And yet another bon mot, slightly longer

On a related note to that last post, this is a great line from G. K. Chesterton on the insanity of having too much respect for the past:

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Another bon mot

Insight is worth a lifetime's experience.

Another of the wise saws I remember from a series of desk calendars with improving (or, more often, intriguingly subversive) quotations for each day of the year, which I enjoyed throughout much of my childhood (they were a regular Christmas gift from one of my father's client companies, I suppose).

I've always been rather irked by the (depressingly common) assumption that 'experience' is acquired automatically by the simple process of living - and the further assumptions that 'knowledge' equates to 'experience', and that 'wisdom' equates to 'knowledge'. It would be wonderful if we became steadily smarter just by avoiding dying, but the fact is there are lots of middle-aged and elderly people who've lived rich and varied lives..... but who are still dumb as a post. Insight is the thing.

Insomina

Not a typo! Well, kind of a deliberate typo, anyway. It was originally the result of some random keyboard clumsiness, but then I decided I rather liked it.

If it were a word, what would it mean? It occurred to me that it might be a plausible plural of insominum (all neuter plurals end in 'a' in Latin and Greek - the Classical education: it never leaves you!)..... which could perhaps mean one of those deranged pensées that occur to you when you're suffering from insomnia.

As I am now. I have been burning the candle at both ends too much for the past two or three weeks, working long hours during the day then staying out late partying at night - and my body-clock is completely screwed. I find myself waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning, no matter how late I went to bed (seldom before midnight; usually more like 1am or 2am). It doesn't help that I have had a really evil cold - sniffles, sore throat, fever, persistent cough - for the past week and a half: that has been seriously undermining the quality of any sleep I have been getting. The black rings around my eyes are now as pronounced as a panda's. I feel as though I want to, need to sleep for 48 hours around the clock..... but it just won't happen.

But enough of that. I was going to write a little piece about invented words. It was a game that was popular with some of my buddies at University - perhaps inspired by a book that came out around that time, 'The Meaning of Liff' (a stocking-filler mini-dictionary which proposed that quaint-sounding British place names could be usefully pressed into service as nouns [sometimes as verbs or adjectives], and provided a treasure trove of humorous examples).

One particular favourite in my undergraduate circle for a while - it became quite an entrenched part of our slang, presumably rather to the bafflement of anyone else - was ept (derived, of course, from 'inept'); any piece of clumsiness or tactlessness being described as having a lack of ept or as being not very eptful.

I also rather like misle (which often seems like a more sensible back-formation of the Present Tense of 'misled' than 'mislead' does - at least to me, in my insomniful state). Also, perhaps usefully reminiscent of 'mither' (which really is a word, meaning to irritate with persistent inquiries or reminders).

Then again (an old favourite of toilet wall humour, this, long before my friends adopted it as part of their argot), there is lert. As in:

"Be a lert. Your country needs lerts!"

There are many more examples I could share with you, but my insomnified brain is suddenly coming up blank. Perhaps this is another theme I shall return to....

Or perhaps not.

Touch the monolith

I have long had a notion to try to establish a website called something like www.touchthemonolith.com - referencing the sinister, totemic black gravestone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I hope nobody's snagged the domain name already.)

I'm not sure if it should be an entirely black page, or a depiction of the monolith from the film (surrounded by screeching prehistoric primates) - but the idea would be that you click on the black mass somewhere, and are treated to a succinct burst of life-changing, civilization-evolving wisdom.

Something like.....

"Bang the rocks together."

Or.....

"Eat the tapirs."

Or.....

"Marry outside your immediate family."

Or.....

"Use an alphabetic script."

Or.....

"Press 'Control-Alt-Delete'."

Or.....

"Never give a sucker an even break."

I should work on this more seriously. The advertising revenues could be huge.

It's haiku time...

A more 'traditional' one again this week - contemplation of Nature inspiring or encapsulating a philosophical rumination.

Tiny markers show
The unseen passage of Time.
Leaf on a river.

