The Great British Summer 2

You might think that having had a brief bash at this topic a little while back, there's not much more to say on it and that I would leave it well enough alone now. Well, you might think that and it does make sense, but I simply can’t stay off such a sexy subject. It is after all a major British preoccupation and needs to be given its due weight and consideration. One post hardly does it justice, especially as it was a rather short one and some time ago.

The thing is that although it is notionally still summer here, Summer doesn’t seem to know it and appears to be attempting an early exit stage left. It has packed its bags and is nearly out the door to judge by the mix of unseasonal weather we’ve been getting these past few days. Wind, rain, cold... cold, rain, wind.. interspersed of course with patches of bright sunny weather to give us a false sense of security. Those foolish enough to go out in thin summery clothes and without a brolly risk being chilled by a gusting wind and soaked by a sudden downpour. The sun then comes out again but the damage is done.

The other day, as I set off for my daily jog, dark clouds began to gather, shutting out the sun which had been shining up to that point, albeit rather bashfully, the wind picked up and a light rain began to fall. Determined not to be put off by this sudden turn, I carried on towards the adjacent park and, once there, I got into my stride, but it was not looking good. The wind made me feel cold, the rain, which admittedly was not much more than a drizzle, was starting to wet me, and the gloom made it feel like the end of the world!

And yet within just minutes the rain had fizzled out, the wind had slackened, the clouds had parted, and the sun was sending its golden rays down on this part of the world again. The weather had gone from a nice sunny day, to wind, rain and gloom, to a nice sunny day again in the space of under ten minutes! Or was it five? I can't be sure, as I wasn’t wearing a watch. One thing's for sure is that had I drifted off to sleep while it was still warm and sunny and woken a few minutes later, I would never have known that the weather had turned downright nasty for a few minutes!


Anyway, coming back to Summer’s short lease ("And summer's lease hath all too short a date", W. S., Sonnet 18), at least in these northern climes, we may yet get some decent warm days, perhaps an Indian summer... or two... before the warm weather goes on leave till next year. As I wrote these lines of inspired clear-sighted observation, I was sat by the window where I was intermittently blinded by bright sunlight that almost obliterated the image on my monitor or plunged into premature twilight by a gloom that made me glad I could touch-type! (I speak in the past tense because it's been a couple of days between drafting this post and publishing it.)

If you’ve stayed with me up to this point, you’re a hardy soul and to be congratulated. But I’m not done yet and you might not last till the end, so you may still fall at a hurdle before the finish! I still have to recount an escapade of mine a couple of years back when torrential rain was unleashed on us after days of hot muggy mid-summer weather. As the rain came down in bucketfuls, I decided to make the most of it and, in imitation of something I had done on a trip to Brazil, I stripped, donned a pair of swimming-trunks and rushed out into the back garden.

I then strode about the garden, rejoicing in the feel of the cool rain on my skin. It washed and refreshed me, relieving me of the hot sweatiness of the day's heat. Within a few short moments my hair was drenched and so were my swim-shorts and the rainwater was pouring down me, bathing me in its cool caress, renewing me, cleansing me. It was such a wonderful feeling and I stayed out in the rain for as long as it lasted, enjoying every minute of it. But eventually the storm began to abate, the rain slackened off, and I looked silly standing there in the garden in my swim-shorts soaked to the core, so I made a hasty retreat back indoors and straight to the bathtub! Days like that are very rare. Not so much in terms of the rain, there’s enough of that alright, but it’s usually not warm enough for one to go out in the rain in just skimpy shorts without feeling cold.

 As for the similar incident in Brazil which I mentioned above, I was at a sort of out-of-town guest-house at the time, what they call a pousada there, when the heavens opened up in a spectacular way so characteristic of a tropical thunderstorm. Like a shot I changed into my swim-trunks and made a bee-line for the swimming-pool. As I circled round in the pool the rain cascaded down furiously like an immense heaven-sent waterfall. And I for one couldn't get enough of it. The combination of the pool water below and the torrential rainwater above was one of the greatest feelings I've ever had and is up there with s.e.x. in terms of good feeling. It certainly lasted much longer! Everyone else in the hotel must have thought I was out of my tiny mind as they stared out at me from the shelter and comfort of the pousada, but I didn’t care. In fact I felt sorry for them, they didn’t know what they were missing, poor sods! I could have spent most of the day splashing about in the pool as the rain beat down on me, but it was over all too soon, though the memory has stayed with me ever since.

Well, that’s all for now, luvvies, though I know you want more. But, who knows, I might come back to this fascinating topic another time.

Stop the World! I want to get off...

