Vie

 

I took this photo about a week ago. Look at it, it's teaming with life . It's a constant cycle. Nature when left is a thing of beauty. Just look. 

For some reason it reminds me of The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke.

The world turned upside down II

It’s become a bit of a cliché, but life will never be the same again. Clearly the reactionaries in charge will do their damnedest to return to ‘normal’ but I don’t think even their worst efforts will be totally successful. Too many people will have died to keep things the same.

I’ve found this time to be both calming mostly with bursts of deep anxiety every so other. There are times when I feel helpless. We all are I suppose. Then there are times when it all makes total sense and I am at one with my fragile existence. My life isn’t how I’d like it to be but compared with many I’m very fortunate. I am managing some fulfillment with many of my Maslow needs being met.

Thankfully I've been quite prolific on the creativity front. In fact I think I’ve been more creative in these two months than I’ve ever been before. It’s quite incredible. But just as my creativity has gone from 0 to 60 in this time, other things have fallen by the wayside.The obvious one being politics. I really can’t be arsed. Yes I still hold the same political beliefs but do I want to sit in on endless Zoom meetings? No, I don’t think I do. So I've decided not to stress about it and take a break. I may come back to it. I may not. Quite frankly apart from survival not much else greatly matters. Life truly is a day to day existence. There is no future.

When life evolves into some kind of consistent new normal, perhaps I will go back to some of my old life. Or perhaps I won’t. Right now I continue playing in cyber space and making art.

Art helps, it really does

In 2014 I had a breakdown. I reached the point where I thought my life wasn’t worth living. I was in total despair and came very close, a few hours away from taking my life. It’s still not easy to acknowledge that. That whole period felt like I was on a never ending roller coaster. It was hell!

All my life I’ve been creative. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing, painting or expressing myself in a creative way. I’ve always considered myself to be an artist, even in the lean times when I was either not creating visual art or when I was creating stuff and then destroying it. This of course adds to one’s anxiety. It also doesn’t help that I’ve always been my own worst critic. But in later years I had started to come to terms with my own creative abilities.

A year or so prior to my breakdown I had started to dabble with digital art. Once I got the hang of the software and had developed the mindset you need to be able to create in a moveable layered format I could really see its potential. I began to realise that this was where I wanted to be and had wanted to be all my adult life.

My depressions had always influenced and inspired my art, and although I didn’t always realise it, had afforded me a reasonable amount of contentment when I was in the creating zone. Little did I realise that it was about to play such a pivotal role in my life. I am so grateful for NHS Wellbeing and the charity Mind for the help they gave me in helping with my recovery, along with people close to me and a couple of very nice, caring people on social media. Without them I wouldn’t be here today. But one of the things that I could not have done without, and the one thing that really helped me to make sense of it all, was my art. My art was my life jacket. Through my art I was able to portray my feelings in a visual way, when words often failed me. My art soothed me. My art didn’t judge me. My art helped me come to terms with what had happened. Art is good medicine.

Black II

(my art making sense of my breakdown)

In these strange days of the Covid-19 crisis with its anxiety, self-isolation and lay-offs our mental health is as important an issue as our physical health. Our world has been turned upside down. Cultural activities are normally some of the ways we relax. The way we help to fill our leisure time. But with galleries, theatres, exhibitions, concerts and craft fairs etc now closed we have been denied much of the therapy that is art. So when Dr Janina Ramirez and others started suggesting that we share art on social media under the hashtag #ArtHelps I vowed I would start sharing art (my own but more importantly art by others) as often as I could. I urge you to do the same.

Art helps!

A Positive Direction

All the fun of the fair

Life is like being on a rollercoaster at the moment; a mixture of a few highs and a great many dramatic lows. Work is so painful now as I know I’m going to be without a job but don’t actually know at the moment when I’ll leave. I am feeling terribly misunderstood.

Emotionally I am more often than not at low ebb. I am finding it hard to concentrate on anything for long.

On the occasions I’m feeling up or optimistic it rarely lasts as something happens or someone does something to put the dampener on life.

I so want to move forward.

I do my thing

I’m currently reading a book that makes reference to the work of Fritz Perls. Not in any great detail, just a few references. Quotes mainly. Quotes which seem quite apposite to my life at the moment. So I searched the web for some of Fritz Perls’ quotes and found this:

“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.”

Fritz Perls

Make of it what you will.

