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.

Snow in Virginia

Just when the kids were moaning about never being able to make a snowman the snow came to Virginia. Then a week later it returned. Of course south east Virginia could not cope. The schools have been closed for the best part of two weeks. The promises of snow plows ring as empty as the clang of shovels on the sidewalk.

For a while I was fooled by the snowmaggedon thing. To venture out would be to risk sudden death. By the time I reached the end of the street I would be like a soldier in the Grande Armee on its bedraggled retreat from Moscow, looking for horse flesh or worse.

Oddly enough after finally putting on my boots after two days of cabin fever, I made it to the store at the end of the street and it was open, even if the wine was unbearably sweet. By Friday I was driving on the slippery streets which were not so bad. It suddenly occurred to me that I had trampled through much snow back in those half forgotten days on the ski slopes and I had not lost any limbs to frost bite.

I have been on wooded paths edged with snow and relished the air as clear and clean as a bell. The words of Robert Frost came back to me and made me think of those places.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

A Teacher Fit for Justin Bieber

My scariest teacher back at school was called Clutson. Rumor had it he had been in a German Prisoner of War camp and had exported its methods to the classroom. Quite a lot of teachers at my primary school had been in the Second World War and a military ethos marched through the school. If Mr. Clutson had taken gym we would surely have dug an escape tunnel under the wooden horse.

Maybe Clutson had PTSD. Or maybe he was plain weird. He had perfected a technique in which he placed his thumbs on a student's neck and twisted as hard as he could. His favorite victim was Witts. I'm not sure if it;s accurate to describe Witts as a victim as he would purposely goad Clutson into getting his neck twisted to get some kind of bizarre pain fix.

The last thing I heard of Witts he was en route to jail for trying to place explosives in the gas tank of the caretaker at his secondary school.


Clutson would rather adeptly apply the pain and inform the hapless Witts: "Witts. I'm going to turn you off at the mains. Witts, I'm going to twist your head around so as when your mother sees you, she will say 'Witts why is your head facing your back?"

I seriously doubt if Witts had a mother; rather he seemed to have been spawned by a couple of mutant toads over at the sewage works. We are not Facebook friends.

I don't know what happened to Clutson, a small and rather disturbed looking man with beetle brows. I recall one day when he had a blazing fight with Mr. D, one of the school's other unrelenting disciplinarians on the playing field when the air turned blue with f words; always a good example to set to impressionable youth.


I'd like to say we went on to fill the ranks of the civil service, Parliament and successful business owners but most of my fellow students ended up walking around with placards or pushing supermarket carts, which are known as trolleys in England, with the exception of odd parts of northern England where trolleys are underpants. I'm not knocking it. It takes skill to hitch together 20 carts and push them around a parking lot without hitting anybody else's car.


The education system has a place for most kinds of teachers but I would like to think there is no place for teachers like Clutson. Then again there may well be. I'm sure Justin Bieber is in need of some re-education and I know just the teacher for the job.

Bad British NFL Commentary Goes Viral

I was pleased as punch when Bad British NFL commentary picked up 3.6 million views on YouTube; mainly because Bad British commentary is so good.

It's exactly the short of commentary I would provide, although funnier. In my time in the U.S. I have stubbornly refused to get excited about funny football played by men in motorcycle helmets and '80s style shoulder pads. I watched one Super Bowl and gave up because it was too long and it wasn't that one where Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction.

This is another puzzling term for Brits because wardrobe is a big wooden cabinet - never the most elegant of things to bring along for a singing performance.

Bad British NFL commentary involves a commentary on Alabama v. Notre Dame playing "robot rugby league". The commentator is impressed that Alabama are playing a French team.

"wow a French team, good luck to them."

The commentary describes how a full back "runs a bit, catches a bit, falls over."
Another player is "caught by 83 like a dog with a Frisbee."


The commentator says Alabama’s full back "has a handkerchief in his pocket. He must have a cold but he’s pressing on regardless."