Do you ever feel, like me, a sense of growing despair at the state of our world in this the 21st century? The sentiment expressed in the somewhat humorous title of this post is meant to convey this sense of ‘fed-upness’ with the present state of the world that we humans have forged. We have somehow created a world seething with conflict, war and strife on all sides? If only the world were like a fairground carousel from which we could jump off at any time! I myself grew up in a time when we were made to believe that, having emerged from a massively destructive global conflict and the dark days that followed it, society and the world in general were gradually becoming a better place by the day in every way and that it would continue to get better until we attained some sort of earthly utopia or Nirvana. We were not, of course, given a time-frame for this, but there seemed little doubt that it would come to pass one day.

But that’s not happening, is it? Not even remotely. There’s precious little peace or harmony in the world today and danger seems to lurk round every corner. All over the planet earth, one country or people is dumping on another country or people. One nation or cultural community is clashing with another. The apparent cause may be territorial, political, economic or religious. It hardly matters. An excuse or pretext for aggression or hostilities towards one’s fellow men can always be found. And once found, the business of making war or launching homicidal attacks can begin in the name of Jesus, God, Allah, or some other suitable deity, holy figure or to-die-for cause, with a clear conscience.


If it's a war waged by Muslims against the Infidel (nowadays that's us in the West), it will inevitably be a holy war or crusade, in the name of Allah and all Islam. It would seem that Allah, the All Merciful, is quite happy to see women, children and innocent people in general being slaughtered in His name by such devotees as suicide bombers, providing it’s proclaimed a holy war. So that's alright then. So much more reassuring to know that one might receive a holy bullet in the head or be blown up by a holy bomb than by one of your common-or-garden bullets or bombs. The reality, of course, is that there's nothing holy about any war, whether it's waged by Muslims, Christians or the followers of any other religion, and one could not imagine either the God of Abraham or the God of Mohammed sanctioning such carnage in His name. War is wrong whoever practises it, its outcome consumes many lives and causes untold misery and visits the participants with destruction and devastation.

If it’s not human beings butchering each other in the name of their god or other ideal, it’s a natural disaster: it’s a flood that sweeps away people and their homes, a tsunami that swamps the land and bulldozes everything in its path, an earthquake that demolishes villages and towns, a volcano that disgorges molten lava and spews out hot ash engulfing whole communities, a hurricane or cyclone, or some such phenomenon, that tears its way across the landscape carrying all before it, torrential rains that transform huge swathes of land into lakes, months of drought that parch the ground and turn it into a dust-bowl, and so on and so forth.


And of course we mustn’t forget the threat posed by contagion when it becomes an epidemic and then spreads across national borders to develop into a full-blown pandemic, killing thousands of people as it extends its reach. Suddenly there’s an outbreak of some life-threatening infection in one country and within days or weeks it’s spreading from country to country, sowing fear and panic in its path round the globe. Before you know it, it’s arrived on your doorstep and emergency action is being taken by the local authorities to check it and to immunise the population against it. Usually too little and too late.

You would think that with so many natural disasters and calamities occurring throughout the world, that would be more than enough for us. But you’d be wrong. We feel compelled to add to the sum-total of our miseries and misfortunes by serving a dose of our own man-made woes just to be sure there’s enough sorrow and grief in the world to go round. So, those few pockets on our planet which have relatively few natural calamities often have local nationalist movements busy planting bombs in public places designed to kill en masse and indiscriminately. A sense of injustice or desire for regional autonomy or even independence seems to excuse nowadays any act of mass murder of innocent people, as they go about their day-to-day business, to make its point.


We often brand someone an ‘animal’ to indicate that their behaviour is unworthy of a human being or we might say that a riotous mob behaved like animals to signify that they ran riot or behaved in a savage manner. And yet this is the last thing that animals actually do. Animals very seldom kill for sport, but for food. Humans kill for sport and out of sheer spite and revenge. Animals rarely go on a rampage of destruction. The history of humans is full of countless acts of looting and rioting. Animals are not known to indulge in serial or mass killings, humans do it with alarming frequency. Need I go on? In fact, when we want to describe wanton and unacceptable conduct of any kind we should say that we’re behaving like humans! Because we are the savages, not animals. We are the species that kills and slaughters and pollutes and destroys on a large and systematic scale and are a threat to ALL other species of life on this planet and to our very environment. Animals live in harmony with their environment, whereas we are antagonistic to it and are constantly harming it.

We humans have made a very complex place of the world. Unless you are prepared to take yourself off to some exceedingly remote and hostile location and live in a cave or hut, cut off from society, you cannot escape this all-pervasive complexity. Today human society is more complex than ever before. Our technology and our scientific inventions, which are meant to assist and support us, add to this complexity as they become ever more sophisticated. It is difficult to really keep up with anything these days. Innovation and invention means that no sooner have we familiarised ourselves with one weird and wonderful device or gadget, than a new one comes along to replace it. Not because it has outlived its use or is outdated, but simply because the policy of ‘planned obsolescence’ dictates that products must be constantly renewed and given a face-lift to keep the relentless wheels of capitalist enterprise turning.