And here’s the news

I happen to think all life is sacred. And, even though it is a word that has its origins in the religious I don’t mean sacred in a religious way. I just believe life to be the most important thing. In fact really it is the only thing!

Unfortunately as far as the gospel according to the British news media is concerned there are British lives and then there are the lives of Johnny foreigner; the former taking president over the latter. It never fails to irritate me how our media reports the loss of life in wars and other disasters. X amount of Britons dying will be conveyed in suitably sombre and sympathetic tones. Any death of those from other nationalities will be delivered almost off the cuff and in a very matter of fact way.

I’ve no doubt that the same happens in other countries.

But isn’t that wrong?

What education?

Is education dead?

I think it probably is!

As an old fuddy-duddy fifty-something it is easy to dismiss the education system as not being as good as it was when I was a lad. Nostalgia has a habit of distorting perception. But I do worry about the way we educate our young people these days. And, that last sentence is part of the problem.

No amount of money could have ever persuaded me to become a teacher. I am full of admiration for anyone who teaches. It can’t be an easy job. The poor souls are knocked by government, industry and the gutter-press constantly. I suspect most teachers do a great job under very difficult circumstances and in my opinion should be freed from much of the checking and measurement of their performance that is the order of the day. Teachers and teaching are not the problem with education.

The main problem with the education system these days as far as I can see is that it doesn’t educate, it just equips people with skills. In my opinion education, which incidentally should be a lifelong process, should be about the discovery and understanding of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and not about training individuals solely as job fodder. A society where people go to university just to get a good job is a morally bankrupt society.

The right to learn and indeed the desire to learn should be a lifelong process and not something that you get out of the way in your formative years. In fact I would venture to suggest that too much emphasis is put on education at a young age. There is far too much emphasis on growing up at a very young age which is bizarre given how life expectancy continues to increase. Education should be a much more fluid process than it currently is and with less emphasis on ending, or course completion. The mechanics of learning need to be given a much higher priority as well. Getting the right answers is all well and good but communicating how you got there is equally important. The edges between learning, working, leisure and retirement need to be blurred so that it is hard to tell where one starts and another finishes. And, opportunities for learning need to be equal and open and available to all.

Life and learning are intertwined journeys. Getting off at the first stop for either shouldn’t really be a voluntary option.

I am a customer and shareholder of Barclays Bank

Does that make me a bad person?

I don’t like capitalism but, as I’m not prepared to opt out of ‘the system’ and live in a ditch, I’ve learned to live with it as best I can. As have most other people in this country I might add. Virtually every financial transaction is an act of capitalism. It’s a shit system but that’s the system, sadly. We can change it but the majority don’t seem to want to. If you have a pension, an endowment policy or some other kind of life assurance savings policy you will indirectly be investing in the stock market, and probably in Barclays Bank or some other institution that is oft held up in public as worse than the rest of them. It does often seem very random about which companies people chose to hate or hold up as examples of “the unacceptable face”. That doesn’t mean I necessarily approve of everything that Barclays do I might add.

To date my working life has been spent in the private sector, so as you can imagine I have been well and truly shafted by capitalism over the years. Early on I was a bank clerk working for Lloyds Bank as it was then. My first ever bank account was with Lloyds, although I switched from them after I left. Over the years I have been a customer of a number of banks, including the Co-operative Bank, who I still have an ‘Oxfam’ credit card with. But I have always found Barclays to offer excellent service, their branches well sited and relatively plentiful and their online banking is first class. So much better than a mutual I also deal with. I acquired the Barclays Bank shares via the Woolwich Building Society. As a member at the time that the Woolwich demutualised I was issued with some of their shares. I held on to them. When Barclays bought the Woolwich I was then issued with Barclays shares in their place. I’ve held on to them. They go up and down like the proverbial Tower Bridge, and this year those peaks and troughs, mainly troughs I have to say, have been quite extreme. I consider them as a long term investment; a little something for my retirement.