My Own Private Spy

I was waiting for a friend in one of my favourite neighbourhood bars, the 'Yacht Club', the other day when a young local guy suddenly started to engage me in English conversation.

This was somewhat unexpected, since English is not widely spoken around here - at least, not to a very high level. This guy was near native-speaker standard. You don't encounter that very often. Certainly not in a policeman - which is what he introduced himself as. In fact, he claimed to be a middle-ranking cop in the 'Foreigner Supervision' department, and kept on 'joking', "It's my job to keep an eye on you."

Given my recent hassles in securing Internet access and in sending & receiving e-mail (to say nothing of the strange clicking on the phone line), I was not inclined to find such remarks amusing.

It's hard to believe that anyone in the security services in any country in the world - no matter how flawed their intelligence assessments or how extreme their control-freakery - would judge that I was a sufficiently interesting potential threat to merit individual surveillance. But then, this is an utterly f***ing crazy country! If it could happen anywhere, it could happen here.....

In fact, I'm not really sure I believe that he was a cop. I suspect it might have been just a conversational ploy or a practical joke. He certainly wasn't your typical cop profile: well-groomed, well-educated, well-dressed, impeccable English..... no, he's not going to fit in with the indolent, semi-literate bottom-scratchers down at the station house at all.

He was, however, an unashamed sleazebag. When my drinking buddy The Choirboy showed up, with his new local girlfriend, the "cop" made a point of getting all of our e-mail addresses and mobile numbers, and he promised to drop us a line soon so that we could stay in friendly contact. The only one he actually called was The Choirboy's girlfriend..... to ask her out on a date.

A cop??? Well, maybe. The jury is still out on that one. I'm sort of hoping I don't run into him again....

Ouch!! (A killer putdown/potential epitaph)

Browsing the Wikipedia entry on F. E. Smith the other day, I was reminded of this caustic comment on him by Margot Asquith:

"F. E. Smith is very clever; but sometimes his brains go to his head."

Now that is another possible epitaph for me!

Caught short

My last post on loos reminded me of another cherished anecdote about the early 20th Century English barrister, F. E. Smith, whom I mentioned last week.

Public toilets in London are woefully few and far between; and those that there are, are often wretchedly dirty and/or beset by 'cottagers'. Smith, then, if he found himself having to answer the call of nature when he was at large in London (en route between his chambers and the Royal Courts of Justice, I suspect), developed the habit of popping into a conveniently situated gentlemen's club. (I forget which one; a distant, nebulous memory suggests either The Garrick or The Reform. Come to think of it, are any of the great London clubs anywhere near The Strand?? I really wouldn't know.) Smith was not a member; but he was an imposing enough character, and such a regular visitor, that none of the staff thought to challenge him.

That is, until one day a new doorman became suspicious of his hasty visits, and summoned up the courage to ask him, the next time he appeared:

"Excuse me, sir, but are you a member of this Club?"

To which Smith, quite unfazed, and feigning elaborate surprise, replied:

"My God! Do you mean to say it's a Club as well?"

Where in the world am I? (16)

I am in a country where people seem to delight in pissing in the street. And not discreet pisses, behind a wall, against a tree, in a dark corner. No, people seem to prefer to whip their willy out in the middle of a busy sidewalk - ideally, close to a functioning streetlamp.

Now, in some places in this expansive country, this might be more understandable. In the 'other place', for example, the competitor city which I visited a couple of weeks back, public toilets are comparatively few and far between, and there is a small - but irritating (and, for the severely impecunious, decisively discouraging) - charge to use them.

But in my home city, there is a profusion of public toilets; all of them readily locatable (even when hidden away, as they so often are, in discreet little back alleys) by their distinctive, pungent smell; and all of them absolutely FREE.

And yet I regularly see people taking a leak against the wall of my local park - in the middle of a busy sidewalk, underneath a functioning streetlamp..... and less than 100 yards from the nearest (very prominent, completely FREE) public toilet.

