And I’m not going to explain it now – unless I already have – which I haven’t.

But our world has changed a little since then…the LHC still hasn’t created a black hole in Switzerland, or France, yet it hasn’t demonstrated anything other than a group of physicists in Italy who say the LHC is spewing neutrinos which do what neutrinos can’t do – that being neutrinos travel faster than light. The accepted model is that nothing travels faster than light and neutrinos measured from supernovae have exhibited the energy pattern which supports the “universal speed limit”. And I could whitter on about this if I had a doctorate in theoretical physics, but I don’t.

My best friend does and we don’t talk about it much, because frankly, he knows better than to listen to the warp drive postulations of the layperson – or at least I hope he does!

But never mind all that…the world has become envigorated, if not engorged with newspeak since I last was here – in particular: NewManagementese:

Going Forward:

“Being an indemnity in general against any failure, oversight, or incapacity, or any failure, omission, lassitude, indifference, general indisposition to, and or towards rank and file, colleague or asset at large (i) , from this point forward; any action and or, responsibility regarding the above, by and  behalf of the board, or senior, or general management will be redistributed to said asset at large. (See (i))

Asset:

See (i)

Colleague:

See “Asset”

Liability:

See “Going Forward” & “Asset”

Austerity:

“Laying off anyone of real worth: reinforced with the active encouragement of those who are left, to fight to the death, backstab each other (on their old wage) and prove why they are the equal to those who have been laid off !

Corporate Liability:

“The path of least resistance.”

The Path Of Least Resistance:

“Any person retained upon the basis of austerity”

Corporate Manslaughter:

“Any one of the above (assuming nobody clever enough is left!”)

Plausible Deniability:

“All of the above!”

Now that may mean a lot to my friends across the pond, but over here in the Old Continent, it’s a pretty big deal; for sure, you’ve got NASCAR which is quite entertaining until you realise that most races are the same…maybe they should try going the other way round the track once in a while! That being said, most races do actually produce a different winner on any given Sunday.

Then there’s the Indy Racing League which is like NASCAR masquerading as F1 cars. Don’t get me started on the IRL because it killed CART/Champ Cars and I find it hard to forgive that. And CART/Champ Cars was where you went if you were’nt good enough to get into F1 or where you went when F1 had finished with you – Nigel Mansell, Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi being notable exceptions. The younger Andretti (Michael) and Fittipaldi (Christian) went to F1 but soon got spat back out: Fittipaldi probably being the only driver in F1 ever to cross the finish line airborne and upside down! And the greatest enigma in Champ Cars, Paul Tracy tested in F1 and by all accounts was very, very impressive, but he elected to stay in Indy Cars as it was still called back in 1992. And in all honesty, Tracy would never have made it in F1 He was too much the maverick. He wouldn’t have fitted into what was becoming a more corporate driven sport. And even though he was arguably the most gifted race-car driver ever to come out of North America, he would have soon established himself as a pariah; after all, he created more than enough trouble for himself in Indy/CART/Champ Cars. And neither is this to say that North America hasn’t produced drivers of note: the Villeneuves spring to mind instantly - neither Gilles nor Jacques (son of Gilles) being readily recognisable as “toe the line” individuals. And it may also be arguable to say that they weren’t necessarily shit-hot! If anything, this father and son combination tended more towards the mercurial. If anything they were the stars which burned half as long but twice as bright.

Word has it that Tracy was better.

Pity. 

For everyone who’s ever donned a set of Nomex overalls and a crash helmet (funny they still call it that in this health and safety, politically correct age, but true enough, a crash helmet is what it is – why else would you wear one?), myself included, F1 has always been a distant and largely intangible goal. I had a pretty canny ability to drive rally cars and when working through university to pay my way tuition-wise, guess where the majority of the money went? You got it: I spent it on racing!

And where am I now? Certainly not in the high-octane, high-flying and more importantly, high-paying lifestyle of F1. Having said that, I touched on it briefly by marriage.

And I’m happy to sit and watch it on Sundays because it entertains me.

And if that’s not sport, I don’t know what is.

But here we go…

It was a great story.

It put a tear in my eye; it did, it really did!

In essence, it was the tale of a father who asked if his handicapped son could take part in a softball game.

