This post is not Gluten free

I make bread. I never buy bread. It's a habit of mine. It's quite easy but also, can be as technical as you want to make it. You can throw (literally) the ingredients into a mixing bowl, for an easy loaf for example: 500g flour, 9g salt, 290g water, 7g dried yeast. And you can mix it up thoroughly into a dough with the handle of a wooden spoon and just leave it for an hour or so. Kneading isn't strictly necessary. Time can have the same effect. And then you can tip it out, fold it and shape it and leave it half an hour somewhere warm and then bake it. The temperature will depend on your oven. I use 230°C for six minutes then turn the loaf round and take the temperature down to 190°C for about another half an hour. You can make bread this simply, with only a few minutes actual intervention. It really is that simple, and generally it will be better than what you can buy.

Why do I make bread? Well, it started when my daughter had her first anaphylactic attack in response to nut allergy about 20 years ago. Prick-testing showed her to be allergic to all nuts, soya (and all pulses), egg, gelatin, tree pollen and cats. This severely cramps your style when you are three and makes birthday parties a nerve-wracking affair for all concerned.

But we discovered that pretty much all "manufactured" bread contained soya flour, or even stranger, lupin flour. And the bread in the in-store bakeries ran the risk of contamination with nuts, which could have been fatal. And so, we bought a breadmaker and this was a wonderful thing! Every morning, for a two minute preparation and a setting of the timer, we could come down to fresh bread at breakfast. We made white bread, wholemeal bread, bread with olives or sun-dried tomatoes. what a feast every loaf was.

But soon, I tired of the "breadmakery taste" which seemed to characterise every loaf. Oh, it was certainly better than most bread you could buy, but because of the construction of the pan in the machine, you always got a slightly caramel flavour, which was not unpleasant, just samey.

Then, after my brain haemorrhage when I was rather rudimentary for a while, tasks requiring procedural actions and no decision making were all I could manage. So, I made a lot of bread. And I started making it by hand. And this was something altogether different. I did, as it might be described, catch the bug.

I think this qualifies as a Cornucopia.

A local and nationally renowned mill ("By  Appointment to HM The Queen" no less) runs bread making courses lasting a day and explaining about aspects of the process, and a splendid lunch was thrown in to boot. We came away not only with a huge box containing flours and our produce: cottage loaves, plaits, Chelsea buns, pittas and other wonderful types of bread I forget now.

During the course, a kind of conversion took place in me. The revered and eminently knowledgeable chap running the course, with some authority, explained to us how bread is made in industry.  He told us of the Chorley Wood process and how a loaf can be made from flour and other ingredients in as little as half an hour, by high speed mixing, extra fast yeasts optimised for carbon dioxide production, and how this caused fast rising but led to collapse of the structure necessitating the need for extra gluten to be added. He explained how the bread went into steam ovens to be cooked at 90°C meaning that in some cases, along with all the unfermented starches and unmodified glutenins and gliadins (the proteins commonly referred to as "gluten"), the yeast might still be active right in the middle of the loaf. And all this using the cheapest ingredients possible to still be able to call it bread.
The purpose of the bread industry is not to make bread, but to make profit.

And so, enthused, I now had good reason to indulge my passion. When we left the course, he also gave us some of his sourdough culture. This is a mixture of wild yeasts such as lives in the air and on the husks of the grain and bacteria such as lactobacilli which like to hang out with yeasts. In short, it is a community of micro-organisms which all resides in a kind of pasty mixture. You feed it with flour and it adapts to the type of flour and the environment in your kitchen. Each place I have lived has caused my sourdough culture to produce different flavours in the bread. I assume this is because the population changes to include the residents of the new kitchen and worktops.

Latest bakings: Seeded Wholegrain sourdough

The beauty of sourdough is that it is a gentle process which is in some ways the antithesis of the Chorley Wood process: It takes time. Of course, you can make bread using yeast. I often buy a block from the bakery at the supermarket. It is good and strong and will lift dough which is "enriched" (mixed with oil or butter) which sourdough sometimes struggles with. But for my daily bread, I use sourdough (which is not sour by the way. A healthy culture, well fed will not go "lactic". That only happens if it is not fed adequately.