Perhaps it's a case of "You can take the peasant out of the countryside, but you can't take the countryside out of the peasant"? If you've been pissing al fresco all your life, it must seem a little bit strange to go indoors to do it.

The degree of compulsive, defiant exhibitionism about public pissing here, though, does seem to require further explanation.

A bad time of the year

The calendar is a minefield - unexploded anniversaries litter my path, forgotten, hidden, lying in wait for an unlucky step.

A favourite 'beachcombing'

It's been in my head (on my mind?) to include this for a while, a fabulous piece of whimsy from one of my boyhood literary heroes, J.B. Morton, one of the greatest of all English humourists.

Morton had a recurring fascination with the comic possibilities of cabmen: arguably his crowning achievement was the 'Directory of Huntingdonshire Cabmen', an irregular feature in his rag-bag funny column 'By The Way', which ran for over 50 years in The Daily Express; the 'Directory' was nothing more than a list of names - for the most part, not even particularly remarkable names - and yet, in the context of the column, it somehow became irresistibly, excruciatingly funny.

Many of Morton's fans, however, consider this to be his finest moment:

The Dancing Cabman

Alone on the lawn
The cabman dances
In the dew of dawn he kicks and prances
His bowler is set on his bullet head
For his boots are wet and his aunt is dead.

There on the lawn
As the light advances
On the tide of the dawn
The cabman dances.

Swift and strong as a garden roller
He dances along in his little bowler
Skimming the lawn with royal grace
The dew of dawn on his great red face
To fairy flutes as the light advances
In square black boots the cabman dances.

Bon mot of the week

I have from time to time been accused of being 'tactless'. This is, I hope (I insist), an unfair charge. I believe, on the contrary, that I am an extremely tactful person; it's just that I like to 'push the envelope' sometimes.

I have long been inspired by this desk calendar aphorism I discovered in my childhood, attributed to Jean Cocteau (although, if he said it at all, presumably he said it in French):

"Tact consists in knowing how far we may go too far."

An Isadora Duncan moment

The weather has turned nippy of late. I was enjoying wearing my new woollen scarf. I was walking innocently down the street in it the other day, when...... aaaargh: sudden strangulation!

One end of the scarf had somehow got caught in the handlebar of a bicycle which was parked pointlessly in the middle of the sidewalk (Where in the world am I?!) - although the scarf is neither very long nor very floppy, and I had sure as hell been giving the bicycle as wide a berth as possible.

I have said this before: bicycles are animate, sentient, malevolent. They wait for the moments when you are slightly off your guard - and then they pounce! BEWARE.

Logorrhoea

I've always loved that word - the Greek for 'word-flow'; suggestive of a helpless, incontinent verbosity.

I was discussing the word - and its applicability to us - with a writer friend a little while ago, and that conversation prompted this little poem. A nice little summary, I think, of the way most writers feel, and of the modest wish we share to make some contribution, however small and indirect, to posterity.

Logorrhoea

I am full of words:
They surge through my veins
They pulse in my temples
Press on my heart
Burst in my brain
Gush out upon the ground

When all my words have leaked away
I will cease to be

But the words I have spilled
Sink deep and spread
May yet enrich the earth
Feed some unknown future flowering forth

A chastened quiz-aholic

I am aware of something of a weakness for, almost a fatal fascination with trivia and trivia quizzes. There was a period - when I was living and working in Oxford back in the early '90s - when I was playing regularly for one of my favourite pubs in the local quiz league, and playing in 2 or 3 prize quizzes around town every week (and winning quite a few of them: my buddies and I established such a domination of the event at the 'Lamb & Flag' that they introduced a rule that the winning team had to sit out the following week and provide the questions instead; so, we could only win in alternate weeks).

I came to think that that was overdoing it rather, and I deliberately stepped back from a potential addiction (I am a very anti-addictive personality, on the whole).

