l know I haven’t written much recently on Curves – sounds like I have been stagnating – but I’ve really been doing loads of things and been just too busy to blog about them.
Anyway, I dusted off the bicycle – which hadn’t been used for a while – and headed off to the beach. Not to swim, unfortunately – it’s still freezing here, something like the coldest Spring in eleventeen years or something. For the first time ever, I had to get off and push the bike up the last bit of a small hill but I am digressing – the point is …this is my new learning curve – right now is the moment I dip my toe (gingerly) into the … – struggles to maintain the metaphor here – … morass of cyber mobile blogging. This, then, is my first ever post to my blog – or anyone else’s, for that matter – from a mobile phone, despite the fact that I am sitting in front of a perfectly good computer! I know, it’s amazing that I should vaunt the minor ability to use a modern phone, a skill that seems almost innate to most people nowadays. Oh btw, here’s a photo of the beach.
Before I went off to South America in August 2015, I cut my hair. I have been back just over a year now and I haven’t cut it since! It is almost exhilarating – I haven’t had long hair since I was a teenager – and it was never that long to begin with. I remember once, when it was at its longest, I could cross my arms over my chest and, reaching up with my left hand, grasp a thick hank of hair and pull it under my chin to where my right hand would have grabbed the left hank and the two ends would meet.
That was back in the early seventies and I’ve never had particularly long hair since and nor have I wanted to. Now however?
I enjoy it, much, perhaps as a shaven headed man must feel running his hands over his smooth pate whereas I run my hands through my hair, pushing an errant lock out of my eyes.
So, here’s a photo of me with long hair from my bus pass back in the early seventies. Notice the segmented wheel around CIE, the national bus company at the time – Coras Iompair Eireann. I always though it a bit odd that a broken wheel should be the logo for a bus company!
Here’s one of me now.
Anyway, I seem to have regressed to my second childhood now, despite the fact that I grunt whenever I sit down or stand up and already I am describing my age in terms of that old e-mail attachment which I include here:
“Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we’re kids? If you’re less than 10 years old, you’re so excited about aging that you think in fractions.
‘How old are you?’ ‘I’m four and a half!’
You’re never thirty-six and a half. You’re four and a half, going on five! That’s the key
You get into your teens, now they can’t hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.
‘How old are you?’ ‘I’m gonna be 16!’
You could be 13, but hey, you’re gonna be 16!
And then the greatest day of your life! You become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony. YOU BECOME 21. YESSSS!!!
But then you turn 30.
Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk! He TURNED; we had to throw him out. There’s no fun now, you’re just a sour-dumpling. What’s wrong? What’s changed? You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you’re PUSHING 40.
Whoa! Put on the brakes, it’s all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH 50 and your dreams are gone.
But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn’t think you would! So you BECOME 21, TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE it to 60.
You’ve built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it’s a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday! You get into your 80’s and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30; you REACH bedtime.
And it doesn’t end there.
Into the 90s, you start going backwards; ‘I Was JUST 92.’
Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. ‘I’m 100 and a half!’ ”
I feel I have slowed down and gone into a form of hibernation, as it were. That’s not quite true though. I have loads of plans – for the garden anyway – but not so much in the writing area and while I have started on a few garden projects recently, I’ve put off finishing anything – it’s too cold, or wet or stormy and such excuses.
Mind you, it has been the coldest start to Spring in something like forty-five years, apparently. Windy too – a tree in the back garden was uprooted, taking out a whole stretch of fence with it. My chooks are now truly free-range!
Anyway, this hibernation might be a metaphor for my (lack of) writing. Just as I have a score of undone things to do in the garden, I also shirk from the idea of writing a sequel to Raiding Cooley or even a different type of novel, and have also started to neglect my website and blog. As for Social Media – FaceBook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, – I have completely reneged on all my intentions of getting to grips with it!
So, I need a new Curve! Summer is approaching here and – in lieu of physical travel which I am planning for next year – I am adding a new category to go with Celtic Trivia, Curves and Book Stuff. So, welcome to Travel Section with stories, comments and recounts of peregrinations worldwide.
Alvin Toffler, the fururist who died recently, posited the ideas that the world had lived through three “waves”, each one pushing the next wave further on. The first wave was that of the spread of Agriculture which replaced the hunter-gatherer societies of the Mesolithic periods. That, in its turn, was replaced by the mid seventeenth century Industrial Wave based on the mass production, distribution and consumption of goods as we became bedazzled with mass media, recreation, entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. Combined with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, this second wave resulted in bureaucracy which was swamped by the Third Wave – the title of Toffler’s 1980 book which described the post-industrial society, beginning in the late 1950s.
For me, the amazing thing is the time spans involved with the first wave enduring for several thousands of years while the second wave only lasted a few centuries. How long will the third wave last? A few decades and then what? Will the fourth wave consist of …?
I’m not sure how these waves fit in with geological time but the notion that the world has entered a new geological age is currently being reviewed by scientists worldwide and the term Anthropocene is being proposed as the latest subdivision of geological time.
