A Day Called 'Frustration'!

You know those days in one's life when hardly anything goes the way you want and when you wonder why you bothered to get out of bed in the morning. They are not tragic days or days of great sadness, and in terms of serious setback they rank very low and I would not even pretend they come anywhere near, but they do end up with you trying to pull your hair out and fuming as you stomp around in less than righteous anger at the frustrations of that day. Well, I had one such day a little while back and this was it:

 

I decided after lunch on that day that I would take a break from my work to get a long-overdue haircut. I work for myself, so in theory I can do this anytime. I stress the 'in theory', as it's seldom that straightforward, but alright, it's nothing out of the ordinary.

 

As I was on the point of leaving the house the phone rings and, not wanting to lose a possible job, I answer it. However, the caller drones on and, though it is about a possible job, it does not result in anything and I put the receiver down, irritated at the needless delay it has caused me.

 

On checking my change, I find I don't have enough cash to pay the barber and there's nothing for it but to make a stop at a cash dispenser in the high street to withdraw a few readies.

 

So I drive off to the high street where all the cash machines are, but, as luck would have it, I cannot find a parking-place even after two passes down the length of the street and I am forced to use the local car park where I have of course to pay a parking charge and then walk all the way back to the nearest dispenser.

 

On arrival at the nearest dispenser I see a message on the screen informing me that it is out of service. As it's starting to get a bit late in the afternoon, I decide to phone my barber and find out what time he will be closing on that day, as he is in his late sixties, works alone and closes earlier than the normal business hours. However, as try to make a phone call, I find that my mobile phone is switching off at each attempt and I realise it's out of charge and that I cannot use it.

 

With little cash, no working phone, I decide to drive to the nearby supermarket where I can do a quick shop and get some cash-back at the till and then head for my barber's in the hope that he hasn't yet shut up shot.

 

At the supermarket, madness befalls me and I take a large trolley which requires a refundable fee before it will be released and, still gripped by some sort of lunacy, I make for the gardening section to load up with a bumper-size bag of compost, only to find there isn't any of the supermarket's usual, just smaller bags twice the price, and so as my blood begins to boil I drop that and content myself with a couple of items which I didn't really need anyway but which will enable me to get cash-back at the till.

 

I join the queue at a cash-desk - well, when I say queue, it's composed solely of one little old lady - and when the moment of payment arrives she asks for a cash-back of £50, the maximum. When my turn comes I too ask for cash-back but I am duly informed that that is the last bit of cash available for the day and that instead I can use the cash dispenser in the supermarket, which is what I do, realising at the same time that I could have done that in the first place and not bothered with the handful of groceries. But there you are, we are always wise after the event or at least we are not to know that at the time.

 

By now, of course, it's getting late and I realise it's too late to go for my haircut, as I will have to pay to park and the chances are that the shop will already be closed, so I decide to admit defeat and leave it for today. There can surely not be two days like this one in the same week, can there? My laughable ill-fortune is however not over for the day. There is more to come to crown it all and assure my complete frustration!

Before returning home, however, I drop by the petrol-station to fill up. On arrival there, all the pumps are busy and so I join the queue to await my turn. Eventually my turn comes and, having filled up, I go into the shop to pay and join another queue there. On coming back out, I see an uninhabited wilderness before me: not a single car to be seen on the forecourt and all the pumps available for use. It seems the congestion only occurred for my benefit and once I had been through the mill everything cleared up again. Nevertheless, to disprove this cockamamie theory of mine I decide to linger at the forecourt for a moment and see when the next car comes. After waiting in vain for some time, with the forecourt still deserted of all life and with my theory of my supernatural persecution confirmed, I start up the car and just as I am heading out I spot in my rear-view mirror one car and then another entering the forecourt. Theory empirically proven!

The final indignity comes when I get home and realise that I have forgotten to collect my anti-cholesterol pills from the self-same supermarket in which I had been earlier on in an attempt to get some cash for the barber's. As I'm too drained of energy by now and weakened by frustration, I decide it is best left for tomorrow when, hopefully, Sod's Law will have eased up and allow me to get something done. Today nothing can be done, at least not without maximum frustration and loss of the will to live!

This has been a day to forget. Over and out....

Into the New Year...

We're well into another year, 2013, and for the superstitious the 13 on the end may not be too welcome, but could it be worse than the last year, or, come to that, the last few years with all economic crisis and all the doom and gloom that accompanies it? We'll see, and we haven't long to wait. By all accounts, it's more of the same and so far doesn't look very different, but let's be fair and give it a chance, it may surprise us.