As most people who work in the private sector will know, pension arrangements these days, by and large, tend to be shit. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to retire as my pensions aren’t going to be great but I have no desire to work until I drop. I worked for a company for 16 years and paid into their pension scheme. I left about 6 months before that company finally went bust. The last owners ran it into the ground, stole employees’ pension contributions and never made their promised contributions. Because of this, a failed marriage and challenging finances through much of my life my pensions will fall short of anything decent. In an attempt to supplement the meagre pensions that I will no doubt get when I eventually retire I have invested the Barclays shares along with shares of a few other household names into an ISA. My pensions and savings will possibly only just keep me above a poverty existence. And, I am not over egging the pudding here I can assure you. Retirement, despite not arriving soon enough, is going to be a struggle for me, that’s of course if I am spared. That said I know that many millions are going to be a lot worse off than me because they will only have the state pension and other benefits to live on; pensions and benefits that become less valuable virtually by the day. A civilised society would certainly not have the inadequate pension provision that we have in this country.

That’s my excuse, what’s yours?

My father has HD, HD has my father

People usually look at you with a blank expression if you mention HD, or Huntington’s Disease. Most people have never heard of it, unless they’ve had some experience of it; perhaps from having met someone with it, worked in a caring profession or have family members with it. I suppose because it is not as widespread as something like Alzheimer's or as well known as MS. It is a genetic disease that is passed down directly from parent to child, and it cannot skip a generation. My grandma had it and now my father has it. And for all I know it could be me next. In grandma’s day it was known as Huntington’s Chorea, the Chorea describing the erratic limb movements that are one of the symptoms and characteristics of this cruel and wasting disease. This BBC web page offers a concise but reasonable explanation of what the disease is all about. For a more detailed information go to The Huntington's Disease Association.

As children we watched grandma’s deterioration with both bemusement and amusement. One occasion amongst many that will stick in my mind for ever was at a family tea party when grandma picked up the left-over crusts from my cousins plate, popped them into her mouth, eating them instead of her intended target, the untouched sandwich on the plate in front. It is to my eternal shame that I admit that we laughed heartily at this incident. Kids can be really cruel.

Grandma died at a relatively early age. She was in her early sixties. She was lucky enough, if I might be permitted to describe it like that, to die of a heart attack. She was spared the horrors of physical deterioration and then dying through painful complications brought about by HD. I’m not sure my father is going to fare quite as well. At almost eighty my dad is now on a definite downward spiral. Wasting away. I won’t go into detail as I don’t feel that would be right but as a son that has not always been that close to his father it is still very disturbing to witness. I’m pretty sure that all my life I have been a disappointment to my father. I was never really that interested in sport, diy or outdoor pursuits. I’ve always been the arty and cerebral type. Puny but philosophical. I’m not sure dad has ever understood what makes me tick, a feeling that is mutual. That said I still feel for my dad. I witness his bewilderment and frustration. It is as if he’s strapped in to a mysterious and scary roller-coaster ride. He has no control over the journey and he’s not totally sure of the destination. Sadly as a spectator I’m pretty sure I know where that destination is.

Given that my father has HD there is a good chance that amongst me and my sisters some if not all of us could well be struck down by this horrible disease. There is a test that would determine if I have the faulty gene and therefore could potentially develop the disease. But as there is no cure or any way of delaying it I don’t see the point of having the sword of Damocles hanging over me. I prefer to get on with life rather than worry greatly about if and when the symptoms might show. Besides something else could well get me before the HD works its magic. We are all mortal and we all have to deal with that fact in our own little way.

When to drink tea or coffee

There are rules in life that dictate how you behave in certain circumstances or the way you conduct yourself. These rules are unwritten. You either instinctively know what they are or you don’t. They are based on logic. Those of us that know appear to be in the minority. Many, many people struggle with this logic. Get a grip you lot! 

Being the public minded citizen that I am I from time to time impart this crucial information via this blog. Today’s public service announcement is about when to drink tea or coffee:

• First drink of the day – this should be tea. No compromises here, tea and only tea. Ideally two cups before any other drink is even considered.
• Breakfast – it is acceptable to drink coffee
• Mid-morning – coffee
• Lunch – coffee, unless you are having fish ‘n chips when it should be tea, or when having a pub lunch
• After lunch – it’s perfectly acceptable to have a coffee after you lunch as long as it remains within the immediate post-lunch time frame
• Mid-afternoon – tea only. Coffee at this point would be a faux pas extraordinaire!
• Dinner – I would only ever recommend beer or a soft drink unless, again, you are having fish ‘n chips.
• After dinner – coffee would always be the first choice
• The rest of the evening/night – tea
• Supper – tea, a mug of cocoa or camomile
• If in doubt you should always drink tea as this is the default beverage
• At any point in the day tea or coffee can be replaced by alcohol (yes I have had beer for breakfast!). The one exception is the first drink of the day which, just to recap, must be tea.
• From lunchtime onwards it is perfectly acceptable to drink soft drinks. Fruit juice as an addition is perfectly acceptable at breakfast but does not replace coffee or tea at that meal.

