Status report Page 6,054

Quote: Briosaid @ 23rd October 2019, 11:43 PM

You are obviously a lovely person.

And you are too. KissingKissingKissing

Image

Having been devastated by knock back off the Beeeb I have been at a low ebb and had taken to questioning my worth as a writer.
However my wholly misplaced confidence has returned and I am now back to being a pain in the arse.

Had me flu jab this morning and like last year it was fine, BUT NOW............f**k I feel tired - now going to bed and may see you all again in the morning. :(

So it's given you the flu?

They keep pushing it here but I'm not convinced.How do they know it's the same flu bug ?

It's almost certain to be the same strain of virus, they keep tracks on it. Having had a jab last year and not feeling anything more than a sore arm, and a couple of years before being really ill and my partner hospitalised, it should be taken very seriously indeed.

Quote: john tregorran @ 26th October 2019, 9:26 AM

So it's given you the flu?

Good God no, just a bit tired and slightly sore arm. You would know it if you had the flu as that is debilitating and I can't afford to go down with that as I'm my wife's main carer.

Had no effect on me at all last year, which was the first time I had it done.

The flu jab, only rarely has any bad effects on me, though sometimes I do get the tiredness syndrome. I have been having the jab for many years now. Most recently last Thursday morning, with no tired out effect at all.

They do change it every year to try to keep up with the mutation of the virus, but that involves some prediction (I've heard) so it isn't always perfect.

The day before yesterday I was eating an ice cream when I bit into something hard. On removing the mush inside my mouth, I noticed a small thin square thing which may or may not have been dental. Since then, I haven't noticed anything extra missing in the tooth department. If it is dental I am hoping it didn't belong to the manufacturer as that would require tetanus. Arguably it could instead be glass so all in all that was complicated enough. I have had bad dreams about it.

Anyhow, Imagine my total surprise when at the newsagent an hour ago, I went to pay for some items by debit card and discovered that the chip in it was missing. By the gap left in the card, it appears that the chip was exactly the same shape and size and width as what was in the ice cream. And yet it has to be a coincidence as it was gold and what was in the ice cream was close to transparent. I am strangely disturbed that these events occurred with 48 hours of each other. It feels almost as if I have been invaded by a ghost playing mind games with my insides, personal finances and the external world.

Did you still buy your Razzle magazine?

Quote: Stephen Goodlad @ 26th October 2019, 7:01 PM

Did you still buy your Razzle magazine?

Yes as I had a bit of cash on me but he didn't let me put my imported Juggs on the slate.

I saw the brightest rainbow I've ever seen recently and it gave me a child like wonder to read up on them so was surprised to learn that they are not physical objects and the perceived location changes depending on where the viewer is standing. They become visible at certain angles so when you see a person standing directly under a rainbow that person doesn't see it. So the idea of finding a pot of gold is impossible. Bummer.

Quote: Teddy Paddalack @ 25th October 2019, 8:15 AM

Having been devastated by knock back off the Beeeb I have been at a low ebb and had taken to questioning my worth as a writer.

Why submit to the BBC anyhow? Look at production companies, look at theatres, self publish? It just seems too easy to use the Beeb, try elsewhere.

...does that help you, Ted?

Weekend Status 1 - Setting off for the Fireworks

Continuing with my 101 things to do on your own because there's no one you know and also like (an increasingly rare combination) who can do them now or wants to do them or ever wanted to do them. This has been a sporadic venture in the past couple of years. Sometimes I can travel miles. At other times I can't get out of the house. Mostly it is a case of forcing myself out and the experiences bring a weird mixture of emotions. It's part bucket list - stuff I never did and places I never saw - and part revisiting things that I haven't done in decades which I used to do all the time. For example, earlier this year I went to horse racing twice. It's something I hadn't done on any occasion since my 20s and never before alone.

So last night it was to a formal firework display at the place my parents used to take me as a child. The Carshalton Rotary Club one. It sounds like small fry being in the London burbs but actually it is one of the most highly rated ones nationally outside any city. It was their 62nd in a row. The last time I attempted such a thing, it was almost 20 years ago. 31 December 1999 when in a large group on one of the London bridges for the Mandelson Millennium fireworks on the Thames. It was totally pathetic. I swore that I would never do a New Years Eve in London of any kind again and I never did. Obviously I hadn't been to the Carshalton one in November since the 1970s so I could barely recall it and didn't know what to expect. However, I assumed that when I got there the memories would be rekindled. Actually, it felt entirely new.