We are a wasteful, voracious, destructive and lethal breed and bad news for the environment and all other animals on this planet, and we consume vast quantities of the Earth’s resources to sustain our ever-growing numbers and maintain our prodigal way of life. When God went one step further than the apes to create humans, was it possible that he did not know what He was unleashing on the planet? How could this be, given that God is prescient and omniscient? Could it be that he knew and did it anyway? Perhaps He foresaw that without man the earth would be a very boring place, with no bloody wars, savage conflicts, genocidal massacres or social unrest, just peace and harmony all around. It seems that even God needs a bit of excitement in his celestial existence and so He created mankind, and I’m sure we’ve never disappointed him since!

Facebook, Frivolity and the Future

The likelihood that anyone reading this post is also on Facebook is very high, given that Facebook recently surpassed the five hundred million members mark and that the English-speaking world has high Internet usage. And yes, I too am on Facebook. How could I not be? It’s now almost tantamount to having a birth certificate or a passport! If you’re not on Facebook, do you really exist? And how does anyone know you exist? In fact, how do you yourself know you exist? OK, I’m being frivolous, but you surely get the point.

We’re told that Facebook is a social networking tool designed to connect us up with family and friends and bring us closer together, since it would appear we’re not able to do this in the conventional way of face-to-face interaction or even over the phone. That’s the stated aim and the public and visible face of Facebook, but there is another side to all this which seems to have become as prominent a part of the Facebook experience as keeping in touch with family and friends or the social networking aspect of it.

The other face of Facebook is the plethora, forever expanding, of games and pastimes to keep otherwise bored and idle Facebookers occupied and amused. Millions of us, it would seem, are engaged in a multiplicity of virtual games and pursuits, some of which are: growing crops, breeding livestock, constructing buildings, keeping pets, running a zoo, looking after fish and sea-life in general, collecting all kinds of objects, participating in Mafia operations, keeping a house or apartment, running a café or restaurant, having pillow fights, inhabiting a desert island, and many others besides.

Those not in work or gainfully employed and with plenty of free time on their hands happily while away the hours engaged in a variety of virtual activities which enable them not only to keep themselves amused but also to interact with other addicts who are also engaged in such activities and are constantly exchanging materials with each other and offering assistance with one endeavour or another. During such activities, real life is suspended, taking a back seat to virtual life, and the participants become drunk with the wine of gamesmanship as they feverishly strive to gain merits and points and virtual money and recognition of their virtual accomplishments through publication on Facebook of their achievements.

One may ask how it is that otherwise sensible and sober adults in the real world turn into a bunch of frenetic game-playing playground kids in the virtual world, engaging in the sort of activities that once were the preserve of juveniles and adolescents! From my own observations, it would appear that many of these denizens of Facebook go online in the morning, spend the rest of the day (with necessary breaks of course) playing one daft game after another, working their way through one activity after another, and only stop when they retire to bed for the night, only to resume the same routine the next day!

The sheer addictiveness of these virtual activities seems to be astonishingly high, taking up a huge slice of the participant’s day and involving them in interaction with other similar addicts who are also engaged in a wide range of pastimes and activities in a virtual world where all is seemingly possible. I suppose in some sort of way it enables them to vicariously engage in activities and pursuits which are not readily open to them in the real world for one reason or other. And so the enthusiastic Facebook devotee is drawn deeper and deeper into these pursuits, with messages and suggestions popping up every so often to tempt the participant to explore further avenues.

Anyone who has a full-time job can only indulge in this sort of activity in their spare time, of course, and to the extent that there are many more women with time on their hands than men (despite considerable social reorganisation and reversal of roles in recent decades) and the type of activities offered by Facebook appear to lend themselves more readily to women than men, being the kind that require you to care for something, be it a farm, fish or a pet. From my own limited observations based on my circle of Facebook friends, whereas the women are feverishly carrying on all sorts of pursuits and playing all sorts of games and publishing their achievements with admirable single-mindedness, the men’s Facebook page is distinctly lacking in such evidence. The odd thing appears now and then, usually to do with photos or music or a funny video, but there is very little to do with the virtual pursuits I’ve touched on above. My own experience is, as I say, a very limited one and others may disagree with me on this, but certainly out of the females I know they are overwhelmingly into all this to a greater or lesser degree, with some real fanatics who have to get their daily fix.