A sourdough fermentation can last days. Personally, once it is kneaded for five minutes or so, I tend to favour an overnight dough, usually no longer than twenty four hours in a fridge or cool kitchen. This long process, usually done somewhere cool, allows the yeasts and bacteria to "do some of the digesting for you". It also produces the deliciousness lacking in too much commercial bread. fermentation by products are what give the deliciousness. And slower and cooler give more. Of course, it grows and you have to "knock it back" (knock the gas out) at periodic intervals lest it take over your kitchen.

As I said earlier, you can make bread simply. Or you can get into the more complicated factors like hydration levels and different protein levels in flours. Simply put: bread flour needs at least 12% protein. British flour struggles to reach this, but that makes it good for biscuits. french bread uses "stronger " flour i.e. flour with more gluten.

54% hydration, yeast dough. Traditional cottage loaf and rolls

Hydration is an interesting variable. It just means the proportion of water to flour. I use between 54% (for a cottage loaf, a sandwich loaf or anything requiring a shape to be retained during baking) and 80% (for a ciabatta or focaccia.) The less water, the "tighter" the "crumb". This just means the bubble are smaller and the bread is more dense. Perfect for a good cheddar and some pickle.

A lighter crumb is a lower density, light bread with big bubbles. You don't knead this, but fold it at intervals, usually 45 minutes or an hour, four or so times. It makes bread that is perfect for soaking up a good olive oil.

ciabatta loaves. 75% hydration. Messy but worth it!

I have been making bread for 20 years in one way or another. It doesn't take much time once the process is clear in your head. I do ten minutes mixing and kneading, put the dough aside, leave it a period of time, knock it back for a few minutes, shape it, leave it a couple more hours and bake it for between half an hour and an hour. Actual intervention time is about twenty minutes and  I bake usually five or six loaves. I like to fill the oven for the sake of efficiency. I can freeze loaves when cool and apparently they are lower GI once thawed and so better with respect to insulin response. My usual batch of bread costs me, in UK money, £1.50 or thereabouts for ingredients and obviously, a few units of electricity for baking. For contrast, the local farmers' market sells large sourdough loaves for £3.50 to £6 a loaf. Food once a staple of the peasant diet is artisan and out of the reach of normal people. Or you can make your own.

I am an evangelist for good bread. I believe the stuff made in factories is bad for us. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I just understand the economics, the processes and the chemistry. People who tell me "I bloat when I have bread" say in puzzled tones that they can eat mine with no discomfort. I think my explanation above may hint at reasons why this might be. And I now bloat if I eat shop-bought bread (and I am by no means a "sensitive type" I can generally eat anything pretty much that falls within the category of "food").

Now I no longer have a salary, I cant afford to turn up with an expensive bottle of wine to a dinner party. But I can turn up with bread that will stop the conversation in the room. And the bread is no longer just a vehicle for more exotic foods. It is a star in  its own right.

I also run occasional courses of my own, and the look of delight when people open the oven door to behold their first loaf of bread, all crusty and perfect is a joy I never get tired of. The subsequent proud photos I receive always give me a deep sense of satisfaction that someone else is now finding their way in this wonderful craft and may bring me to new ways of baking by their discoveries.

If you don't already, I urge you to give it a try. There are some excellent videos on youtube I could point you to. I am still learning from them myself. It is better for you, even a loaf such as I described at the beginning of this piece. The making of it grounds you and leaves you feeling peaceful but accomplished. Of course, you get the occasional failure, but generally, it is a pastime that only brings deep gratification.

The Worth of A Diverse Portfolio

And so I finally find time to sit and write. Bit of a long one as a result. Sorry about that. It has all been building up in my head and so probably will lack a little structure as the stream-of-consciousness unfurls through my dancing fingers on the keyboard.
So, I have time to write today. This is mainly because today, I do not have any jobs on, though really I should be preparing for tomorrow's fairly major task; And also my dear lady is asleep upstairs after a long and productive night shift delivering babies. Hence I am unable to use my power tools, which is causing me no end of frustration as I have some beautiful timber I am just about to cut up to make a box for a friend. I have the fence all lined up on my circular saw and have calibrated it particularly accurately using the in-built laser line, a good metal rule and a magnifying glass (this latter because sadly even with my glasses now, resolving millimetres on a rule is a challenge). And so here am, sitting on my hands because I LOVE using my power tools and at the moment cannot.