I hope I was never as nerdy as many quiz-obsessives become (the star player on our league team at 'The Black Swan' actually used to read Burke's Peerage and the Encyclopedia Britannica in idle moments!). And I don't believe I am as ruthlessly competitive as..... well, the Nemesis who stole our glory from us last Monday, for example (a rather lovely lady journalist - but man, she's mean when she's quizzing!!).

However, my girlfriend, The Artist, after reading of my misadventures in quizdom this week, commented quite aptly that quizzing seemed to bring out a side of my personality that she hadn't seen elsewhere - a scary single-mindedness, a steely focus. She said I became "something between a bloodhound, a racing driver, and an assassin".

I am duly warned. I shall try to steer clear of the dratted events in future.

I think "assassin" was a bit harsh, though.

A footballer anecdote (or three, or four)

I thought I'd pick up from yesterday's courtroom stories by recording my favourite tale about George Best.

Best was a magical football player - he could dribble, cross, tackle, score goals, was impishly inventive; and he exhibited an arrogant swagger in confronting defenders, his close control being so perfect that he would often simply defy his opponents to try to take the ball off him.

Sadly, his national side, Northern Ireland, was too weak ever to give him the opportunity to show off these skills in a major international competition. He was signed by Manchester United as a teenager, and almost immediately had a sensational impact. 5 years later, when still only 21, he almost singlehandedly won the European Cup Final for them (a feat the club was not able to repeat for 31 years). In his native Belfast, they like to say, "Maradona good; Pelé better; Georgie best."

Alas, his career soon went downhill. His brooding good looks and sly charm made him one of the first 'pop stars' of the football world, and he became an incorrigible ladies' man - and also a hopeless alcoholic, a problem which blighted the second half of his football career, and the whole of the rest of his life, finally causing his death - at not yet 60 - earlier this year.

The best of many stories about his wild days:

In the early '70s, when Best's football career was already in decline, he was asked to be one of the judges at the finals of the 'Miss World' beauty contest. Naturally, he got off with the winner. The next morning, room service was summoned to his luxury hotel suite to bring yet more champagne and caviar. A tired-but-happy George opened the door, wearing only a bashful grin and a bath towel around his waist. Looking over Best's shoulder into the room, the waiter saw a tableau of debauchery: designer clothes torn off and dropped on the floor, wads of cash (from a brief but evidently very lucky visit to a casino) strewn around, a small army of empty bottles.... and a gorgeous blonde sprawled naked on the bed.

The waiter, a devout football fan, could not contain himself. Shaking his head sadly, he said, "Oh, George, George, George - where did it all go wrong?"

Best always seemed quite unrepentant about his self-destructive lifestyle. One of his most famous lines (from a TV chat show appearance, I think) was:

"I think I must have spent a good half of all the money I ever earned on women and drink. The rest I just wasted."

And while on the football theme, I've always loved this story about an archetypally bluff and pragmatic English football manager.

The star striker is sparked out cold by a clash of heads. The trainer runs on to administer the smelling salts, and the big lad comes around, but is very woozy. The trainer reports back: "It's no good, boss. He's got no idea who he is."

"Marvellous!" retorts the gruff manager. "Just tell him he's fucking Pelé and get him back out there."

Surely an apocryphal tale? And yet, and yet.... I can imagine it being true. I wonder if it ever has been attributed to a particular manager. I can well believe it of Jim Smith or Joe Royle, or maybe the notorious Ron Atkinson.

Ah, and that reminds me - one final football-related line. In recent years, Joe Royle has become one of the UK's most distinctive and insightful match commentators on TV. Describing Poland's burly pair of central defenders (painfully slow on the turn, and regularly being slaughtered for pace) in a game in the European Championships a few years ago, he came out with the brilliant phrase:

"They do look a bit like the Terracotta Army at times, don't they?"

I nearly forgot!!

It's Haiku Day!!

Hmmm, how about this? A slightly more 'experimental' style.....

