Crows

Today finds the man who thinks he's a wolf sitting on top of Kenidjack Carn.
He's watching a swirling gyre of crows roll and tumble over the moor that falls away below him toward Pendeen. Must be a hundred of them, more. Maybe they're rooks? He can hear a raven caw, somewhere. Just him and the crows. Or rooks.

The wind is surprisingly bitter. Bitter sweet really, thinks the wolf. He remembers running across these moors in another life, with a huge and beloved Alsatian by his side - Wraith. Huge, powerful, fearless and with a heart that could drive a V8 and a grin that could eat granite. Long gone, along with the life and home he once had here.

Choices made by someone the wolf once loved finished that life and broke that home, something he came to terms with a long, long time ago. The consequences of those past choices still cascade through the lives of people here and now though, and today the person responsible had to be held to account by the wolf.

Because of his love for his son, the wolf had to make that person make a decision that they did not want to, that may cause them pain for the rest of their lives. He did it without regret and would do it again because of his love for his son. But it caused him great sadness to see someone who was once in his care in so much pain. But there was no regret. And no pride.

The crows have gone.
It's getting darker and the wolf has calls to make and a fire to build in his house, something to watch through the night. He stands and stares across the moor through the broken pasts, through the billion possible futures, to the sea. He wishes he was going home but doesn't know where that is any more.
People are home to the wolf, not places.

Maybe one day.

Disco Dilemna

Fun evening tonight.

For someone who thinks they would rather live NOW, for all their admiration of our our tough and clever ancestors and their achievements, than at any other time in history it's been a toughy. While living NOW means I can read, have had an education, anti-biotics, the right to free speech, the ability to treat women as equals, procreation-free sex and the ability to say fuck off and die to any religion crazed loon I care too, living (right) NOW also means being skint. Not swede eating, child selling medieval skint, when being a serf dude meant hanging by your thumbs for the amusement of some inbred frog speaking member of the middle classes, but still, relatively and quantitatively, skint.

Among other things this means that my choice of personal transport (another NOW plus of course) is limited to vehicles from the recent past, a chronological upper limit of around 12+ years old. This can be cool, as I get to drive around in a small nostalgia bubble, lose no sleep over the depreciation (V = P(1-R)^n, like you didn't know) and am often on the right side of the component failure bath tub curve*.
Often, not always.

Tonight my old Land Rover Disco decided it was time to remind me that NOW is not some white clean i-pod shaped, photo-shopped vision of instant seamless gratification, however the consumer pornographers might try to convince otherwise, but that all the things we use and count on are fabricated from matter, and while it may or may not have a soul, it is most definitely base.

A couple of times lately I've waited for the coil to heat, turned the engine over and nothing has happened. Like any other shape-shifting killer primate with thumbs in the same situation, I automatically glare at the switch or key that has failed to initiate my desire and do it again. Sometimes it works and the monkey brain shrugs and gets on with Taking It All For Granted, something this generation more than any other seems to find very easy, gorged as it is with the surrounding media pap that waves stuff and aspirations at it, and tells it you can have it all and it always works. Bunch of arse.

My Dad and his generation would have been straight out with a spanner and a bit of bent wire fiddling and learning what had happened the first time, being a lot closer to the nuts and bolts of how stuff works. Sadly, I'm not and paid for it.

So, on the way back from fisherman bothering in St. Ives, did some shopping (fags and vodka, natch) jumped back into the 1990's turned the key and the sucker wouldn't start. No matter how much I stared at it. Swore like a deckhand in a wine bar for a minute (which did nothing) then got my Dad head on and lifted the bonnet. Lights didn't dim when I turned the key, so battery fine, starter not turning, ipso facto, current not getting to starter. Wiggled wires in that 'bloke who knows nothing but wants to look like he does' way for a while, then sat down and thought for a minute.

Being a werewolf from Essex has its pluses. One of which is having connections to (allegedly) Dodgy Geezers. Belled a couple of people who know people who know how to get pretty much any motor going whether the actual owner wants it to go or not and found out more than I need to know about the vagaries of the Disco ignition system. Turns out there's a sinister sounding module called The Spider, part of the immobilising circuit, which is prone to immobilising when you want it to be mobilising.

One way of bypassing it (allegedly) is to "beat the shit out of the fucker with a claw hammer 'til it falls out of the dash under the radio and boost the left input and output tabs with a bit of foil or a chewing gum wrapper", another is to "jump the coil 'though you'll have to stall it to stop the engine and leg it from there". After pointing out the beast was mine and that I wasn't in that much of a hurry, Crimepedia finally came up with the suggestion to pull a fuse, put it back, click alarm on and off and try it again. Which worked. Amazingly.