And this brings me to a strange thought: These last weeks, my new-found means of (self) employment entails me doing for other people those jobs -pruning hedges, hanging trellis on walls, putting up gates, that kind of thing - which I happily do at home for leisure, only now people are paying me to do it. This has to be a Good Thing. And with the inclusion of the magnifying glass and a pencil sharpener to ensure my marking-out is accurate, I am extremely pleased with my handiwork. And so are others, it would seem.

So, when I think about how I made my living for over three decades, using my intellect and my extremely in-depth knowledge of, initially, electronic engineering, it makes me do a kind of internal double-take when I suddenly realise I am no longer using that for which I had trained for so many years.

Will I miss it? Yes, I think so. But I have a microcontroller and some other electronic bits and bobs here which I am getting together for a project so I will probably keep my knowledge up to date to some extent. But the challenges on a daily basis are not technical in the same way. That said, last week I bought the wrong size gate for a customer and found I had to build a suitable one from scratch using the wood and screws I just happened to have in the van. I was quite proud of it, and gratified this only took me twenty minutes or so (though frankly it wasn't difficult).
The challenges are therefore present, but different.

A sturdy bespoke gate built from scratch by my own fair hands. And a rabbit.

The other challenge I perceive is one of values. That sounds rather nebulous and a little existential perhaps. Actually it is not the former but may well encompass the latter. Allow me to elaborate:
when I was a corporate salary-slave, I had a particular role in a professional world. I traveled to far flung countries, I had meetings discussing the configuration and movement of literally millions of dollars' worth of product. I went out for dinner in expensive restaurants. My customers were in the region of tens of millions of dollars a year. People saw this as to some extent responsible and glamorous. I must be somebody to live that life.

Now, my customers are of the order of tens of pounds a day. I travel about in an old van. full of cement, wood and tools. People ask me what I do and I reply "Anything really. I maintain gardens, I put up fences, I hang doors". People on the whole seem rather less impressed with this response than my previous International Man of Mystery persona could provide. And I thought this would bother me. But it really doesn't. Were I inarticulate and felt intellectually inadequate, perhaps I would feel differently. But here I am writing this, able to divert, should I choose to the proteins comprising gluten, the best type of solar panel and charge controller, which philosopher I prefer for consolations in unhappy moments. Only some of this formed part of my education. The rest can be gleaned from books or online.

And this leads me, in my characteristic serpentine fashion, to the point that has been begging for examination in my funny-shaped head these last few weeks:
Where do we find our social value? Was I a somebody and am now a nobody?

Cars and houses seem a big thing in this particular game. I have a car and a house. Neither are remarkable. People wouldn't point to either and be impressed. Both are very ordinary. And yet, I am privileged to have either of them and feel so. My car gets me to see friends, to the shops, to dances. In that, it serves its purpose as well as something several times its cost. My house has more bedrooms than I need most of the time (three). Occasionally they are full of sleeping visitors, but usually, more likely, crates of beer bottles and boxes of books.  It is comfortable, warm and dry and I love living here.
My job, similarly will hopefully, once I have built a customer base, finance my lifestyle adequately. Or maybe I will founder and have to get a job in a shop. We'll see. For now, it looks promising.

So, what seem to be the usual markers of "success" are present, but perhaps my own "humble" examples of that are not perceived as being particularly high up that scale. Does this therefore make someone less "worthy" of regard? Does it cause them to be less likely to be invited to parties or have their company eschewed as being less desirable than that of more obviously "successful" people?
My experience is, actually, in general no. By having good manners and attempting to be genuinely nice to people, and as interesting as I can aspire to be within the confines of my intellect and personality, I have found people are as happy to talk to me and associate with me as an odd-job-man and gardener than when I was jet-setting around the world. It is not always the case, but when I do encounter those who look down upon my car, or who see me as a "loser" for lacking ambition and hence "success", I find in general, they tend not to be very careful in how they form opinions, accepting values from unreliable sources such as advertising or celebrity TV. Or prone to making incorrect assumptions about the nature of happiness and worth.