There you have it an essential guide to help you keep on the straight and narrow. How have you ever managed without it?

The death of Thatcher

I always said that when Thatcher died I would celebrate by getting roaring drunk. Having witnessed the nonsense on the news about the death of Osama Bin Laden I now realise that rejoicing over anyone’s death, however evil you might perceive them to be, is barbaric and inhuman. Acts of love and peace should be celebrated and never the taking of life.

Vindicated

A certain amount of snobbery goes with the territory of owning a railway season ticket. As much as you try you just can’t help it. You have a tendency to look down on the occasional traveller. Those hapless individuals that are never quite sure of the rules of train travel. Those hapless individuals who get on the wrong trains and who when they get on the right train can’t understand the concept of sitting in the seat that has been reserved for them. The occasional traveller will stand out a mile. They are the ones with unruly baggage, unruly children or will have purchased a take-away coffee and or pastry from a station kiosk. Whilst I dislike all of them I find the last category pompous (I realise that there is an irony in that statement) and worthy of much ridicule. They think that getting on the train with a take-away coffee is ‘what you do’ no doubt they are trying to look cool, to fit in. Take-away coffee, I suspect, is seen by the uninitiated as a form of traveller chic. A must have accessory to facilitate blending in. A badge to say, “hey, look at me, I do this every day”. When in reality it says the opposite. Do you get the picture?

Today, part way on the journey from Norwich to Thetford, a twerp a few seats ahead of me chucked take-way coffee everywhere. The gormless one had clearly just taken the coffee out the brown paper carrier bag that reinforces the take-away status and had either squeezed it too hard or lifted it by the lid. The murky brown liquid went all over the table top in front of him soaking everything on it including the papers of a poor unsuspecting woman opposite him who was busy working away and minding her own business. He stood up, and as is usual with twerps, he just stood there not really knowing what to do. Finally his victim, the unfortunate woman with the coffee coloured work papers got up, went to the loo, and returned with some paper to mop it up. This then ‘inspired’ him to try and mimic the behaviour of someone with some common sense. Eventual the mess was cleared up and they settled back into their seats. Unfortunately my concentration had been broken and I found it impossible to go back to reading my book.

To be a bona fide twerp a person has to meet certain criteria. The list of possible attributes is as long as your arm but as ‘the twerp’ only has to meet a few there is little point in exposing the vast array of variables here. All I will convey are those attributes that qualified the above mentioned twerp to be a twerp. He scored heavily in the following way:

• Take-away coffee in a brown carrier bag
• He was wearing shorts
• He was wearing sandals
• He had no regional accent

I don’t like prejudice, and I know I shouldn’t really think the way I do about the person mentioned above, but it’s hard to think differently when you feel vindicated for holding such views.

Life in the air-age

"Jets at dawn trail across the sky
Silver birds writing words for airman's wives
Who down below hang the washing out to dry
Frilly briefs and flying helmets in a line

Jets at dawn, writing in the sky
Silver planes
(Vapour trails)..."

Jets At Dawn (Bill Nelson)

I like the aeroplane free skies that we are experiencing at the moment. Life feels somehow different, almost eerie. As a child born into the jet age, and in particular brought up in East Anglia, I have always known planes in the skies above where I live. In the early days this was due to a number of operational RAF camps housing either our home-grown squadrons or squatters from the USAF. Now, whilst there is still a certain amount of military traffic, civil aviation most definitely dominates the skies. So this current phenomenon is something new to me.

Clearly it is sad for those that have been stranded. Even more importantly it is sad and possibly tragic for those whose livelihoods currently depend on air freight or air travel. If this goes on much longer it is going to have major economic consequences. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of all the air traffic that we generate, when stopped suddenly it is bound to have an effect on trade and the world's finances. My big fear is that when this is over, as is surely will be at some point soon, we won't actually learn from it. We will continue to use ecessive amounts of air travel and freight. What we should be doing is thinking about ways to cut back on our aeroplane dependency. This is not going to be an isolated event.