Moral of this story? Well, Take Nothing For Granted is sound enough, but It's Good To Know Dodgy Geezers opens up a whole dustbinful of relativism even for a half-arsed left-leaning libertarian like this particular werewolf. On the other (sinister) hand, at least I can chew it over with my strangely sharp canines, at home, Martini in hand, thanks to exactly that moral relativism.
Cheers!

*Also cool is being able to take my son back to Essex and show him What Cars May Come in our future...

Coming home

Back home and back down. Post-break blues eh? Killer.
Especially when you come back and find you and the rest of the world is much the same as you left it.

Some good memories though, wandering around the lonely heaths, valleys and woods of the New Forest. Ironic name, I'm told it's a relic of the post-glacial landscape our ancestors found when they crossed the land bridge to here. Magical. No, really.

Step away from the gated Barret homes and the Mercedes filled car parks around the forest and you are 10,000 years away, when spirits haunted the dark or drove the boar onto your spear. The Sidhe still inhabit the place, no more or less than when feared or placated by the tribes of the heath. Whether it's because I know the history, legends and tales, whether it's because being a werewolf makes me sensitive to such places, it reeks of Elsewhere. The tumuli that loom from the mists and woods have the same impact on me as Eliot's "places where prayer has been valid", the thinning of reality is palpable*.

For whatever reason the liminal** spaces, the sea, empty woods, open horizons, moors, heaths, airfields and even car parks, give me a sense that something has, or is about to happen. I put it down to a clearing of sensory inputs (just sky, land, rock or plane surfaces), allowing the antenna to tune, to attenuate the myriad choices that have been or will be made. My sense and delight of our deep, deep past is matched by my sense of the infinitely deep future, the choices and histories yet to be made. When faced with those sorts of infinities, you have to accept you are always halfway between the Beginning and the End, and wonder.

Or alternatively, accept that you should lay off the Martinis before writing blogs...

*note to self: more meat, less dictionaries in diet
** note to self: i won't tell you again...

Facing up

With friends in the New Forest, gathering in the kitchen at night, close to the fire. We weren't friends a day ago, as we had never met, but the person who bought us together was a shared friend, a nexus, and so by her grace, we are now.

A werewolf, a man touched by death and struck by lightning, an old sea dog who has swallowed the hook and lost a family, and our sad, beautiful host. All of us loners in one way or another, we have made our way to our friends house up the ancient track, like travellers passing through the Old Wood seeking shelter as night draws in.

I look around the pool of light over the table at these new friends of mine, listening as I drink (vodka, thanks). No one grabs and holds the focus; all listen, laugh, smile and share. None of us moan or whine about our lives, we are not here to bleat, we are telling stories, horrors, yarns, histories, all delivered in a way to entertain each other, to explain or delight, or sometimes, horrify.

We are all too old to give a fuck about face or status and span class and culture to the point it disappears. The same sort of thing that has gone on for a million nights around a million fires, on plains, in caves, taverns, inns, pubs and gods help us motorway services for all I know.

There's something else too. While we talk to entertain our new friends, we are also tracing our old wounds and scars, flexing stiffened joints delineating and defining our own experiences, who we were and what we are, through the looks, smiles, frowns and reactions and comments of others. Describing our lives and the things that have changed and made us, refracting through this shared prism. This too I suspect has gone on for ever. It's not obvious or even conscious, but it's there, and beyond price.

And you know what? You can't do it via text, email, phone or facebook.
Face it kids, literally, or lose it forever.

St. Valentine's Day

Hey. Happy Valentine's Day.
Or not.

Being half-cut at the fag-end of a dull day and start of a bleak night as I am is probably not the best time to be writing about stuff like this but it's my blog and I can do what I want. And sadly there's no one to tell me to get to bed, to kiss me until I shut up and do something constructive with my hands. There is however plenty of Lidls finest vodka left so what the fuck.

Valentine's Day. It's a tough one isn't it? If you are in a loving relationship then I hope you've already made it clear to your significant other that they are loved and valued, in which case the day could be looked on as merely an excuse for a night out, or sometimes just as a commercial itch, an itch ruthlessly exploited by commerce, a vaguely tawdry pastel coloured joke. Or it could be a really special day, an affirmation or even declaration if you are at the start of a Big Adventure. If you aren't with anyone, it becomes a technicolour, multi-media, 24-hour salt in the wound reminder that you are
On
Your
Own.
The echo that returns to you from the limits of your single space, suddenly defines a cave a whole lot larger than you thought it was. Scary. Lets go out and go mad and pretend we don't care! Ha ha ha ha ha ha Being on our own is brilliant! Look at me ! I'm happy! Don't look at me too close though! You might see something...sad!