The team accepted and “Shay” was accepted onto a team which was (I think) three runs down in the eight inning. The long and the short of this tale is that the winning team threw the game because “Shay” was given the opportunity to make a grand slam by virtue of soft pitches and fouled base throws.

I love baseball and it’s a great story…and you know what?

It might be true.

But I don’t believe we need these types of story to make us stop and think.

I believe we are put on this earth with an equal proposition: You can be something, or you can be nothing. 

Now, something always gets in the way of that and generally speaking, the impediments to any person’s growth are: Parents, Religion, Education, Society!

At some point in any human’s growth, he or she, will come head-to-head with one of the above; most probably, all of the above.

One of the most fundamental, hard as nails tenets of the religion in which I was brought up is this:

You are born a sinner!

Well that can’t be true, because -and I’ll use a legal term here- people of diminished responsibility can’t possilbly be born that way!

And only for this reason: That can’t be right!

So, let’s say you’ve been through the grinder of parents, society, peer-pressure, religion…

And to a greater or lesser extent, the end product will have been moulded by these influences; but all along the path, there has been the ability to choose.

So what’s left?

It’s you!

Strip everything away: all that’s left is You.

I have three sons.  I look at my boys and wonder sometimes. I wonder that they’re so grown up. But they are their own people. I look at my boys and wonder. I wonder because they’re so grown up; I wonder because they’re so human.

But I also wonder because they know so little and think, such innocence and fundamental goodness cannot possibly exist in a state of Original Sin.

And as I sit here now, the world seems to have gone mad! 

Sometimes the temptation can be to go: to run away; anywhere, just somewhere.

And again, we’re back to the same question:

Who do you meet when you get there? 

Life is a series of anchors. We humans need them and sometimes, we humans throw the anchors in the bad ground; but that’s choice.

In essence, we are all good: many choose not to be.

But when it comes to finding who and what you are:

Get an airplane ticket to…anywhere…run…get there and see: who’s the first person you meet?

Then, look in the mirror and ask this question: “What choices have brought me to this point?”

Most importantly of course, is that the world didn’t end. Secondary to that is that space time didn’t rip, large furry three headed lizards of fearsome intelligence didn’t step out of the void and tertiary is that we didn’t all collapse into a small black hole in Switzerland;  consigned to the afterlife, or to some odd Swiss singularity and to the everlasting sound of cuckoo-clocks! 

Now, they spent a lot of money on this thing and I can’t see the merits of a spend like that when you stack it up against something like, say, the Apollo moon missions.

You see, to me, those lunar shots were worth every penny the United States government spent.

And the point is this: the moon missions did more than just go to the moon; they created a notion of America. And that notion is this: everything to which any nation, to which any person, should aspire  is possible.

Read the books about it! Sure, there’s the hands-on-heart schmatlz, but you can never escape the fact: the United States did something of stupendous importance to humanity.

And what was done most of all was this: A Nation became galvanised, united and caught up in the dream of doing the almost impossible. If you compare today’s technology to that of 1968 (when they actually committed to going), it becomes even more impressive.

John Kennedy wasn’t much of a president, if you take the time to dig deeply enough into his background; but, if anything, he was a guy with his head firmly planted in the clouds. But by God! could he dream! And if there is a redeeming quality in the man, it is that he is probably the last of those who believed in America – the last of those who could dream.

I don’t mean the America where opportunity is defined as someone to be taken advantage of in the pursuit of personal gain. I mean America, where the Declaration of Independence had meaning in the daily lives of it’s citizens, America, where The Constitution had not only legal weight, but a moral imperative second only to The Ten Commandments. It was a nation of ideals, a nation of freedom in it’s purest sense forged from a pioneering spirit.

Then someone killed him!

It was easy to forget in 1968 when men orbited the moon for the first time, that Americans were dying in Vietnam, or at least it would have been easy if there hadn’t been so much civil unrest in the country. But the dream kind of makes all that a bit blurry now. And the dream did so again in 1969 when they landed and walked on the moon. And the funny thing was this: when people from around the globe spoke to those involved in the space programme, they all said “We did it!” They said, “We”!