After the Christmas festivities and the emotions of New Year's Eve, the entry of the New Year can only be an anticlimax. I had hoped we might get some snow around Christmas, but it was not to be. Last year it came in February and was substantial and made up for none around Christmas. Weather patterns have changed quite a bit since I was a boy and the seasons seem to have shifted. But why should the weather not change over the years, everything else has!

The world today is a very different one from that just 2-3 decades ago, and if we go back a little further it's like being on another planet! Thanks to scientific discovery and technological invention our world is in constant rapid change, with computers and mobile phones and other electronic devices leading the way and transforming our lives for better or worse. Either way, we have no control over these developments and we strive to at least keep up with them, not always with success. But there seems to be no other way to go even if we wanted to.

As our world around us changes, we too change with the advancing years. Some of us change in tandem with the changes going on around us and some of us lag behind, the gap growing wider with each successive technological innovation and new way of functioning in an ever more complicated society. I know that as electronic gadgets and devices become ever more advanced and supposedly easier and more intuitive, instead of simplifying things for me they complicate my life. The phone and the computer which were so easy to use once upon a time now require a lot of concentration and effort from me, as they are so replete with functions and options that I hardly know what I'm doing anymore. Even what seems to be a straightforward list of options presented to me becomes an almost insurmountable barrier of proposed new changes that leaves me spoilt for choice but confused for the same reason, so I tick one box and hope it's the right one for me!

Well, we've had the snows, the cold frosty weather, the icy winds, the flooding rains, the gradual thaw, and now in mid-February things have warmed up a little, but there's no guarantee that the sudden onset of mild weather will take us into spring. Many times before we've had worse weather as we've gone into March and April, and there have been years where we did not get any consistent warm-to-hot temperatures till July! From this you will deduce that here in the United Kingdom the weather is highly changeable and unpredictable from day to day, hence the reason we Brits talk about it so much and have made it our number one topic of conversation calculated to bore the pants of any non-Briton! But there you have it - it is what it is and has made us what we are and this isn't likely to change for several millennia to come when there might occur a massive meteorological upheaval. 

And this is where I finally conclude this post which has gone on for rather longer than I had anticipated and has been revisited various times by me over several weeks in an attempt to complete it before the end of this year and the advent of a new year, namely 1914! 

An astronomer and a gentleman

A few days ago I was saddened to hear of the passing-away of Sir Patrick Moore (aged 89), astronomer and broadcaster extraordinaire, who, among many other pursuits and accomplishments, was best known for hosting his flagship tv programme 'The Sky at Night' for a record 50 years plus. It is not my intention to list his many talents and achievements, these can easily be ascertained on the Web and elsewhere. The point of this post of mine is simply to record his passing and his significance for me.

In a way, Patrick Moore bears a similar relationship to me in my later adolescent and early adult years as did  the comic books I read in my childhood years (see 'Death of a comic book'). He represented a particular phase of my life which left its indelible mark on me. Through his programme he contributed to arousing in me a strong interest in astronomy which led me to read books on the subject and eventually, when I had the money for it, to buy a decent refractor telescope so I too could survey the heavens and identify cosmic bodies. 

Patrick Moore was perhaps the last of a dying breed of gentlemen scholars and amateur enthusiasts: eccentric but not over the top, enthusiastic but not ostentatious, passionate but not exaggerated, meticulous but not pedantic. I suppose the word that best describes him and which appears here more than once is 'enthusiastic'. And his enthusiasm was contagious to all those who had an interest in his field of expertise. He had the knack of carrying his viewer or listener along at a fast pace and of holding his attention right to the end. And by the end of his programme one always felt that one had learnt something.

With his monocle, rapid speech, single-mindedness and rather sedate manner of dressing, Patrick Moore may have looked every bit the part of the absent-minded and unkempt professor but he was certainly not absent-minded, rather very quick-witted, and his ungroomed appearance betokened a man more interested in sharing his field of expertise and his enthusiasm with his public and his followers than in preening himself! With Patrick Moore, you got what you saw and the impression I got was of a very genuine man absorbed in his subject and eager to share his knowledge with us.