One thing that intrigues me about all these Facebook pursuits and pastimes, and perhaps sociologists and psychologists can analyse this more deeply and suitably enlighten us, is what this says about our society today and the way we spend our spare time and interact with others. What exactly is going on here and what are the consequences and ramifications of all this online virtual activity and obsessive game-playing behaviour that is now taking up so much of our time? And is it a good or bad thing or neither? Will it improve or damage our 21st-century society? And what will it do to us as individuals? Will it be one of the biggest social and societal upheavals that has taken place in human history, altering on a massive scale the way we interact with our fellow men and the way we approach human relationships? Only time will tell, but great changes are afoot and they will make themselves felt at every level of society.

Little did we suspect when the computer was invented, how far-reaching its impact would be, what it would lead to and what massive changes it would bring about to our world. And these changes and developments are still going on, relentlessly and irresistibly, spawning new possibilities and new aspirations and giving rise to a brave new world which even the acutely perceptive and ingenious Aldous Huxley could not have conceived in the pre-computer age in which he lived. “Brave New World” indeed, as we stand on the threshold of sweeping social, cultural and political changes driven by our advancing sciences and technologies. The virtual world of Facebook and its gamesmanship and online activities may be the harbinger of a cybernetic revolution that will sweep us all along on its back to a future as yet unknown.

The Loss of a Friend

Losing a dear friend you’ve known for many years is a sad and painful experience, and many of us know what it's like. It’s bad enough when you know what’s happened to them and the reason for their disappearance, but it’s worse when they suddenly drop out of your life and you’re left completely in the dark. Worse still if you try to get back in touch with them and, try as you might, your efforts come to nothing and you're none the wiser.

Such a situation is not unknown, it happens. But today, owing to the spread of the Internet and the making of online friends, it is something that can and does happen more than ever before, much more. We meet and get to know people online and some of these people we get to know intimately and we become used to their regular online presence. We may go a step further and speak to them in a live chat environment, an instant messaging program, see them on a webcam, talk to them on the phone, and even visit them in person, whether in our own country or abroad.

If we get to know them personally, the inexplicable loss of that friend is felt so much more acutely, even without having had personal contact, thanks to modern technology which enables us to communicate by voice and even to see each other, with the result that we can get very attached to that person, though we never have been in their physical company. Habit, friendship and companionship transcend the physical separation that distance creates between us, and should the person we have come to know and like and perhaps even love through the Internet suddenly disappear without trace we may feel the loss as acutely as if that person were a friend of ours in the more conventional way.

I know what it’s like to lose a friend in such circumstances. It was a person I had met online in the early years of the Internet and we began communicating through instant messaging programs. The conversations we had became a daily thing and we gradually became addicted to our regular chats, to the point that any absence, be it for only one day, became a cause for concern and had to be explained by the absentee on their return. We then supplemented this by phone calls to each other and eventually it progressed to personal visits. And, over time and inevitably I suppose, we became lovers and sweethearts.

This was all some time ago. The relationship eventually broke down, for reasons that I will not go into as they are not pertinent to this post, but nevertheless we remained friends and we kept in contact, mainly online but sometimes by phone. And then one day my once-friend and lover and now just friend, though a dear one, vanished! She stopped coming online. She wasn’t answering her e-mails or the phone. She had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared for good and left me not knowing what had happened to her. Though I had her home address, the question of visiting her was impracticable. She lived in another continent, thousands of miles away, and I could not embark on a trip that would take me half way round the world to visit a person who might not even be there to receive me.

And that is how things have remained to the present day. It has been over a year since I last had any contact with her and, after having tried to get hold of her by one means or another and failed, I fear the worst for her. I imagine that she may not even be with us anymore, that she may have sickened or had an accident and.... I dare not even say the word, as it saddens me greatly to think of her like that. She would be in her late forties now, so she’s still relatively young by today’s standards. I’ve racked my brain in an effort to imagine what may be preventing her from communicating with me and the answer that comes back is always a bleak one.

I’m still hoping that one day I will succeed in getting in touch with her or, failing that, at least in finding out about her, though I fully realise that the news may not be good, and this is my worst fear. But the anguish of not knowing is probably worse than knowing the truth, terrible as it might be. Either way it’s very sad, especially when I think back to when I first met her and how our relationship went on to develop into a close friendship and then bloomed into a romantic liaison which lasted several years. Those were our halcyon days, even though there was many a storm that tested us.

My life will not change if and when I find her or find out about her. We have gone our separate ways since we split up, though we kept in touch. But at the very least I need to know what’s happened to her. “While there’s life there’s hope”, they say, but as the years go by with no news of her, it all begins to look rather hopeless. But I’ve not given up all hope yet. I still feel there’s a chance I will at least find out about her and my ignorance of her circumstances, whatever they may be, will finally come to an end. It may be hoping against hope, but it’s the way it has to be for the moment. For the moment, I live in hope...


P.S. - Since posting the above, I have located the person in question and I now know the truth, though it might have been better if I had not known!