And so, I conclude that happiness and one's self of self-worth can be easily maintained without the cost of an expensive car or the soul-eroding responsibility of a "high-powered" job. In fact, it seems easier and cheaper to live a well-thought-out but simple life. And that is exactly what I am doing.

My Gap year comes to an end

Three hundred and sixty five days have elapsed since I became unemployed. After thirty two years of gainful and eventually lucrative employment, I was let go via a phone call I mistakenly answered on the beach during my holiday. That was over a year ago now and I still recall the mixture of outrage, relief and fear the call brought with it; Outrage because how dare a manager call me from the other side of the world and launch straight into contract-speak about the end of my career whilst I was on holiday; relief because the final year had been a nerve-wracking roller coaster of managing perceptions of my performance in an impossible job; Fear because I have a huge mortgage and no means to pay it beyond my redundancy payout which is beginning to run out.

The world of employment has become a largely inhumane place. I was lucky that I had relatively good pay and conditions. Others have to scratch a living on zero-hours contracts. But even so, that was no way to divest yourself of an employee. It was cowardly and inconsiderate because no consideration is required, at least beyond that of being a decent human being. Even that was lacking here as it seems no longer to be required in a manager. disappointing.

Possibly by writing this in a publicly visible setting, I burn my bridges. Well, I can't say many bridges have appeared to employment so maybe I lose nothing by this. But somehow I find this helpful to write.

In the last year I have completed probably three hundred job applications. Of those, I heard back in the negative for about six, had three interviews and been ultimately unsuccessful in getting a job. I suspect my age might be a factor. In the interviews it was clear I had significantly more experience at a higher level than the hiring manager and nobody wants an employee like that, do they? After some interviews, I received no further response at all. How indifferent and arrogant is that? Well, another sucker will always come along, won't they!

And so here I am, an electronic engineer, chock-full of all kinds of knowledge, speaking passable French and German, 25 years experience in sales with a major tech company, articulate and healthy. And unemployed. One of a number of cast-aside people with skills to offer that nobody seems to want. And yet industry screams "We need engineers! technologists! Scientifically literate candidates!" as if there were none available. And there are. They are just "too old". Perhaps deemed too expensive to too close to retirement to be considered.

Reading the industry press, my situation is far from unique. Indeed, it seems an endemic problem; Skilled and experienced people in their forties and fifties finding themselves surplus to requirements. It seems a shame that this pool of talent is going to waste. But wasted it is.

And so, I resign myself to never getting another "proper" job again, at least not in the sector I trained for. What to do? Oh, I have a plan. I am not sure if it will come off, but what choice do I have? Too old for tech, too young to retire.

It has been a good year. I went round most of Europe in a van (I never told you about that, did I? 4500 miles in a little over a month, meeting lovely people, some of them from here! Perhaps I should write some of that down) toured Scotland and lived on a beach at the foot of a mountain by the sea for days on end. I spent weeks this summer in Cornwall bobbing about in a canoe. I landscaped the garden. I made hundreds of loaves of bread and ran a baking course. We built a new pizza oven and filled the greenhouse with incredibly productive plants.
I am really good at being unemployed. I am always busy! But now it's a year and I need to do some work. So, I sit down to my business plan, review what I have to offer and find myself... hopeful. Let's see where my new path leads.

Just an atavism really

I almost never come here now. There was a time, oh, a very long time, when this was my lifeline to my eroding self. Now, the forces of distortion are long gone and with it, the need for some kind of assertion of my own will and character.
You hear people say:"I know people think I am a bitch/bastard, but on the inside, I am actually quite nice!"
This is to miss a central truth about identity: We are what we appear to be to others. As far as the world is concerned, what lies within is of no consequence if the external manifestation of a personality is a bitch or bastard. That is what we all experience.
And so, were we to be on a desert island, alone, could we be said to be an extrovert? A kindly soul? Mean-spirited? It doesn't seem so. Perhaps we could be determined or a defeatist. We could struggle valiantly against the odds, or lie down and die. Is that character, personality?
Perhaps our character is then to some extent our own experience of ourselves, at least in properties which are not social attributes.

So, maybe that is what this was: A reassurance that regardless of how external forces try to shape one, personal opinions can remain beyond the reach of others. Knuckling down day-to-day need not mean losing sight of what makes us who we are. We can "secretly" be who we actually are, only ironically of course in a public realm.

