of Real Housewives of Atlanta or New York or Redneckysville, Alabama.

So what are the origins of Thanksgiving? According to the Northwest Herald which is, I presume a newspaper in a cold place, it’s….

“The proclaiming of a day of thanksgiving traditionally dates from the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth Colony Gov. William Bradford invited the local Wampanoag Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day celebration of feasting and recreation. The Pilgrims were especially giving thanks for surviving the harsh winter of 1620-1621, during which half of the 102 Mayflower passengers had died, and for the bountiful harvest, which hopefully would help them to meet the challenge of the upcoming winter.”

But there’s also some kind of school lesson plan that does the rounds about how the Indians gave the Pilgrims their corn, that ensured survival, taught them to hunt and they all lived happily ever after. This is surely the tale that prompted my daughter to ask: “If the Indians didn’t have microwaves how did they teach the Pilgrims how to make popcorn?”

This is from the lesson plan.

“Tell first winter the Pilgrims spent in their new home was very cold. Food was in short supply. Some days they had only enough food for each new person to have five kernels of corn for the day. Finally spring came. They planted food and it grew. All the pilgrims did not die. From then on, when a time of Thanksgiving came around, the Pilgrims put five kernels of corn on each plate to remind themselves of their blessings. Let us also remember: (Written on the poster paper).”

Well that’s as clear as mud then. What is clear is that a few years later the Indians weren’t happy bunnies with a valid cause as the settlers took their land and drove them out. Philip, or Metacom, the second son of old Massasoit, the longtime friend of the English, became the head of the Wampanoags in 1662.

King Philip’s War between the Indians and the settlers that was waged from 1675 to 1678 was a bloody affair and the single greatest calamity to occur in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. Nearly half of the region's towns were destroyed, its economy was all but ruined, and much of its population was killed, including one-tenth of all men available for military service. Proportionately this was one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in the history of North America.

For the next 200 years or so the protracted and intermittent genocide of the Indian people continued, as they were pushed west to the badlands of Oklahoma until somebody decided they wanted those lands too, perhaps after hitting pay dirt in those hills.

This is one reason why Thanksgiving leaves a bad taste for me. The other is the way we celebrate the Pilgrims as Godly and goodly when they were religious extremists who used to kill women who acted in a peculiar way as witches. These folks were more extreme than the tea party. In modern America they would probably be going around cutting beards off Amish people (predominantly men folk).

America makes such a big deal about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact, that’s made out like a precursor to the Constitution, that they tend to forget the first successful English speaking colony was in Virginia not New England.

There’s also a certain irony in seeing descendants of these white settlers who drove out the native people arguing for the kids of Mexican immigrants who sneaked into the country, to be sent back south as punishment for their parents’ actions. Just saying.

Preconceptions Gone with the Wind

I have never appreciated the attraction of Gone with the Wind, believing the film to be a cliche of star crossed lovers, garish sunsets, Magnolia trees and the old south. I had seen parts of the movie and knew a couple of the most famous lines "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." and "Tomorrow is another day."

What more did I need to know? What was the point of giving up four hours of my life - more like six when you build in commercial breaks - to watch this predictable mush in overwrought costumes?

But while I was aimlessly channel hopping last night I chanced on Gone with the Wind and decided to stick with it because there was nothing else worth watching. And then a funny thing happened. I got hooked and my old preconceptions were gone with the wind.

Most of all I got drawn into the character of Scarlett O'Hara. It stuck me it's been a long since since I saw such a fascinating character on the silver screen; manipulative, impulsive, scheming, yet charming and despite all her flaws she draws you in, even after all the decades that have passed. There are people we encounter occasionally who burn so brightly that we can't help walking into the flames, even though we know we will come out singed. And Scarlett is one of those people.

Gone with the Wind has been described as one of the greatest love stories ever told. If this is so then love is clearly destined to be one step removed from torture. The relationship between O'Hara and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is at best dysfunctional and at worst abusive. And yet these two manipulative people are fixated with each other. The only people who don't realize it is themselves, although perhaps they get an inkling at the end when it's too late.

Watching Gone with the Wind made me realize that we have lost at the same time as we have gained at the movies. The backdrops may look crude at times and the sets appear clumsy by today's standards. But while we can create special effects with stunning accuracy somewhere along the line we've lost the raw passion and the emotion.

Back in 1939 there were fewer distractions to shrink the big screen. David Selznick, the producer kept many details of Gone With the Wind secret. Numerous big name actresses were auditioned to play the role of Scarlett O'Hara. The successful candidate Vivien Leigh was an outsider from England who was little known in the USA.

The film was first shown to an audience that did not know what they were about to see.  People were permitted to leave, but the Fox Theater in Riverside, California was sealed with no re-admissions and no phone calls out.

The audience only realized they were part of a grand design when the name of Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind came on the screen. The reception was apparently thunderous and the film ended with standing ovations. This is the classic stuff of a golden age of film that may never be repeated.

Yet while Gone with the Wind can look antique its themes of a nation divided and a conflict that rages between the sexes, are as relevant now as 75 years ago. Gone with the Wind has the flawed motif of ideal love - that felt by Scarlett for her cousin's husband Ashley Wilkes that fades and falters like his character and notions of the old Antebellum South. The roguish Butler copes better with the cut throat world of Atlanta after the Civil War while O'Hara thrives in chaos.

And then there's the strife and the pride and the battles for turf that may not be on the terrifying scale of Gettysburg but can be just as destructive. But more than anything else Gone with the Wind is about the contradictions of the human spirit all bound up in Scarlett who is despicable but admirable, and at turns childlike and scheming. We don't need a Scarlett. Mitchell herself when asked what may have happened to the lovers after the novel ended suggested Rhett Butler may have found someone who was less difficult.