Can you name one thing in the last forty years which has caused just about every living person on the planet to say “We did it”, when in fact, someone else has done it?

And then America went all to hell! Perhaps it was the concept of corruption at executive level that killed it for Americans (me, I don’t know…Nixon was a great president! History will bear me out)

There are dreamers there still – I know some of them, but the administration has taken over.

The Consitution of The United States may as well be an epilogue to a romance novel these days.

So what has this got to do with the large hadron collider? Not a lot really, but I find it hard to get excited about something which has cost a multi-billion pound sum in the pursuit of a theory. It may theoretically do this and it may theoretically do that and I’m sure it has real and tangible value to someone somewhere who has a head full of theoretical physics.

But at the end of the day, it’s a sub-atomic crash-test train set.

When I go to bed, I won’t dream about the origins of the universe being demonstrated, I’ll dream about astronauts and exploration and rockets and believing in the impossible.

That’s what I’ll dream about; and there’s a lot of that missing in the world these days.

And now I’ll add a postscript and it’s about astronauts:

I could write a book about astronauts, but it’s been done.

It is 2008.

Once, in history, there were were heroes.

I realised at a pretty early age that my brain was leaning towards language and the written word.

Fair enough, some mathematical theorems turned out to have their uses. Take Pythagoras for example: he taught me that when driving somewhere, there’s no need to go ’round when you can go straight down the middle. Then again, I’ll bet Pythagoras never figured on one-way traffic systems, so in a sense, you can actually disprove that particular theorem vis a vis it’s practicality in the 21st century! And just to get that particular theorem to work, you had to multiply everything by itself and then add them up just to arrive at a conclusion which, although interesting enough, is actually pretty pointless when you can just drive down the middle – assuming you’re not in a one-way traffic system! And here’s something else: you definitely won’t be whipping out a calculator just to see if you’re actually going to save time or distance; and your satnav doesn’t particularly care either!

But recently, my thoughts have turned to what it was about math that never did it for me and what it was about language that did do it for me.  And here it is:

Math is an absolute and language isn’t. For example, 2+2=4; that’s it! That has always been it and that will always be it! Sure you can add a few zeros here and there and you end up with an exponential of the same numbers, but make no mistake – they are still the same numbers.

But language is a different kettle of fish. Take for example the word Gay: fifty years ago, it meant happy. Today, generally, it means something else entirely, but it still also means happy. So thirty years ago when Larry Grayson was saying “What a gay day!”, he meant one thing but was implying another. Those same thirty years ago, 2+2=4; pretty boring, huh? Hell, two million years ago, 2+2=4!

Mathematicians like to bang on about how mathematics is the only pure language and they may have a point there, but think of this: it’s always been around and these fine folk needed actual language to express it. So we humans now have a “language” which the math chaps call pure, but it wouldn’t exist without the spoken and written word. And to dispel any arguments before they arise, why else would they have spent so much time raping the Greek alphabet and a goodly portion of the English one to express some of their more complex riddles?

And you can’t tell a story using math…Physicists will say, “Yes. We can express the creation of the universe mathematically”; but if you choose to believe in such stuff, the bible does it somewhat more eloquently. And Stephen King would have never had quite the impact he has had if, in ‘Salem’s Lot, he had chosen to describe Ben Mears pounding a stake through a vampire’s heart as an equation outlining the conservation of momentum!

It boils down to this: they say eskimos have about fifty words for snow, I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that I can say I’m telling a lie in quite a few different ways, or that I can say yes, or aye to confirm assent. 2+2 will always be 4.

And let me tell you this: 2-2=0, or put in English: two minus two equals nothing. If I had a choice of saying yes as a “1″ or an “aye”, the ayes will aways have it.