The search is now on for a “golden spike”, a marker that can designate the start of the Anthropocene Epoch, meaning the current phase of Earth history known as the Holocene has terminated. The best spike should reflect events on Earth around the 1950s – the start of Toffler’s Third Wave – and would probably be plutonium fallout from bomb tests in the 1950s, found in marine or lake sediments or ice layers This is seen as the beginning of what is often referred to as the “great acceleration”, when human impacts on our planet suddenly intensified and became global in extent.
Anybody care to suggest what the Fourth Wave might be?
I consider myself to be, at least, an average swearer; that is, I can curse and swear in several languages, besides English of course. Hitchhiking down to Rome in 1971 and totally bereft of Italian – I had earlier turned down a lift to “Firenze” because I wanted to go to Florence – a truck driver educated me, along with graphic hand gestures, all the more terrifying as we both slugged down miniature bottle of Campari as we barreled down the autostrada. To this day I am more fluent in Italian curses than in any other language other than English.
In Arabic I remember almost being arrested in the late 70’s when I muttered “kisimuk” under my breath at Damascus airport while, more recently, my Cantonese “pook guy” and “bart paw” had a student complain about me to the school principal.
So I was rather pleased when I discovered that a new study has found that those who have a healthy repertoire of curse words at their disposal are more likely to have a richer vocabulary than those who don’t.
“Taboo word fluency and knowledge of slurs and general pejoratives: deconstructing the poverty-of-vocabulary myth“, was published in the November issue of the peer-reviewed Language Sciences publication, debunking the “poverty-of-vocabulary” (POV) hypothesis that swearing is a sign of a deficient vocabulary and that profanity shows limited intelligence, a result of a lack of education, laziness or an inability to control oneself and we swear because we can’t find more intelligent words with which to express ourselves. As Stephen Fry once said, “The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just f*cking lunatic.”
Anyway, I have just finished reading a fascinating novel which took swearing to a new level for me. I have no idea if these are “real” words belonging to a subset of a dialectal form of English or whether the author simply made them up. Whatever, hats off to him. Here are a few samples:
Pussyhole (self explanatory, I’d imagine, needing no further gloss from me!)
R’ass (rat’s ass?)
fuckery ( as in an Amy Winehouse song)
bloodcloth ( tampon?, sanitary napkin?)
bombocloth or bombo r’asscloth (??)
rahtid (??)
batty (anus)
batty boy (arse bandit or bum boy)
stoosh (?)
duppy (a ghost)
And the book from which these little gems originate? Well, I thought I would leave it up to you to see if you can figure which recent novel (in the last two years, anyway) they came from. Answers, please, in the comments
One last thing, while it’s great that an ability to curse can be equated with intelligence, it is probably best to use that intelligence to know the social domains within which you can operate and let off steam without causing undue offense to your “audience”!
Recently, I felt I was sliding backwards in terms of my earlier avowed promise to get to terms with Social Media Communications (mostly WordPress, I have to admit as I have done absolutely nothing about FaceBook for ages) and I have to say that sometimes, I feel I now know less than when I started this a few months ago – things change, getting added to and taken away all the time so that I never seem able to either find the time, or have the ability, to stay abreast.
Anyway, sitting at the open window the other day, enjoying the mild weather, I decided to put myself to the test and do a major revamp of my WordPress thing and see what I can come up with. Thanks to a little bit of help from Nigel – thanks, mate – I think I’ve got things worked out now, to a certain extent.
I have my three categories – Celtic Trivia, illustrated with a court tomb photo, Curves, illustrated with a Curving beach shot photo and Book Stuff illustrated with a photo of one of my bookcases – and each time I post, the post should go into the appropriate category. Here’s hoping anyway.
I seem to have spent a lot of time recently doing just about everything else except write another book. After all, it is nearly two years since I finished the first draft and more than three months since I uploaded it as an eBook but it seems I’m busy all the time, so much so that I never have time to write, or so I tell myself!
In an attempt to continue the deception, I spur myself on to do loads of unnecessary things as quickly as possible, so that I will have cleared a space in which I can write. It’s a bit like the clear the desk syndrome, sharpening all the pencils and making sure the eraser is to hand, that kind of thing.
I’ve even written stuff on my blog instead of actually sitting down and writing my novel. It’s almost as if I am frightened to start – frightened in case I can’t finish it, frightened that it will be no good, frightened that I will never actually start it in the first place, frightened that it will take me too long, frightened that it is beyond my skills, frightened that … I could go on and on but here’s the point.
Absolute nonsense, isn’t it?
Anyway, back to the title, I have been inspired.
One of my best friends has just completed an incredible walk / hike through an amazing group of European countries – a trans-national Camino-style adventure from Vienna in Austria through Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Slovakia to Trieste, Italy. Here’s the website http://www.peacewalk.eu
Owen mentioned some time ago that he was planning to walk this incredible route from south of Vienna all the way down to Trieste in Italy, cutting through six different cultures over three weeks or so but, I have to confess, it didn’t stir my interest at the time, being more interested in getting my book into shape than I was with myself. Anyway, my last attempt at a serious hike was about three years ago and I pulled out after the first day. I felt it was too much for me and that I just wasn’t able for it. In truth, I hadn’t prepared myself mentally for the challenge and I certainly had done nothing in the way of physical preparation.