Whilst we might never see disruption to flying like this again in our lifetime I'm convinced that other major events that challenge our lifestyles are bound to happen. Despite what detached right-wingers and pseudo-libertarians might think climate change is a reality. A reality that we need to face up to and start coming to terms with. Before too long we are going to witness and suffer from various other environmental extremes and catastrophes, many of which will be of 'Biblical proportions'. We need to change the way we live and how and what we consume. Wake up world!

"You can leave me in the air age if you like
But I'd dearly love to go back to my own time....

Life in the air age, isn't all the brochures say...
Life in the air age, it's too dangerous to stay...
Life in the air age, airships crashing every day into the bay...

Life in the air age, it's all highways in the sky...
Life in the air age, all the oceans have run dry...
Life in the air age, it's grim enough to make a robot cry..."

Life in the air age (Bill Nelson)

Busy

Easter was a busy weekend, unfortunately I was busy decorating. I hate DIY with a passion. Yesterday I went and saw AC/DC at the O2 Arena. Excellent! If I have time I’ll blog about it.

New Year's Day

Another great thing about living in Norwich is that it is so close to the coast. This made it easy for us to yesterday pootle down to Horsey in search of baby seals.

Although a grey day it wasn’t too unpleasant weather-wise. We lunched at the Nelson’s Head before heading off to the beach. From the pub I would suggest that it is a good mile/mile and a half walk to where you can view the seals. I hadn’t realised that Horsey was part of the Broads National Park, but apparently it is. The Park authority now rope off the beach on the sand dunes that are set back from water and beach itself so that the seals a relatively undisturbed. This is just as well as there were hordes of people there to witness this amazing event.

There seemed to be quite a mixture of seals at various stages of the reproductive process. Lying around on the beach were mating couples, pregnant females, pups suckling, inquisitive more advanced pups, and bulls swimming and diving in the sea.

Apparently once a pup has first malted they become quite inquisitive and have a tendency to come to have a look at these strange creatures that have in turn come to look at them. They clamber through the dunes in their own lovable and clumsy way coming very close to us humans, sniffing, snorting and passively growling as they do so. The pub below came right up to my feet. I’ve placed a short video on YouTube of this pup as it waddled towards me.

It's snotty by train

I’ve been ill for two weekends in a row. I currently have a cold which broke out on Saturday morning, and the weekend before I had some flu-like bug that kept me in bed for a day and a half.

One of the joys of public transport is you get to travel with members of the general public and all their faults, their inconsiderate manners, their disgusting habits and their germs. I’m convinced I picked these two illnesses up travelling by train. Those over hot or freezing cold contraptions that claim to offer a transport service for the masses. With the extreme changes in temperature and the way you are often packed in it is no wonder that trains are a breeding ground for illness. And by way of an added bonus they transport these unwell people to so many places, spreading diseases far and wide.

I hate public transport, sniff!

Accident

As I was walking from the train station to work this morning, I came upon an accident. It was on the main road, in front of the trading estate that I work on. As I reached the scene the ambulance was arriving. It was hard to make out what had happened. Some poor soul was lying on the path, with another citizen crouched over him. In the road there was a two car shunt. A car, not sure what make, had run into the back of a Rover. Not wishing to intrude into other people’s misery I carried on walking, rather than stopping to gawp. It was not clear if the person lying on the ground was a pedestrian, a cyclist, or passenger in one of the cars. I suspect the former, but it’s so easy to jump to wrong conclusions. My immediate thought when seeing the Rover was that the accident was probably caused be the driver being the obligatory dozy fucker one needs to be when driving this make. And despite wearing tracksuit bottoms the injured bloke (I do hope he wasn’t badly hurt) is somebody’s loved-one, be it son, father, brother, husband or lover.

This comes on the day of the funeral of the daughter of a work colleague. She was killed in a car accident.

Events like this make you stop and think about your own life. Well they do for me. It brings home the fragility and precarious nature of life. It makes me reassess how I treat those around me. How I live my life. How I should do more to confront my own prejudices. The trouble is that for me, these feelings will no doubt fade, as they usually do, after a relatively short time. If only I could distil the compassion and appreciation that I currently feel, and place it in a phial. A phial to hang around my neck, to act as a reminder about the person I should be, and to use in times of need.