Hang on Marrok, why shouldn't you celebrate being alone? Isn't love, fidelity, loyalty, sharing so impossibly 2oth Century? Why not enjoy living alone, forming connections and collaborations for sex or nights out on the piss or movies or interesting multi-media projects. The solace of casual sex is out there, uncomplicated, quick, clean, painless and utterly, desolately, empty. For me anyway. For those of you that it fits for now, well done. You have embraced what you are told is the zeitgeist. Just don't think it will fit for ever, zeitgeists have a habit of shifting. Hence the name.

On the other hand seeing as the chance of finding someone to share your life with who also considers that a worthwhile goal is diminishing, being incredibly unfashionable and un-post-modern, why bother even hoping there might be someone for you?

Well for one (ignoring the fact that the last two reasons are always good reasons to do or value something), all of our millions of ancestors did pair and maintain, in some way or another, and it paid off. We, and our so-called civilisation, are here. More importantly for me, the happiest I have ever been is in long term relationships (or what I thought would be). That goes for moments of insight, sexual ecstasy, general background contentment, financial security, periods of intense creativity and (unfashionable word-alert) joy. Coming from the union of two parents who loved each other until the day death parted them probably helps. To me it's not an outmoded idea or impossible fiction. I was there, I saw it. It worked.

OK, if you were or are in a relationship where that didn't happen, I'm sorry, just get over it or get the fuck out - it's not what I'm talking about. Doesn't mean it will never work, although it definitely won't if you keep telling yourself it won't - guaranteed. Yeah it's scary, but you need to throw the dice sometimes, to feel the wind of chance in your in your face again, flex and reach; otherwise you have every chance of hardening and shrinking into a smaller, brittle soul.

Yes I can survive and get by on my own. I'm a werewolf for fuck's sake and have nothing to prove. So what. The trouble is , I know that I can live with someone who loves me.

Being with someone for good (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), that loves you and that you love means you can start to relax into the ride. You deepen as a person, a whole raft of anxieties and neuroses that you thought defined you can fall away. You get a chance to rest properly too, to have a break and look around. Someone that you know you can trust can take a watch now and again. You get to know yourself, by talking to someone that knows you, really knows you; you get to grow. I know. I've been there one or twice. And who knows, maybe again one day.

So, raising a final martini to us all - drunk or sober, together or alone;
May we find, or keep, our heart's desire.
Happy Valentines Day!

"Let the people who never find true love
Keep saying there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die."

-Wislawa Szymborska

Do nothing.

Dragging my gaze away from my navel, for an hour, attractive as it is.

I've been thinking about the Precautionary Principle (PP) recently. Yeah I know, but it's my head and in the absence of a life to amuse it with, I let it pretty much go where it wants.
The PP came up in a discussion I was involved in a few months ago about a contentious area of sea bed, stopped it dead as it was meant to, and produced a lot of head nodding and murmured agreements. "Ah yes the precautionary principle. Of course. Hmm." In my head all i could hear was some inane twat wailing "but what about the children! Does nobody care about the children!" as some are prone to do when another group is doing something they personally don't want them to do. Like playing conkers or having sex in anything other than position a or position b, or with person c.

My work brings me into contact with a lot of people (conservationists, environmentalists) who care deeply and genuinely about what they call 'the environment'. It sounds nice, 'the environment', but I'm not sure I know where it is exactly. It's definitely something other than where I live, work or play, as it should be made (or left) to be 'natural', i.e., unaffected by civilisation, the artificial...the human in other words. Ironic really, as both concepts are very recent, very human concepts or categorisations. A topic for another day perhaps.

Anyways, one of the ways in which the *ists lay claim to dominion over what they define as the environment is by invoking the aforesaid Precautionary Principle, an unarguable semantic construction that requires absolute proof that anything human which occurs in near or to the environment will cause no damage. The generally accepted definition from the 1998 Wingspread Conference states:

"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof"

By public they mean themselves, rarely the same thing, but the worrying part to me is the part I have italiscied. If you can't judge the case for action/no action scientifically how the fuck are you going to prove or disprove no harm will result? Tarot cards? Mystic Meg? And what does harm mean in this case? Change. Or rather any change not approved by the proponent.

There is a huge literature out there dealing with the fear of change in relation to different groups in societies, those who desire order and control and those who require someone else to keep them safe. Within these groups change is characterised as threat, either to them personally, the system of control or even god forbid, future generations. For those of us who have ever lived, dealt or traded with extreme risk (I'm an ex-fishermen) the concept is almost totally opaque.