And my niece is doing the incredible – actually cycling from South Korea across China and all the K-stan countries and over the Pamir highway and down into central Europe and on to the UK and Ireland, a total journey of gargantuan length. I suppose it has to be pretty much the same route the Mongol Khans took when they headed over into Europe. Fascinating. Take a look at Steph’s website and be even more fascinated. http://bike-back-home.blogspot.com.au
Incredible adventures, wonderful experiences. And I envy them and can’t help thinking why I haven’t done something like that for ages.
So, inspired by the two examples above, I am committing myself to doing that European Peace Walk or something similar in 2017. Too late to do it now, this year – thank God, so that gives me time to prepare and get myself ready to walk 25 – 35 K a day, carrying my own bag.
For too long I have been sedentary. I sit around all day messing about writing and fiddling with the website and the layout, graphics that sort of nonsense. But if I am not going to write something, I have to get up and be more active. There are always jobs to do in the garden now and then but then I do nothing for ages and yet I don’t manage to write or produce anything!
I remember a time when I stood on the top of the world looking down at the sun rising below my feet while I shivered in my sweat drenched clothes and I felt wonderful. I remember feeling superhuman when I reached the summit of Mt. Kinabalu in Sabah in Borneo, about 4100 metres high and high enough that oxygen became a problem in the last few hundred metres of the ascent.
And since then? I’ve never had that amazing sense of exhilaration that I had that Saturday morning, a quarter of a century ago.
OK, there is my new learning curve – shit or get off the pot, to put it bluntly. Write a new book or start training for a six or seven hundred kilometre walk in June or July next year.
I set off, all gung ho, the other day to redesign my website. Not one hundred percent sure what I actually intended doing, but I knew that I wanted to do something.
Spend time doodling in a notebook – yep, pen and paper – drawing diagrams of how I’d like my page(s) to look and uploading new photos to illustrate my topics and drawing links between posts and categories or pages or …something and as it turns out, after about two days messing around with customising and tweaking here and there, I have no idea where things stand now. I might even have made things worse. I want to direct all my posts on Celtic Trivia, Book Stuff and Learning Curves to have their own featured image and for each post to slip nicely onto its Page categorisation.
I just don’t seem to be able to do it. Half the time I can’t even access the dashboard to adjust settings and so on.
I feel I am sliding backwards in terms of my earlier avowed promise to get to terms with SocMedCom and I have to say that I may now know less than when I started this a few months ago – things chang, getting added to and taken away all the time so that I never seem able to either find the time, or have the ability, to stay abreast.
Looking back over the last few weeks, my blog thingy looks a bit sparse as I have barely added to it recently.
Sitting at the open windown, enjoying the mild weather, I decided to put myself to the test and do a major revamp of my wordpress thing and see what I can come up with.
When I started this blog back in March 2016, I was doing so for three main reasons – firstly to promote and advertise my first ever novel – Raiding Cúailnge – and to have fairly regular posts on Book Stuff in a general fashion. Next was going to be a section on Celtic Trivia where I would share some of the research I had done for my Raiding Cúailnge and finally a third string to the bow would be to track my LearningCurves in this – for me -new world of social media communication.
I seem to have managed, more or less in maintaining the Celtic Trivia section and I have added a few short stories to the Book Stuff section but it seems like my Learning Curves has petered out a bit so here I am again, trying to bolster not only it but also the main reason why I started this blog – my book, Raiding Cúailnge.
So, I am going to embed / upload an audio recording of me reading a chapter from the novel, which is set in an Iron Age Celtic society in Ireland and is based on the epic The Cattle Raid of Cooley,
OOOPS – major hiccup here. Just tried to upload an audio recording of a chapter from Raiding Cúailnge only to find I need to upgrade my blog before i can do so. Hmmm.
So, if you are new to my blog, feel free to start here or go back to the beginning and flit through the various posts I have made on all three main categories.
For some reason, as yet unclear, the individual posts I write don’t seem to go automatically into their respective categories, so I suppose I should reserve a future post for Curves in an attempt to find out what I am doing wrong and to correct it in future posts.
Anyway, I seem to have regressed to my second childhood now, despite the fact that I grunt whenever I sit down or stand up and already I am describing my age in terms of that old e-mail attachment which I include here:
ks or so but, I have to confess, it didn’t stir my interest at the time, being more interested in getting my book into shape than I was with myself. Anyway, my last attempt at a serious hike was about three years ago and I pulled out after the first day. I felt it was too much for me and that I just wasn’t able for it. In truth, I hadn’t prepared myself mentally for the challenge and I certainly had done nothing in the way of physical preparation.
Red Branch Chronicles 
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