Missing missing you
Craving yearning needing you
Wanting wanting you

A legal anecdote (or three)

The archaic formula "Who, pray, is.....?" is supposed to be much favoured by doddery old British High Court judges - who traditionally affect a magnificent indifference to, nay, a complete ignorance of current affairs, or at least of the reviled 'popular culture'.

There are a number of well-worn anecdotes (forgive me: I used to be a lawyer, once upon a time) on this theme, perhaps the best-known of which is this:

At some point back in the '60s, a witness in court happened to mention The Beatles. The judge rolled his eyes in bafflement. "Who, pray, are the Beatles?"

One of the barristers helpfully explained (while disguising, apologising for his own shameful familiarity with such base matters): "M'Lud, I believe they are a well-known skiffle band."

[In some versions of the story, the barrister's explanatory phrase is "popular beat combo" - but I'm really rather sceptical as to whether 'combination' was ever a common term for 'band'; and I'm damn sure no judge would have allowed the slangy contraction 'combo' to pass in his court.]

In another (more recent) one I like, the exchange supposedly went like this:

A witness had mentioned the legendary Brazilian football player, Pelé; so, the judge, of course, asked....

"And who, pray, is Pelé?"

The barrister responded: "M'Lud, he is widely recognised as the second greatest football player in the history of the game."

The judge rose to the bait: "And who, then, is the greatest football player?"

The barrister (touting a personal preference shared by many British people of a certain generation) boldly replied: "That, M'Lud, would unquestionably be Mr George Best."

[If any of you said 'Maradona' - SHAME on you!]

However, my favourite courtroom anecdote has long been this fine riposte from one of the most celebrated advocates of the turn of the 20th Century, F.E. Smith (who went on to a distinguished political career, and became Lord Birkenhead).

Smith had taken great care in his closing speech to explain the key points of a long and complicated case with great clarity and simplicity - for the benefit of a notoriously dim judge (and there are a lot of those!). However, when he had finished, the judge shook his head in befuddlement, and sighed sadly:

"Alas, Mr Smith, I fear I am still none the wiser."

"Indeed not, M'Lud - but you are at least better informed," came the barbed reply.

You can't often get away with a remark like that in court. Perhaps never. But oh, how we all used to dream of achieving such a moment ourselves!

Yes, even lawyers have dreams....

Who, pray, is....?

'Eurynaes'??

Yes, it looks like an ancient Greek name, female.... but rather odd in form, and utterly unfamiliar. Is it perhaps just an extravagant mis-spelling of 'Erinyes'??!!

I took part in a trivia quiz last night. My first in a long, long time. (Well, OK, actually it was only my first in 5 or 6 weeks - but before that, it was a long, LONG time!) Much to my surprise and exultation, my team won. (Well, OK, we didn't quite win officially - in that there was a superfluous 'buzzer round' play-off with the second-placed team at the end, in which we were royally abused by both Fate and the quizmaster...... gripe, gripe, gripe. But, you know, morally, WE WON.)

This improbable success was largely down to a first round on literature, in which there was an optional 'specialist subject' section of frightful trickiness - having to identify the 'odd men out', the 5 bogus characters from a list of 30 or so appearing in..... either 'Romeo & Juliet' or 'The Canterbury Tales' or 'The Iliad'. Since I wasn't confident of getting more than 3 out of 5 on either the Shakespeare or the Chaucer, I had to dig deep into my buried memories of undergraduate study of Classics..... but I could only come up with 4 out of 5 ('London' was a mark for everyone!). I eventually decided that Eurynaes - if it were really a name at all - must be a character from The Odyssey (Nausicaa's mum, perhaps??). Well, we got 5 out of 5. Which was considerably more than anyone else. (I think we might have been the only team to take on the Homer question. Most of the others attempted the Chaucer, and suffered for it.) And that section turned out to be worth DOUBLE marks. Woo-hoo!!!

That helped to give us a commanding lead from the get-go, a lead which our somehow slightly-less-formidable-than-usual rivals were never quite able to overhaul.

I won't let it go to my head.