Then when some description of an official show up, the commentator says: "A man from prison has come onto the field."

Blimey, wallop, Mother Goose, crikey - it's really better if you watch it.

I heard The hunchback had a good game too.

The Folks I Bump Into At 7-Eleven

I have a slight 7-Eleven dilemma. I'm about to go to a marketing social event thing but need an Altoid fix from a day of cussing and office breath. The good news is the 7-Eleven has a batter caliber of people than the one near my home ie. nobody has throw up on their construction boots and you aren't very likely to be carjacked or end up in a grisly gang initiation behind a dumpster.

The downside is a keep backing into people. I don't mean with my butt either ; rather that big ol' backside of my SUV because I'm not paying attention (what was I saying?) Either that or the parking lot is undersized, yes clearly that is it. Yes officer - the parking lot is too bijou. It's the Napoleon of 7-Eleven parking lots and it wants to swallow Russia.

The first time the lady very kindly waved away my efforts to give her $5 as she drove away on her three remaining good wheels.

The second time was more problematic. The guy was driving a BMW. Admittedly it wasn't a very good one. After the crunch I jumped out immediately to find him examining what looked like a rather obvious scratch. I offered him my insurance details and he hummed and hawed in an embarrassed way. Finally he agreed to take my business card but he seemed more interested in my accent.

When he found out I was from London he became animated and told me all about his business trips there. He seemed to totally forget about his scratch. I thought of asking him for a beer but thought that might be pushing it.

Maybe I will risk going to the 7-Eleven for an emergency mint stop. I end up bumping into the nicest people there.

Dark Dreams of the Fens

I have a recurring dream I am back in the Fens. The road is straight and the black earth rolls away from me for mile upon mile. Even the nearest hedgerow is leagues away. Only icy culverts break up the monotony and given the flatness that pains my eyes, the sky takes on a new brooding force, exposing all under its withering glare.

I came here so many years ago to apply for a job in King's Lynn of all places. I had no perception of King's Lynn but the monstrous gran silo in the middle of the town unnerved me. I hadn't expected it to feel so remote - so end of the line. The people who interviewed me in the beaten up office unnerved me too with their great hooked noses that were like aberrations. Was this what happened at the end of the line? Your features grew to resemble the gargoyles on the great churches that towered over the lands, as you withered away in obscurity.

King's Lynn

I didn't get the job. But the man with the hooked nose offered me another one in Norwich. The favored candidate's mother had died so he could not take the position. Norwich was the end of the line too but compared to the Fens it felt like the great city.

Over the next few years I got to drive across the Fens on many occasions. I hung on lonely roads beside long silver canals that ran to the horizons. I followed the power lines. One time I tried to find The Wash, the indistinct and muddy sea where King John lost the crown jewels back in 1216. There's a story that he was poisoned by a renegade monk soon after and the hapless king died days later.

Wisbech

There's much about the Fens that suggest an end game. I never found The Wash - just giant pylons and windmill stumps that ran away into the North Sea. But I found Wisbech once, a place that made Lynn look cosmopolitan where heads and bulging eyes swiveled and a hush fell on the bar when I walked in. The bleakness of such places appealed to my restless soul. I drove through the tulip fields of Lincolnshire and south to Ely, a city named after the eels that squirm in these waterways, where a great cathedral with a glittering lantern rises from the Fens.

Ely

Graham Swift set Waterland here, a brooding tale of incest and dark practices in the marshes. The book is perhaps better then the film, but the film stars Jeremy Irons which makes up for any deficiencies. The book draws hard on the history of this isolated and reclaimed land.

Today the Fens with its vast industrial fields and over sparse horizons is a world apart from the fog and mist bound fens of Medieval times where people feared to tread because of swamp spirits. Only in preserved places such as Wicken Fen can we catch a glimpse of the mysterious marshes of yesteryear.

Wicken Fen

Still the landscape haunts me. It creeps up on me at night and I have that odd feeling that I am back in the Fens and sky is too big and the iron bound cold of the place in winter is back with me.