Having been in quite a lot of pain recently - a month of very heavy gardening turned out not to be a good idea at all and something of a jolt in reminding me of my age now - I got a taxi there. It's only six miles away but the journey by public transport is horrible so I felt that I could only do that one way. In fact, had I not got the taxi there I wouldn't have attended it so the public transport bit had to be the return journey. The absolute contrast between the emotional vibe in that taxi and the vibe when I got there was so stark, and I realise now that it has become typical, it was so informative of the life of a late middle aged single man that again it informed even me. The stuff of a book really and yet you will never hear anything of it in the media. We are clearly now among those for whom there is just no commonly acknowledged voice.

I got into the taxi. The driver was a guy - black - and of ethnicity whose English was extremely good and he knew the locality after four years here almost better than me and certainly more than 75% of the half baked people who have been here all their lives. He had a good sense of humour and laughed a lot. I kind of thought West Indian as it used to be although he was youngish - 30s? - and actually he could have been African in origin for all I know. Anyhow, it was really, really good. We chatted and laughed, exchanged information and shared common viewpoint, and it was all so easy.

It was like we had been friends for life. This doesn't always happen. Drivers are variable to put it mildly. But although I say it myself I am a very good verbal communicator and always have been and I am even better now than when I was younger because I am much more confident. There is no comical or disturbing accompanying angst. So when I get someone like that life feels more right than it has ever been. Personal status wasn't mentioned. It was one person relating to another person. And in these situations I know exactly what the other thinks. They think "thank Christ, I've got someone really friendly and normal enough for once and with a bit of personality too". Which is exactly how I feel too so the whole scenario is reciprocal. Yet on my arrival through no fault of my own, I morphed into what I know well to be my Person B.

Weekend Status 2 - Person B (1)

Person A gets out of the taxi and walks a bit unsure of where he is until he finds what he first perceives to be the main entrance to the park. It isn't. It turns out to be some special entrance - god knows for who or what - and is told by a 20 year old cocky sort of male to turn right then left and right again, quote, "as everyone else is doing". This message is heard by what suddenly becomes Person B as a criticism of sorts. It's something along the lines of "you're on your own, you might think you are above everyone else, you're not, so don't try to sneak in here" when actually I wouldn't choose to be on my own and I was genuinely confused. I did what I was told. Once inside, it took about ten minutes before I was playing in a way that I dislike intensely "spot the other single person". I didn't see one until I was on my way out and then it was an elderly bloke with a walking stick walking miles away from everyone else by a hedge. That was not coincidental.

There was a brief time - late 2000s when his many friends had disappeared or become crocked - when Person B had started to see what life was like on his own in the great outdoors and felt not wholly uneasy by building on a lifelong sense of things like shared interests, community and especially congregation. He could insulate himself from any sense that he stood out by blending in to that concept in his mind, while also applauding himself for his individuality, which of itself had been built upon when in groups. However close the mates had been emotionally, there had always been that sort of inner dialogue going on in relation to the wider whole along the lines of this music or this sport or whatever joins us all together, just so long as we don't have to hear from each other who we are in relationship terms and what we do in work or what we think of politics. A band or the roar of a crowd drowns all the rest of it out which is obviously wonderful.

But here I stood, having arrived rather too early as it happens, acutely aware of not only what I am not (which hardly matters) but with whom I feel I am no longer unable to identify conceptually. Unfortunately, it turns out to be everyone in conceptual terms. The place was teeming with parents who out of their work contexts were fully in parental mode. I don't identify with parents other than my own and even then that has diminished as with age they have lost the plot. There were grandparents either side of my age. I don't identify with grandparents other than my own and they all died in the 1980s.

There were quite a few gormless teenagers in couples or in groups. I have always been tolerant of such people and even a bit saddened for them. Obviously I know that they are mostly going to become parents and grandparents themselves so they have a future strength over me in a sense but their working lives and personal interactions will almost certainly be for ever quite mundane. They don't have the knowledge or the access to cultural interest to have rich lives in that way and politically they are screwed. If push comes to shove, I would always side with them over young pushy university types. I feel for them on some level. And one tires of seeing these people era in and era out for they have always been with us and their plights have never changed. They are one thing that has never changed. And I have never identified with them either.