Everyone has a set of values by which they live their lives and on a social level, they are pretty universal. But over the years I’ve evolved a series of guidelines which I feel everyone might benefit from:

stillkickin’s laws

1. Overestimate everyone – many will eventually disappoint
2. You cannot fail if you do not try (corrollary: you cannot succeed if you do not try)
3. There is a difference between being  beaten and losing
4. A stab in the back is better than a gash in the throat
5. If you’ve got it, rub their noses in it
6. A grudge loves a memory, memory loves a good grudge
7. Believe in an afterlife; you may need to bring a grudge with you
8. Goalposts rarely move; it is peoples’ perception of them which changes
9. But the bar can always be raised
10. Know the law – you may need to break it one day
11. Revenge is an expression of weakness in all but those who are also prepared to destroy themselves in its pursuit; in which case it is an expression of stupidity
12. Nothing is perfect and neither are you
13. You will make mistakes
14. Know when you’ve made then and know how to admit them
15. To err is human, to forgive is a matter of personal preference
16. There is opportunity in even the most dire situation
17. You will never hit bottom
18. Education is often mistaken for intelligence
19. Follow procedure, but know also when to throw the book away
20. The weight of the world is 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level

Anyway, on this recent trip, we went back to the Boscastle area and having been there before, I was keen to revisit a number of places – one of which is a large hotel which in design, is at the same time, both loosely and largely based on a castle. The last time I was there, I felt something about the place which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. This time, I put my finger straight onto it’s ulnar artery and felt the strong but unmistakeable pulse of Scientology!

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with boy racers? Well, it’s a little bit of a lateral thinking kind of story, so read on…

In this country, there is a breed of person called the boy racer and one of his main pursuits is modifying a car the size of a matchbox so that it looks like a car the size of a matchbox which has been in a high-speed collison with a Dalek. Then, when he has completed this undertaking, he spends the rest of his time getting from A to B as quickly as possible. Which is all well and good providing he has to travel in a straight line to accomplish this. I reckon (and this is a very loose and ready reckoning) that on a ten mile trip, a boy racer will spend approximately seven miles slowing down; more, if there are bends in the road.

So with that in mind, while driving home some weeks ago, I spotted one in my rear view mirror slowing down to negotiate a bend. I had my family in the car, so my usual hobby of playing with the boy racers had to be deferred. Sure enough though, when the road straightened out, he overtook me at a speed something considerably in excess of the signed speed limit.

And I know this is wrong on many levels, but as he went past, I distinctly remember thinking, “I hope you crash, you idiot!”.

So I watched him belch and bark his way into the distance and watched his brake lights come on for the next bend. (Here’s a driving tip for all boy racers: In your car, there is a circular thing on which you place your hands. It’s called a steering wheel and it makes your front wheels turn left or right. You need to turn it to go around bends!)

And as I came around the bend, I expected to see him struggling to accelerate away into the distance following the enormity of the challenge which he had just faced: getting around a bend in a moving vehicle. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sight of skirts and dams all over the road and clouds of steam billowing from a now, disabled and crashed car and a rather sheepish boy racer stepping from the car with body language that suggested he was sorry his faux pas hadn’t also created a crater for him to crawl into while waiting for the police and low-loader to arrive.

Now, somewhere in the reams upon reams of legislation, it is written that motorists should stop at the scene of an accident. Nevertheless, I didn’t because I was armed with the following two pieces of hard fact:

1. I am not a Scientologist – they are the only ones who can help at the scene of a car crash
2. I didn’t have Tom Cruise’s phone number to dial for advice, as he’s the one who imparted the preceding pearl of wisdom to the world at large.

So instead, I kept going and laughed the rest of the way home.

And so, back to Cornwall…behind the hotel is a precipitous cliff which, on the whole, I would avoid going too close to in the interests of personal safety and continued existence. But let’s say I did and took a long and flailing tumble over the edge…at the bottom, I would lie broken and battered but secure in the knowledge that a squad of Scientology’s elite (a kind of Thetan Force Recon or SAS, if you will) would soon be rappelling down to provide comfort and solace – if not succour.

They’re the only ones who can help, you know!

Dear Public Sector Computer,

It is with dismay that I have found -yet again- on my welcome mat, a bill for Class 2 National Insurance contributions.

Having phoned your employer, listened to one of your colleagues and some music of dubious indigenous quality, I did, at length, speak to a human who helpfully enlightened me on the following points:

·          Bills and other demands for remittance -regardless of creativity or legitimacy- are computer generated

·          Changes in the status of a self-employed individual must be communicated in writing

Given that I have written on a number of occasions, it was with dawning horror that I reached the following Holmesean epiphany:

·          It is you who is in receipt of my letters (the remaining option being however improbable, must be the truth)

Whilst I understand, in this modern era of automation and efficiency, the need to delegate lesser tasks to machines, immigrants and temp staff, I see a fundamental flaw in the reasoning of your employers: Computers lack the basic manual handling skills to open a letter.