The very little I have written above hardly does justice to the man but I have tried to portray the essence of the man in a few words and convey the place he held in my esteem and the part he played in my life as a teenager and a young adult. Later in life I got caught up in the maelstrom of adult life and all the responsibilities that come with it, but from time to time I would tune in to his programme late at night and somehow it was a comforting feeling knowing that he was there as always. Now that he's gone, it won't be the same without him, and I will miss the old soldier! 

Farewell, Patrick, Gentleman Scholar, may you rest in peace among the planets and stars in the heavens which were your playground since your boyhood years!

Death of a comic book

And so it is that on its 75th birthday the Dandy comic, which saw the light of day in 1937, has now passed away as a tangible palpable paper publication and has migrated to the Internet to exist only in the ether, in cyberspace, for those who are still interested in its brand of humour.

Its sister publication, the Beano, born a year later in 1938, ironically on the eve of World War II, still hangs on for dear life, having recently been granted a reprieve, whilst the Topper and the Beezer, later arrivals, also issuing from the DC Thomson stable, in 1955 and 1956 respectively, long gave up the ghost and were consigned to the comic book graveyard in the sky in 1993. I doubt that it will be long before the Beano goes the way of the Dandy. Still, unlike their two former bedfellows, they will still be available online, for now, and it remains to be seen what their eventual fate will be.


For me personally, these four humorous comics (for, despite their name, not all comic books are humorous, witness many of the American super-hero publications and others), accompanied my childhood and played an important part in entertaining me. Every week I would traipse off to my local newsagent's to collect them, but, as they did not all come out on the same day and I was impatient to have them as soon as I could, I often did not wait for all of them to be saved for me by the newsagent and would have to make more than one weekly trip before I had them all. But I did not mind and even relished the trip to the newsagent's and the anticipation that built up inside me.

These were the comic books that injected laughter and mirth into my childhood years and that preceded in my life such DC Comics as Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and The Flash, to name a few, which engrossed my early adolescent years. I would spend many a moment chuckling to myself as I read the antics of such iconic characters as Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger, and Lord Snooty. Some of the others worth a mention were Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear, The Three Bears, Little Plum, Ball Boy, Ivy the Terrible, and Billy Whizz. No doubt there were others which do not come to mind at the moment.

By the time the Beezer and the Topper were in financial straits and had to be merged into one between 1990 and 1993, the year of their demise, I was very much grown up (!), and I don't now even recall hearing about the merger at the time. Given my 'advanced' years, I had long ceased to read any comics and, as it was still the pre-Internet era (indeed the pre-desktop pc era), I was busying myself in my spare time reading factual books, composing poetry and trying my hand at painting. The comics of my childhood were reaching the end of the line and I was no longer part of their world, and it seems the children who were buying them were dwindling rapidly, as they defected to other publications more in tune with the changing world. They had become too innocent for the 1990s generation of children who now needed more realistic comic books to feed and fire their imagination... I guess. 

I suppose these developments and demises were to be expected and had been on the cards for some time. Very few things last very long in our modern world of constant change and renewal, where tastes and fashions come and go as swiftly as they never did before in this society of the fleeting and the transient. Now we live on a diet of instant impressions and overnight successes, and the thirst for more and bigger stimuli to keep us from getting bored consumes our lives. And yet, I can't help thinking that the simple comics of my childhood left a more lasting impression and a deeper mark in my psyche than all the wealth of clever novelties, gimmicks and innovations ever will before I too check out of this life.  

The Dandy, the Beano, the Topper and the Beezer, became my constant companions as soon as I was able to read, and together with such other pastimes as marbles, picture cards, toy soldiers, yo-yos, train sets, and stamp-collecting (philately), they filled my out-of-school hours and provided me with the stimulus and fun that I needed without all the mad intensity of today's electronic games and the vagaries of computers that seem to complicate our life today rather than simplify it in spite of all the nonsense spouted by their purveyors. And all these pastimes and hobbies were all the more important as the monochrome television of the time was still very much in its infancy and did not provide the interest, variety and stimulation which it now does with its multiplicity of channels and the huge flat-panel screens that try to mimic the big cinema screen experience.

My childhood world was one consisting of hands-on experience and I interacted directly with the tangible environment around me, not with a cyber world that can only be experienced indirectly. Was this better? I think it was for me the child but I will not press the point. In any case, it is now an academic one in this world of electronic this and electronic that which promises everything but which delivers much less. What I can say for sure is that in the grey post-war world of my tender years, these four comic books introduced a good bit of colour and laughter and amusement which made all the difference, and for that at least I am forever grateful to them and saddened at their demise or banishment to the Internet.