AWAY

• I am away, staying at Fawsley, the most bonkers of all places. A bonkers pile, exploded into the British countryside. The sheep are arrogantly bonkers, mutely submitting to being run over on the gated road. The place is bonkers, architecture all over the place, mainly bonkers Tudor with bonkers bits of Georgian and Palladian fill in. The staff are bonkers. I thought the receptionist was going to bite my neck. She is a long dead Russian ballerina. The systems creak more than the floorboards. Even the menu is bonkers. Smoked salmon, but in some mad curry slurry, which obviously you have to ask them not to put on the plate. A perfectly good steak is ruined by some Cajun nonsense. Why don't cooks just do the simple thing well? Eating out would be so much better if they tried less hard. A glass of wine is a tenner, but a bottle only twenty. They have every form of gin but not Plymouth. The pictures on the wall are all of British Royalty, from Tudors onwards. Oil paintings. Except they aren't - they're prints with odd dabs of paint put on to make them seem authentic. Even the guest list is bonkers. The place is full of lesbian couples, each a bonkers combo of pneumatic babe and industrial lump.
• An interesting conversation about autism and how autistic people work from detail outwards. I recommend the book The Reason I Jump. I see  this detail out tendency in people who would not be thought of as autistic too.
• Late food makes my sleep intolerably awful. Alcohol in the evening also has this effect. It is difficult to accept this after such a long career of carousing.
• Can women have it all? Career, motherhood, loving partnership? An interesting chat about whether it's the media asking this question which limits women's sense of entitlement. Little girls are criticised for being bossy. Little boys aren't.
• One of my clients has resigned, following a single session with me. There is a frisson to this. Excitement. Fear, too.
• The Hopping Hare is a place I really like. I stay there quite often and the people are getting to know me. They are very nice and helpful. For example, I went mid afternoon to try and get some lunch. No chef. But the barmaid said "I'm no great cook but I could rustle you up a sandwich." That kind of straightforward care is rare.
• I desperately need an early night, having feasted and thus slept so badly. I am ready for bed at about nine and am just dropping off when there's a fireworks display. The bonkers tin lid on it.
• Tomorrow I sleep on Cylesta. I dream of it.

The Giro d'Italia is starting in Belfast.
The Tour de France is starting in Yorkshire.

The Marathon des sables is due to start in Barnsley.
The Venice Biennale will start in Caracas.
Rio's famous carnival will shift its start to Antarctica, posing costume challenges for the participants.
The May Day parade in Russia's Red Square will start in Belgium.
The London Marathon will start on the moon.
The Edinburgh tattoo will be in Cameroun.
Timbuktu will host for the first time the Palio.
The Derby will be run mid Atlantic.

I'm all for cosmopolitanism, but to an older gent like myself it can at times be a touch confusing.

SWEATY PALMS

DAWN

0540.
Blackie is singing outside my window.
This is the rough end of a belief that we should be diurnal. Go to bed when it is dark. Rise when it is light.
So comes the listening - a practice I do not find easy. The mind strays away from the present moment into all sorts of versions of past and future. Stories.
This morning, Blackie holds my attention. It is a truly beautiful, heart-filling sound, and with a background rivulet of curlews, I cannot imagine a finer alarm clock. For one raised in sounds of traffic, rowing neighbours, and the odd siren, it is a privilege worth daily thanks.
It sets me thinking too.
Current science holds that the dawn chorus is a territorial claim, made over and over again. In some time, I imagine science will be proved wrong again.
Blackie does not repeat himself. The core melody is similar, but not the same each time. He ends it differently, and adds all sorts of variants throughout his aria. Each call is different. And the answering calls from neighbour blackbird also differ each time they are made. Sometimes I could swear they are interrogative, sometimes jussive, and sometimes downright imperative.
What I believe I am listening to is conversation, perhaps with repetitive themes, but with stimulus and response both present in the song.
Why would they just repeat the inane "here I am; this is mine"?
Why wouldn't they be talking about what would be important to them that day? The weather? The wind direction? Where they will be going for food? Where they have heard or sensed food might be? What threats are about? What opportunities? These seem far more likely to me, even if more sophisticated.
Maybe even, like me, Blackie sends up a prayer of exultation at simply being alive to hear this marvellous round of sound.
Birds and animals are far cleverer, I believe, than we humans, and especially scientists, acknowledge.
After all, we have many singers, but few as fine as a blackbird.
And not a single one who can combine that beautiful voice with the ability to fly.

NO CRIMEA?

Now that Russia is enacting the answer that ought to have been enacted from the start - a Crimean referendum - one might think that the invitation to OSCE observers to monitor the referendum would be accepted.
But it hasn't been.
That is because the Crimean referendum will be free and fair. It doesn't need to be anything else. You don't need to rig an answer you can get without rigging it.
But the OSCE has handed the West what it would want - an excuse to condemn the referendum. Indeed, they are already doing so, in terms of it being illegal. Rigged, will follow as a headline.
The situation tells us something else though.
It tells us that the OSCE is prey to following the West's own on and off definition of democracy, based on European and Western geopolitical and economic advantage.
What the world needs is a democratic monitoring force which actually is interested in democracy for its own sake, disinterested from any national or supra national interests.