I suffered one of the great salutary lessons in quizzing many years ago, a dire warning against succumbing to too much pride or ambition in regard to these silly little competitions.

During my teacher training year at the University of Durham, I discovered that quizzing was BIG in the pubs in those parts. One evening, I took a bunch of my fellow trainee teachers to try out the quiz at my local, The Loves. We won. This was obviously not supposed to happen. The quizmaster found a way to dock us a point, leaving us tied with the resentful resident champion team. The tie-break question was: "How many rivers were there in the Greek Underworld?"

Three of us were Classicists..... and none of us had a bloody clue! (Though I really think that whatever answer we came up with would not have been acknowledged as the 'right' one: the purpose of this exercise was to put the insolent intruders in their place, and reaffirm the old world order.)

To this day, I still don't really know. It depends if you count Phlegethon - which is a river of fire.

And again, is Lethe really a river, in the watery sense? A river of Valium, maybe??

The first time this bizarre thought occurred to me, I got Boney M stuck in my brain for the rest of the day.

By the River of Valium,

There we sat down.

Yea, and we slept,

And we forgot about Zion.

Oh, dear - it's happening again. Must.... get..... that...... annnoying...... tune..... OUT..... of...... my...... head!! Aaaaaaaaahhh!!!!

My favourite non-native speaker mistake of English

A few years ago, when I had been living for several months with a friend in the Pimlico area of London, I happened to be wandering the streets in the middle of the day (I used to do that a lot back then - I had quite an extended period of unemployment, followed by an even more extended period of becoming a student once more), when a rather attractive young German girl approached me and asked, "Are you well-known around here?"

What she meant, of course, was, "Do you know this area well?" (She was looking for the nearest laundromat.) However, I found myself reflecting for a moment on the question she had actually put to me, and I realised that I probably really was quite well-known.... if you went into this bar or that bar, or that corner shop, this cafe, then probably quite a few people would at least recognise me, and perhaps even smile in greeting.

It is sometimes rather gratifying to be able to count on that sort of familiarity.

That's probably what I enjoy most about the place where I am living now: after four-and-a-half years, I am very well integrated into the place, widely recognised in all of my regular haunts, warmly welcomed in most of them.

Or, in the words of the legendary Ron Burgundy:

"I don't know quite how to put this, but.... I'm kind of a big deal round here. People know me."

What is poetry?

Ah, now there is a question that has tied up better minds than mine in knots for quite a while.

I recently found this rather nice piece - on the nature of poetry, and on the difficulties of teaching it - by the American, Billy Collins. He was the US Poet Laureate a few years ago, and seems to be widely disparaged as too 'popular', too 'accessible'. I haven't found much of his stuff yet, but what I've seen, I like. 'Popular' and 'accessible' are not bad things!

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say, drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

Is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it;

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Traffic Report - the blog story so far

I've just been conducting a brisk review of my output on these two blog pages of mine, and the findings are these:

Rather to my surprise (given my absurdly heavy workload of late, and my general disdain for the whole blogging concept), I have managed to develop a pretty regular blogging habit, adding something to one or other of the pages almost every day. With the exception of my recent out-of-town jaunt, which led to an interruption of nearly a week, I have rarely gone more than 24 hours without a post. (On the two or three occasions where Blogger asserts that I have gone three days without a post, this is down to a glitch in the site's clock/calendar: my posts are sometimes timed and/or dated somewhat inaccurately. I have never, in fact, gone more than 48 hours without a post. Well, not more 49 or 50 hours, anyway.)

The average frequency of contributions is 8-10 per week on Froogville, and 5-6 per week on Round-The-World Barstool Blues. However, since my pieces on the latter often tend to be more substantial, the overall word count is pretty similar on both blogs: around 8,000 to 9,000 words per month. At this rate, I'll soon have a book!!

In November, despite the unusual hiatus at the end of the month, there were 39 new posts on Froogville and 25 on Barstool Blues – almost identical to the preceding month.