But while he may not have needed a Scarlett life must surely have been a lot less colorful without her.

The last colors of fall - Lake Maury

Pride comes before a fall, or if you live in Virginia, it's a hurricane. And after a fall comes freefall and a nothingness in the darkness.

When I wrote a while back about my dread for October my dread was misplaced because October was crisp and colorful, temperate and beautiful. But by now the gulf between my everyday life under artificial lights and the beauty of nature is growing just as nature goes into hibernation.

It's hard sometimes to deal with the minutiae and the deadly nuances of office politics when there's a vastness out there waiting to swallow us up. Four mind numbing hours of vastness just to get to the mountains and then a world of sweeping wind kissed escarpments, and I spend most of my days starting at a screen or out of the window at the sickly saplings that grow from the asphalt.

From now on in the light will quickly disappear. I'll stand outside the concrete awnings one night and grumble about the endlessness of it all with a colleague and the next time I'll have the same conversation it will still be dark and hopeless and light years until the spring.

It could be worse I'll tell myself. I could be in Wigan. If you ever find yourself in Wigan in November when even the rain looks brown you might want to slip into the nearest pub, ducking the darts that are aimed at your head, and drink yourself into oblivion.

Unbelievably there are probably worse places to be in northern England in November than Wigan. Perhaps Warrington or Middlesbrough. How do people ever get up in the dark in Middlesbrough and make it to their cars without cutting off their heads as an act of mercy?

The fall here has a beauty but it's fading fast. I went out in a hurry to capture it as the leaves danced and buffeted me down the footpath.Mocking, mocking and moving south. No time to go far. Lake Maury again. Just like last year; so we run to stand still like Joyce's character in a Portrait of the Artist his hands pinned by his side as he circles the track.

We laughed at Joyce then. We didn't take him seriously. Until the passage about the walk by the Liffey won us over. Nor could we appreciate the frail beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins. We couldn't get beyond the pale and wan face and the repressed and unmanly priest, going through the motions to shut out human nature while betraying himself all the time with his pen in the rhythms of the natural world.

Only now can I appreciate it, in a time and place far removed when his words echo back across the years like an old friend whose letter you find after a long absence.

Spring and Fall:

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The science of stability balls and other stories

I only started to ponder why I found myself staring at stability balls on a Friday night when I was (um) staring at stability balls on a Friday night.

I'd like to say I found myself at the Y because I'm so dedicated to reinventing my body but the reality is less impressive. Nic informed me that Zara was claiming I had promised to take her to the "interactive zone" although my recollection was of a less definite term. I'm not sure when the word "perhaps" had morphed into a promise but by the time I got home it was cast iron.

I have been on my intensive fitness program now for two-and-a-half months and the folks at the Y keep moving the goal posts; or rather they keep fitting new distorting mirrors. I am convinced they bring in a more grotesque mirror every week. How else can I explain the fact all these intensive work outs seem to be having so little impact on my gut?

In saying that these work outs are clearly having an impact on upper arm strength. These days if anyone is handing around babies at work I politely decline for fear I'll accidentally snap off a couple of limbs with my super human strength.

Still I feel like confronting the folks at the Y and telling them I wanted this program to flatten my gut, not to turn me into the Incredible Hulk with a gut. If I had wanted that I could have stayed at home, painted myself green and ripped up my shirts. Believe me people do this kind of thing in my neighborhood. Not for purely altruistic reasons either.

The gym is bearable if a trifle dull. I always forget head phones and find myself watching TV screens from afar. This being American TV there's always a lame show with celebrities trying to dance and another show about two waitresses which is probably better without words, although the brunette can become quite alluring 14 minutes and 24 seconds into the random hill program on the elliptical machine. But who's timing it?

At least I don't feel out of place in most parts of the Y where there are people more out of shape than me. The exception is the weights room downstairs which attracts football players and guys with bulging muscles and eyes. Last week I was pulling down about 50 pounds when I eyed a guy opposite me who seemed to be in direct competition and appeared to want me to know he was pulling 100 pounds.

When I went to walk away he blurted out: "Excuse me." I assumed he was going to inform me he had just out pulled me when he said: "Did you used to teach?"

It dawned on me this was one of my former students. We proceeded into a rapid fire conversation about how bad the rest of his class and all of the teachers (except me) were and by a stroke of luck I recalled his name.

Tonight I encountered another student but he either did not recognize me or did not want to acknowledge me. The last time I spoke to him I reprimanded him for plagiarism. My advice for any students out there who are minded to cheat is this; if you are going to rip off another person's work, don't use word for word the thesis of a leading academic on Macbeth comprising some elaborate and complex theories that have nothing to do with the essay topic when you haven't even mastered the art of tying your shoe laces or keeping your pants up in class. It tends to raise suspicions.

Still Kevin's parents were nice enough, although I did get worried when they emailed me to ask on his progress two months after I had quit.

Although the weight room is scary, it's the stability balls that really do my head in. If the program asks you to do crunches on one it's anything but stable. You find yourself drifting across the running track and coming into conflict with the grumpy, cursing old man who walks round and round every time I'm here whistling for his imaginary dog.

I am enduring the Y but will need to spice things up to keep going. At the moment the only saving grace is Prophet Monster Man, a character with the beard of a crazy preacher, big saggy and potentially soiled track pants and a moss green T Shirt who looks like he swallowed a baby whale for breakfast. Yes Prophet Monster Man makes me feel a lot better about my gut.

But right now I need a plan. I need to invest in the cutting edge of technology - a Sony Walkman perhaps so as I can listen to my tape of The Queen is Dead.