U KRAINE IF YOU WANT 2

Congratulations to the lucky winners of the competition launched in the last blog post. Well done, Mr V Putin, of Moscow, who shares his win with 79 members of Crimea's parliament. Your prizes are on their way to you.
It is disappointing to note that winners from further West have been few indeed. And there has been some quite bad sportsmanship too. Mr B. Obama, of Washington DC has complained loudly about breaches of the rules. Apparently, holding a referendum on separatist feelings is a violation of international law. Even more disappointing is a universally supine western media, not one of whose ranks has had the sense to ask Mr Obama "Mr President, which law?" I am not a lawyer so cannot of course be definitive about what is or is not legal or illegal in these matters. But if Mr Obama is right, then MR D Cameron of London, England, and Mr A Salmond, of Edinburgh, Scotland may both be in legal hot water. Everyone knows though that in law invading another's country is illegal and that is why, as an example, we would never see US or UK troops invading, say, Iraq or Afghanistan.
What is most puzzling is this - that the West would expect Mr Putin to simply lay down and accept the machinations of the West in creating a pro Western Ukraine, with concomitant access to its important gas supplies. That is an arrogance which is pretty unbelievable, and, as the events have shown, misplaced.
What is also puzzling is this - that the West does not simply listen to what Mr Putin has to say and take him seriously, accepting a greyer, less absolute but much more workable version of both truth and national and international best interest.

U KRAINE IF YOU WANT TO

Here's a simple spatial problem.

A country is surrounded by two powerful neighbours. Lets called one simply East and one simply West.

Half of the said country overwhelmingly want alliance with East, and half want alliance with West. Those who want alliance with West live overwhelmingly in the west of the country. Those who want alliance with East live overwhelmingly in the east of the country.

Bearing in mind modern principles of democratic self determination, solve the above problem.

You have (shall we be generous) two minutes to provide a suitable answer.

I am expecting that any sensible reader of this now has the solution.

Yet, for leaders of two of the world's superpowers, this seems not to be the case, and, instead of an amiable tension free arrival at the solution, we have bellicose escalation on both sides.

Why?

Because to be a modern leader it is more important to be seen to be hard, warlike and powerful (based on military power) than it is to be seen to be emollient, wise, flexible in thought, and able to get on with one's neighbours.

We shall see how a dangerous situation in Ukraine progresses. On pragmatism, or on ego?

My guess is, it'll get worse before it gets better.

MORE ON MONKS

Which reminds me.......

When I was travelling in India once with the Missus, we visited a Buddhist monastery. Quite a famous one.
We were shown round by a brown skinned, round faced monk - a refugee, I believe, from Tibet, and a follower of the Dalai Lama.
He gave us quite a tour, and quite a lecture. Especially, as I recall, on the subject of attachment. He urged us to free ourselves of attachment. Not bad advice, I thought, so I asked him if he wouldn't mind giving me his watch.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't. My mother gave it to me."

THE MONK WHO SOLD HIS FERRARI

I haven't been reading this book.

If he was a monk, why didn't he give it away?

INTERSTICES

My Dad used to joke that he was a collector - a collector of Fivers. In my lifetime he was not a conspicuously successful collector in that field.

He more successfully collected words. Odd ones. Arcane ones. Obscure and interesting words. Thus, at an early age, I learned of numismatics, graticules, micrometers, interstices and many more. This collection was housed in scraps of paper and notebooks, written in his beautiful, artistic hand.

He also collected small memories, often also written up in his notes. Recordings of the ordinary things in life around him, which he found, by dint of his own survival, shimmering and remarkable - the amount of raspberries or other crops yielded by his garden; the way a particular view looked on a particular Wealden evening; a sound of this or that bird, the taste of a toffee. Not big things. Small things. Small things noticed, though. Small things appreciated. Interstices, you might say, between the big ups and downs of life, the big happenings, the triumphs and disasters. An appreciation, and a contented awareness of what is happening when nothing is happening. What is going on, all the time, if only you stop to notice it.

These were his collection. Perhaps, too, his collection had a greater value than any collection of Fivers.

I find, as I return to this blog after an extended, indolent Christmas and New Year absence, that, if I have a New Year wish for others, and for myself, it is to be able to look at the interstices, the gaps, between notable events in our lives, and to collect with wonder and gratitude the million, million tiny spurs to contentment which are happening, every minute of every day just, in fact, as we think nothing much is going on at all.

May we notice, appreciate, collect and treasure.

OTHER MEN'S FLOWERS

If I ever become a rich man,

Or if ever I grow to be old,

I will build a house with deep thatch

To shelter me from the cold,

And there shall the Sussex songs be sung

And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood

Within a walk of the sea,

And the men that were boys when I was a boy

Shall sit and drink with me.

HB

EMOTION MAP

 

Participants in a study were asked to map where they felt different emotions - which part of the body was stimulated (red/yellow/white) or deactivated (blue). One of the more interesting things I've seen recently.