By the end of November, there were 60 posts on Barstool Blues and 104 posts on Froogville (well, it did have a head start of 8 or 9 days on its brother). Not a bad total, considering I started them less than 3 months ago.

According to the Hit Counter I set up through www.sitemeter.com, there have now been around 680 visits to each of the sites (in the 9 weeks since I installed the counters, that is; that was 2 or 3 weeks after I launched the blogs). Early on, I was registering a dozen or so hits a day, but that seems to have tapered off to 8 or 10 a day (although there is something of a peak at the weekends!). Tallies for the two blogs are uncannily identical: I can only assume that you are all loyally reading both together. Thank you.

Also, curiously, I am averaging nearly two page views per visit to each site. Since you can read almost everything on the main page, and nobody ever leaves me comments, I am somewhat mystified by this stat!!

Average page view time is around 4 minutes, so I guess you are taking the trouble to read quite a bit of what I'm putting up there. Again, thank you.

I'm not sure about this (how can I find out??), but I suspect visits through proxies are not registering on the counters – which could be quite a problem since, in my vexingly censorious country of residence, Blogspot has only been accessible via proxy sites like Anonymouse over the past month or so. And this isn't by any means the only country which suffers such problems.

There may also be a problem with Sitemeter itself. The counter has frequently been failing to appear on the bottom of the Froogville blog over the past couple of weeks, and my most recent weekly 'traffic report' recorded 0 visits to the site (although the counter itself – when it deigned to show itself again – showed 70-odd). I didn't receive a report for Barstool Blues at all this week.

Maybe I need to get some better traffic-monitoring toys……

Anyway, I deduce that I have a fairly solid readership base of somewhere between 30 and 60 – most of you already on my regular e-mailing list.

I hope you will stay with me, to see what else oozes out of my overfull cranium in the coming weeks and months.

And I hope you'll spread the word to your friends. It would be nice to see that weekly hit count going up rather than down!

And I do urge you to leave me a comment once in a while.

So far, only 6 people have done so. And one of them was me! Come on, people – let's get interactive!!

Something cheerful?!

"For a change!" I hear you cry.

To offset the rancour of my last post.... I offer you what has often been praised as one of my most 'positive' poems.

A Smile

A smile is not
The crescenting of lips
Or dimpled cheek
Or fleeting glimpse of teeth

Nor even
The brighter flash of eyes

But the quickening of spirit
That shows in these
One instant
Of shared
Projected
Joy

Where in the world am I? (15)

I am living in a city where the only means the banks can come up with to try to limit one's exposure to card fraud is.... to impose preposterously low withdrawal limits on the ATMs.

For most banks, the daily maximum total withdrawal seems to be the equivalent of barely US$600. And the maximum for each individual transaction is only $180!

My rent is around $550 a month (my one extravagance: I treat myself to a spacious and fairly centrally-located 3-bedroom apartment - quite unnecessary, but I enjoy the space!). And I have to shell out quarterly, in advance. In the past, most of my work has paid me cash in hand; but at the moment, my three main jobs are all (supposedly!!!) paying into bank accounts. Thus, I find myself with comparatively little cash lying around the apartment. And I had forgotten the rent was due at the end of November. So, I have to keep my landlord waiting for three days, while I make a series of long treks to an ATM (the one at the front of my building is mysteriously out of commission this week - another piece of wanton persecution for me to endure).

Ah, well - it won't kill him. And he is an annoying, miserly little toerag - in a city of notoriously bad landlords, surely one of the worst! He really has nothing to complain of. I am a model tenant. In fact, I often get the impression that I am THE ONLY TENANT in the whole city who invariably pays his rent promptly and in full; nearly all of my foreign friends and many of my local ones are almost permanently a month or three in arrears.

But does my miserable git of a landlord appreciate this? Oh, no. His mantra, whenever politely invited to meet his obligation to carry out minor repairs, is always, "You broke it, you can pay for it."

That time of the week again

One of my wistful, romantic ones this week.


So many imprints
Left: the ghost of your smile glimpsed
In every mirror.