Managing resources, protecting much loved or useful landscapes, all no brainers if clear and agreed surely, but avoiding all risk, giving up the option of change for a generation that doesn't even exist yet is pseudo-intellectual bollocks. How many of us would be here now if the PP had been invoked before the introduction of mass vaccinations in the 20th Century? How many generations lost to hunger without the development of modern agriculture? The domestication of fire? Of course we have and will make mistakes, but any action, and its presumed benefits, must be weighed against the possible risks, not against the unknowable risks.

It's what humans do. It's what makes us human.
.

Break in the clouds

A talk with a dear friend yesterday lifted me a little, realigning some of the lenses in my clouded vision. A day that started cloudy and ended with a glimpse of sun. So hard to talk though and so ...essential. The people we love always deserve better than we can give, at least mine do. I always feel I have a wooden tongue in a broken mouth when I try to express my feelings to them. Clack, mumble, clack. So important and so hard, especially in this particular case, where an awkward ending needed to be turned into a friendship.

But after our talk I have hope that we may have managed to trim our ailerons and align wing tips before hurtling off on our separate trajectories into some bizarre Red Arrows display metaphor and what the fuck am I going on about...

You see what happened there?
Anger and indifference are easy. Expressing compassion is not. Especially for the werewolf's son.

I seem to have a jaw full of weapons grade insults tipped with acid and powered by malice that seem to fight and fuck each other if they have no clear target, generating more venomous and venal versions of themselves. Trouble is they are so nasty I can barely bring myself to use them, would have a good chance of ending up in a courts martial if I did. And while yeah, every one says 'I'm nuts I am, you don't wanna see me mad' etc, etc, an episode in my distant past really did scare the shit out of me and left someone else very very poorly. You can take my word for it (or not) the fucker deserved it, so no guilt, just fear of the ferocity and loss of control. Although not direction, unfortunately for him.

Fact is I made a conscious decision to try to be a good person a looong time ago, rather than the un-moral one I was in a different part of the realm. I wasn't bad, just moral free and with a Bad Crowd, which meant my life could easily have gone either way. And often did. No regrets for changing, I have had more love, friends and laughs, and whole lot less punches kicks stabbings and batterings. Result!

It's just that even after all this time, something in me feels I'm not really built for the Light Side; I don't look like it or sound like it and my feeble attempts to convey what I feel, inevitably leave me feeling like proverbial one legged man in an ass-kicking competition.

Still, at least I try.
And hope she, and all my other friends, know the love behind the clacking growling noise that comes out of my snout sometimes...

Plain brown wrapper

So me and my mate who I will call Matt run a twig of the mighty Cafe Sci tree. We meet once a month in a rather funky Arts Club (you almost expect the door bell to gush daaahling at you when you push it), an 18th century town house dressed in boho baroque, and and adorned with members 'work'. The society itself is as hilarious and up itself as only the art world can be. 'Dark', 'tortured', 'sensitive' and any other emotion you care to put in inverted commas that they feel more than you. Don't get me wrong, art fascinates and moves me, it's just the threadbare piss-ant romantic persona that so many artists dress up in that irritates.

Anyway, they are normally absent on Cafe Sci nights being allergic to science thank god, or maybe just the act of listening to anyone but themselves. Always intrigues me how many scientists I know who are fascinated by, and knowledgeable about art, and how few artists can reciprocate. Those that can are gold, witness Sue Buafo who once talked to us (look her up!).

So, random expert of the month has completed his lecture on Astronomical Magnitudes and the basket of young and old, geeks, nerds, iconoclasts, bored, amused and confused which make up the Cafe Sci multi-crowd chatting and arguing over beers. I'm packing up the screen and projector, sipping my beer, prior to giving Matt and his co-worker a lift home. When I locate them they are talking to 'Professor Phillip' and his wife, a very elderly and incredibly distinguished mineralogist with an impossibly fruity avuncular public school voice.

As I join them I realise they are talking about the danger of constantly evolving digital media, from the point of view of the archivist (how many people do you know who can run even a 3.5" floppy disk these days?). Prof. Phillips: "...a constant and wearisome problem. Mmm. I have hundreds of geological papers to archive safely. Mmm. Mmm. And of course I have an enormous collection of extremely exotic Erotica I would be loath to lose. Mmm."
Dead silence.