What is generally required is an organic brain, flexible appendages (in vernacular terms: arms), extremities on said arms known as hands, fingers (known technically as the phalanges) and opposable thumbs. This list comprises only the most rudimentary equipment necessary to open a letter and is by no means exhaustive; it also helps to have a knife or other sharp implement to hand, although this is an optional extra – a phalange will suffice in a pinch (with the proviso that it is still attached to the hand and arm).

Then you have to read the letter, disseminate its contents and process the information contained therein in a logical and timely manner. The thought of a growing, unopened “letter mountain” on your desk is enough to instil horror in even the most rational of us. I would hope that your remuneration for services rendered is on a strictly performance-related basis; if so, you don’t get out much on weekends.

I feel it would be trite, if not overambitious of me to use such terms as: “As you can imagine…” -this can be an undertaking even for humans- however, I am nonetheless reaching breaking point as a result of your continued demands for payment. In addition, it is disconcerting in extremis that you continue to generate these demands and dispatch them via Royal Mail at a continuing cost to the taxpayer and registered voters at large. I suppose that some reassurance -however small- can be taken from the fact that this exercise is expedited by Second Class post (I shall, in the interests of decorum, and common decency, refrain from drawing inferences and creating allegories regarding this rate of postage and how it relates to ordinary citizens of the State).

Please allow me to re-establish the following facts:

·          I am not self-employed

·          I have not been self-employed since February 2002

In conclusion, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you well in your career. It is my hope that since your last communication to me, your regular performance review has highlighted the need for, at the least, a RAM upgrade; and in place of a Christmas bonus, perhaps a new processor (I hear quad-core Intels are all the rage) would be more appropriate.

I remain,

Yours faithfully,

stillkickin’

“…my cat is seven but since I’ve been feeding her [unremembered brandname], she has a spring in her step and a glint in her eye…”

Or something like that anyway.

And I had to wonder, if catfood is having that effect on a seven year old cat, is the catfood company actually putting crystal meth in the food?

There’s a thought: housecats on speed!

Sometimes I buy a new guitar and then sell it, sometimes I buy a guitar and trade that against another guitar I like even more. But I seem to have settled on four guitars as a good number to have; there is room for a fifth, but I don’t really see the point at the moment. And then there’s my mandolin which is to my guitars what the McNugget is to a chicken – it’s bite sized and nice and a bit of a change when you don’t want the whole chicken. And if I had a whole lot of room in my house -like a basement- I’d have a whole bunch of keyboards as well.

And then there’s the music I listen to…For the most part, my taste runs very broad, but it tends definitely towards the heavy; but it had it’s roots in the early eighties when people like Gary Numan were making pretty cool sounds.

For a time there, music for me had entered the doldrums; it was hot, sticky and the air just wasn’t moving - for sure there was Britpop, which was ok; kind of McNuggetish really. And then Trent Reznor came along with Nine Inch Nails and for me, it was like the wind had started blowing again. 

If you read interviews with Reznor, he says that one of his influences was Gary Numan and Mr Numan wasn’t someone who was content with using his keyboards alone to produce his sound. No! He ran his synths through distortion pedals which were designed with guitars in mind. So…Nine Inch Nails heralded the Industrial era which I particularly like because it’s got some key elements which motivate me musically: keyboards and guitars. lots of distortion and a good old beat driving it along. And the angst ridden misanthropy is an added extra!

At some point in his career, Gary Numan went broke and American Express had a hitman looking for him and then in the mid-nineties, the very same Amex launched a credit card and for the t.v. ad, they used Numan’s “Cars”. (Numan himself claims that that gave him tremendous satisfaction).

In any case, it must have been around this time that Gary Numan heard Nine Inch Nails and he must have thought, “Hmmm, I’ve still got my old Moogs, ARPs and guitar pedals, I wonder what they’d sound like if I actually plugged a guitar into them”.

And he did and d’you know what it sounds like? It sounds fantastic.