PHEASANTS

Someone wrote that no pheasant has ever done anything interesting. Perhaps that's why I've stopped avoiding them and now just run them over.

A friend of mine got his car all entangled with a pheasant, just before arriving to drop his son off at school. Conscious of the image problem, he rummaged to try and get the pheasant out of the radiator grille. This made matters worse, because the corpse would not come. He tugged and yanked at the dead creature but was rewarded only with a facial and bodily spray of pheasant blood, guts and feathers. As the school bell rang, he attracted shocked parental stares. A murderer in the playground. Further evidence of the horror of this man's character could be attained from a glance at his car, the mangled remains now wrenched across most of its bonnet, as well as hanging from its front bumper. Not a good look.

"But they're so stupid," he might have said, by way of defence. "They strut out stubbornly right into the path of your car."

Pheasants play a bizarre game of "chicken" with motor vehicles, asserting their right to strut nonchalantly wherever they will, even in the face of a 2 litre engine, a tonne or so of metal and a couple of hefty Goodyears. They know they are right, until, well..... the end.

Some years ago I knew a man who wore a cravat. He was what I would call old. He was in fact, I suppose, in his sixties. But it wasn't the age that defined him. It was the certainty of his views. He knew what he thought, about anything. And what he didn't know, he didn't want to know. He knew enough to know what he knew, and to know it was enough. It was this certainty, this lack of curiosity, which marked his age. To me, that kind of certainty marks out old people. You can have the experience of visiting an old folk's home with people in their mid twenties. And you can bathe in the joys of youth with eighty year olds.

The cravat was worn rather as the extravagant colours of a cock pheasant. His wife, whom I have difficulty remembering, was of the invisibly brown tendency. As far as I can recall, she habitually agreed with her husband.

I meet quite a lot of people like this. Externally colourful, perhaps. But within, deeply conservative, deeply certain, deeply incurious.

I find myself now at a point of my life where some options open upon what I may focus, to what I may dedicate myself, over the next few years. A junction point. There are no guideposts. I am uncertain which way to go. And that uncertainty is not only within the decision, but also written into the chosen route, as an energy for propulsion along it, once chosen. Uncertainty, curiosity and wonder may serve. They may make for a more interesting time than pheasant-like certainty. May, indeed, be the elixir of youth. No matter how old one gets.

TRUE WORDS

When I was on the train, we passed through Taunton. I only know 2 people who live in Taunton. One is a friend of mine who is known to me simply as Chopper. I look out of the train window at Taunton station and there is Chopper. I ring him:

“Have you just got off the London train?”

”Yes”

“I’m looking at you.”

”What do you think?”

”Very nice, Chopper, very nice.”

“Why are you in Taunton?”

“I had a meeting in London and I’m on the train back”

“But you live in Yorkshire…..”

“It’s ok. I’ve got a ladder.”

SHARP

The Mini Madam is developing a nice little brain.

We go to a 24 hour service station, and, as we go into the shop area, Mini Madam notices that there is an Open sign on the door.

"Why do they need that, if it's open 24 hours?" she asks.

ZEN TODAY

It'll be alright in the end.

If it isn't alright,

It isn't the end.

ZEN TODAY

Every formed view is a kind of mortality.

WORK HISTORY

We've had the wheel, the machine, the computer and the robot. Management has become a science.

Yet hundreds of years of humanity on, people are still working all the hours God sent.

Doesn't say a lot for our productivity.

FORTNUMS DUNDEE CAKE

Winston's favourite.

Mine too.

ABOUT SUFFERING THEY WERE NEVER WRONG

There are days, and the last twenty four hours has encompassed one, when it is possible to believe that one is feeling the pain of the entire world. I suppose that is when people look at you and say "he looks as though he's got the sufferings of the world on his shoulders."

I do not wish to carry the suffering of all humanity on my shoulders. They are broad. But not that broad.

It's just that sometimes the volume of incoming narrative about the suffering of others bears in on one's psyche in a peculiar way - a special vulnerability to seeing that even minor things carry with them their pain, according to the perspective of the sufferer. One man's bereavement is calculable alongside another's relationship breakdown, alongside doubts about self worth in another, alongside money worries, health worries, love worries, you name it. For each, they are real, and palpable. And their presence is pain, none the less real.

When, as today, one finds oneself porous, what is happening?

Is it what they call compassion?

Is it what they call depression?

It is all very well making objective calculations of real impact. I am not sure these measure pain in any way accurately.

It is all very well doing spiritual work on oneself. This may bring a perspective of gratitude, against which to set present pain. But it doesn't change the pain.

Even the devout, with a knowledge that roses grow best in shit, that pain is the best growing medium for transcendence, cannot but admit that the pain has to be real to breed such growth.

Puzzled. Porous. Pensive.

A frozen day, of unfrozen sensibilities.

JOB TITLE

I have a form to fill in.

The first couple of questions are easy. Name. Address. Date of birth. They're simple. Then it comes to profession. Job.

What do I put?

That is more troubling.

The auto response would be management consultant. But the truth is nearer anti management consultant.

The closer I get to a management theory, model or vocabulary, the further away I wish to run.

Where I am deployed, it seems to me that the role I perform is to undermine the subtly dehumanising force of management as a science and breathe back into hierarchy a child like voice of humanity.

To say it is about stating the bleeding obvious is to state the bleeding obvious.

Yet it seems that it sometimes takes an innocent daring from outside a system to name the system's patent human erosions.

To say: that practice there - we wouldn't, couldn't do that with someone we love.

HELP FOR THE DYING

I was struggling to help a friend, in some difficulty. Another wise friend advised "stop trying to help. Just enjoy them."

What golden advice this has been.

Advice which I passed on to someone else this last week. Their elderly parent is finally failing - physical and mental health on the severe decline. A brother visits the relative, but offers no help. Indeed, he is looked after by the ageing parent on his visits.

My view? The apparently dependant son is actually helping, without even meaning to do so. When parents age, it is a severe challenge to get them to break the habit of a lifetime - of looking after their brood. When they can no longer do this, I think it is common that they lose purpose, and thus the will to live. That certainly happened in the case of my own mother before she died. She could not and would not accept that her son could and would help her. It was her job to do that. Not mine. I struggled for a long time, even after her death, to understand this. I believe she died, not from the illnesses which invaded her body, but from having no credible (in her mind) reason to carry on living.

VON CLAUSEWITZ

If you can't win the peace, why fight the war?
If you can't win the war, why fight the battle?
If you can't win the battle, why fight the skirmish?

YOUTH

= you th.