Dawn of the insomniacs

I think it must be a sign of getting old, because at weekends I now find myself waking up early, and not being able to stay in bed for that long after I wake up. Once upon a time in the not too distant past I could luxuriate beneath the quilt basking in the womb like environment. As a teenager I didn’t even know of the existence of Saturday mornings. Now as someone in their early fifties I’m not sure I will ever return to the great ‘lie in’, unless it re-manifests itself in my dotage. This getting old lark is a right bugger. Having said all that, the strange thing is that on a work morning it is all I can do to drag myself out of the sack. Ever since the age of five I’ve struggled to get out of bed on then school mornings, and now work mornings. This affliction must have a name. There must be a syndrome out there that describes my condition! Its compulsory these days isn’t it?

If there isn’t, I shall feel discriminated against, and probably cry.

Looking Back

As I sit here at my computer on New Year’s Eve, eating a bag of Fair Trade Bombay mix, and drinking a bottle of Nicholas Feuillatte Champagne, I’m trying to think of something clever to write to sum up 2007. Not sure why I’m not drinking ale, and I’m failing miserably on the summing up. The year 2007 wasn’t a fantastic year for me, although there were probably more good times than I can possibly remember. We had a great holiday in Alsace. The lady got a much more interesting and better-paid job. And there were a number of nice outings and weekends away. To counteract that some shit happened; I was diagnosed with skin cancer, and we have so far failed to sell the house (with very little prospect of a sale in the near future), so no move to Norwich just yet. Bugger.

Quite by accident, I’ve just come across an article about the New Forest, on the website of The Boston Globe. I am immediately transported back to my childhood. I was probably about 10 or 11 and we had embarked on our first camping holiday. We were headed for Dorset. It was in the days before many major motorways, and so to avoid a lot of traffic, and being in the school holidays, it had been decided that we would travel overnight. We stopped for a few hours passed London, and all five of us tried to get some sleep. Mum and Dad managed some, but it was impossibility for excited children. After the early hours catnap we hit the road again, just as dawn was breaking. I could make a smutty joke about ‘the crack of Dawn’ at this juncture, but rest assured readers I’ll not bother. It was breakfast time as we came upon the edge of the New Forest. Our stomachs were rumbling. Time to stop. In this age of Health & Safety etc. etc. it’s probably not allowed, but on that morning Dad got out the Primus stove, started pumping away at it, lit it, and proceeded to fry up. Sausages, eggs and bacon in the New Forest. Mother busily buttered bread, or was it rolls? I can’t quite remember. I suppose it’s why barbecues are so popular, as you can’t beat the experience of food cooked and eaten out of doors. It assaults all of the senses. I’m sure in terms of what someone like Heston Blumenthal does it was very mediocre fare, but to a little lad on his first experience of a camping breakfast, it was the best meal I’d ever had. Still today I would say that it was certainly the best breakfast I’d ever eaten; Great smell, great taste, priceless atmosphere and beautiful surroundings. The memory of the smell, the air and the early morning dew on the leaves and plants will I hope never leave me.

I’ve looked a bit further back than just the past year. Thank you The Boston Globe for jogging my memory.

I suspect I'm Compo

On Friday night I met up with my two oldest friends for a drink and a meal. One of them, my best friend from school, I had not seen for nearly two years, although we had chatted on the telephone during that period. There were lots of things to catch up on, so we all had much to say over our very mediocre meal. I can't remember exactly how it came up, but I think we were talking about concerts, plays, shows etc. that we had seen and were going to see, my best friend from school said, I don't really like comedy". I was quite shocked by this. How can you not like comedy? In our youth we tried to write comedy scripts together. All rejected by the BBC I might add. He was a big fan of The Goons, The Good Life and Woody Allen. What he went on to clarify was that he didn't like comedy nowadays and thus had stopped watching or listening to any of it.

As far as I'm concerned three of the most important things in life are music, ale and comedy. Life without them would be most unpleasant; culturally inert. For the weak willed it might be enough for them to turn to religion. Not my friend though as he's a vicar in the C of E. And despite the fact that he goes to cricket matches, ballet, Katie Melua concerts and drinks lager he's still a great bloke and remains a good friend. I think the friendship between the three of us has survived because we all enjoy taking the piss out of each other, knowing that we can all take it. And whilst we do not all share the same interests, we have enough overlapping ones to make it a viable and sustaining trio. We also share vaguely similar political views.

In our earlier adulthood I often used to suggest that we would end up like Compo, Clegg and Foggy out of Last Of The Summer Wine. We could never agree on who would be who!

Compo, Foggy & Clegg