Fighting the urge to force Guinness through my nose at astronomical magnitudes I muttered to Matt I'd pick him up in a minute and moved away to study the suddenly frozen group from a safe distance. Awkwardness has mass, radiates embarrassment and has a half-life (if you are within 1 meter of the fields origin) of a billion years....

Mmm. I wonder if Prof. Phillips would like to offer us a talk next month. Could be interesting. Mmm.

Sol Invictus

There's a statue in the British Museum of Mithras, a god once worshipped in Britain. His temples are found all over what was once Roman Britain, from the Northern wall forts to the City of London.

The cult (gnostic, hermetic so not a religion) was spread by the Legions from the Mesopotamia to Ultima Thule. Why this god was held in such devotion by the hard, tough men who constructed his marvellously theatrical temples, and carved the beautiful tauronocties is a mystery. Literally in this case, it was not an evangelical, encompassing movement it was secret, contained, enigmatic.

What little we do know about it is fascinating and for some, disturbing. All notions of rank, nobility or degree were left at the door of the Mithraeum, a rare democracy at any time, rarer still in the deep past. The only hierarchy recognised was that earned with in the cult; seven grades from the Raven through the Sun Runner to the Father, all achieved through a process of ordeal.

The unease for some comes from the many uncanny similarities between Mithraism and the far younger Christianity. To pick just a few, both their gods have their birthday on December the 25th, were born in stables of a virgin birth, and were first acknowledged by shepherds; both practised baptism (one in blood), asceticism, a one-off redeeming sacrifice for mankind, emphasised charitable acts and both held a last supper before their ascension. Both traditions hold Sunday to be sacred and believed in an immortal soul. Hmm, copyright issues?

Yeah, well all very interesting but the what the fuck does this have to with anything?
Glad you asked.
Well, I talked to Mithras just recently. And talking to him helped me make some decisions.

Nothing mystical about it, he is a god like any other created by man or woman, existing (only?) in the world of ideas, symbols. My connection to him came when my Dad showed me the statue many many years ago. He told me a little about this strange and mysterious god, and about his many analogues. Then held me up behind the head of the statue, who now gazes blindly down the aisles of display cases at the dust of his worshippers, and said See what this small god can see now; imagine how many changes he has seen pass before him in the centuries since he was carved. Imagine what he will see when we are dust.
Yep, my Dad really was like that. Working on the line at Fords could do that to you. I should know.

He put me down and I gazed up at the calm marble face and blank eyes and felt myself falling through millennia. An epiphany. I had no sense that this was a god that had been passed by, a relic; rather that I was a flicker, a seconds shadow flashing past this eternal unhuman gaze. I had been shown Deep Time, and was exhilarated, and terrified.

Since then, I return whenever I can to pay my respects to this calm, quiet idol. I'm taller than him now. We stand and stare at each other, or at least I stare at him. He gazes at aeons.
To me he is an occasional still point, one of the motionless points at the centre of the gyres around which so much of my life revolves.
I tell him where I am, what's been happening, how I feel.
No answer, no message. None wanted or expected.
I'm talking of course to my dead Dad, to myself and to the ideas my Dad planted in me all though years ago. Although I am not immortal, I am part of something eternal, glorious, infinite and ultimately beyond pain, desire and suffering.
So, fight when you have to, love while you can, let go when you need to.
And adore, for your own sake, the universe that holds your beginning and your end.

Thanks Dad.
Sol Invictus.

And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. - T S Eliot

This seems like a good enough place to start from.

Early last year I parted from someone I cared deeply about, too much to stay with, for her sake as much as mine.
I'm as skint as I've ever been.
And pissed off with my job.

Hey, that probably identifies me with a few billion people straight away. Feeling better already.
Group hug?

But, I am proud of the way I thought honestly about the relationship I was in and whether or not I would be a better friend out of it, despite all I would lose. And trust me, it was a lot.

Glad too in a weird way I'm skint again, always good to take a close look at what really matters to you, what you need rather than what you want, I guess.

Being pissed off with the job is trickier, what I have to deal with makes me incredibly angry sometimes which I cannot afford, for personal and professional reasons - which is why this blog will stay anonymous.

On a positive note - I'm excited. Because I'm writing exactly what I want in public, which I have never done. Thinking aloud, or writing publicly, will allow me to crystallise stuff that's been churning around in my head for years, to articulate feelings that I'm struggling with right now. Eliot again - "It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words." Therapy, or more honestly maybe, a therapeutic punch bag; something that can have the shit kicked out of it in a guilt free stylee. You can take the boy out of Essex...

Oh yeah, the Marrok tag comes from Mallory.
Look it up.

(A widely-read working class werewolf from Essex. What the fuck?)