Well, I have no need of that now. There are no forces of correction to divert me to a path not of my choosing or contort me to fit the expectations of another. I have no employer (which is not without its own worries) to watch my every keystroke for dissent.

Perhaps then, i have no need of this, being able to "be myself" in the entirety of my "new" life.
But... Oh... this is so difficult! So out of practise have I become that my prose won't flow. It sticks and falters and the results are not as i would have wished. Short of the odd, admittedly verbose, paragraphs in my facbook statuses, I never write now. And that seems a shame.

So, that tells me I need to resume writing. If not here, then elsewhere. Probably not here actually: Too much painful history, though I do enjoy reading back the more whimsical entries. But somewhere. And since this isn't a desert island, personality may be retained.
Ahh, nobody reads this anyway so the pressure is not on. But they might, and so standards must be maintained. And that's the value - rigour.

Where to then? I am not sure. Somewhere because writing this was a real exertion and it shouldn't be. Somewhere else then. Yes. A new start. That feels good. Another one.

Who we are in the garden

Aha! Some writings! well, I have to keep my mind alive and my tools sharp. As will become apparent should you read this, circumstances dictate that some intellectual rigour must be maintained. And what better way than this: The examination of thoughts and the putting-into-words. And so, where to begin? With the situation I suppose. it's been a while, but here goes...

To look at a life and decide what it is about it that defines us is a difficult thing. I suppose this is why people ask at parties or when acquaintances are formed "What do you do for a living" or some variation thereof. It seems to provide a shortcut to an understanding of who it is we are talking to and their probable value system (or, if I am to be cynical, in some cases of a person's potential usefulness to the questioner).
Such pigeonholing seems ubiquitous and I think undermines the potential for friendships. To learn that someone is a consultant anaesthetist or works at a recycling plant sorting bottles from cans tells you something about their likely educational level and possible drive but nothing about whether they might be kind to animals or fun to spend an evening with by a fireside.
It is an unimaginative question and one I never ask unless it becomes pertinent to the immediate conversation. A better one, i have found is "So, what do you do for fun?" (Though sometimes this has startled the recipient by the sudden realisation that they actually don't do much beyond work and watching television).

And so, here I find myself at a loss now. I have no job. My questionable career trotting round the globe persuading people to buy what I genuinely believe to be very high quality and innovative technology has come to an end. After almost thirty years, inevitably and understandably, the market changes and my services are no longer required. That's ok. These things happen. We all need to adapt to new situations.

But of course, I now have to answer the tedious question on those occasions it appears. I could of course reply "I am a confidence trickster. I identify suitable people at parties to take part in my audacious and almost certain-to-succeed business ventures. Would you like to buy my miraculous tonic wine?"
Or I could just respond with a euphemism for "I am unemployed" such as "I am between jobs" or "I am currently a gentleman of indolence and leisure".
This latter is actually quite accurate. Though I am no longer being paid by a company for the hours of a week I attend to their endeavours, I am finding plenty to occupy my time. Imagination does that.

If someone were to ask how I spend my leisure hours, I could reply with any number of activities: I garden. I dance! I bake bread. I brew fine ales from the basic ingredients. I make furniture from suitable recycled timber. I kayak on seas and on inland waters. I work on my self-build camper van. I make pizza ovens out of clay from gardens. I ferment my produce. I read about science. I write (occasionally).

And any one of these can be a point of commonality. Myriad conversations might begin from any one of these topics. Or a long and enthusiastic dialogue might begin from the natural links between some of them.
So much better, it seems, than talking about the rather specialised and artificial nature of my (former) employment.

So, we never need fear the question. There is plenty that one does that can indicate or define the type of person we might be. Of course, I could do all of those and still be a psychopathic manipulator who enjoys pulling the legs off flies (I am not, btw. But I do resort to fly papers in my kitchen due to the rural populations of insects that otherwise tend to congregate where many of my aforementioned activities take place).

So, are we what we do? An opinion exists amongst learned thinkers that personality is an illusion and no more really than a set of individual cognitive processes. There appears to be some merit to this argument. But that aside, we cannot deny that we each possess a kind of set of characteristics and behaviours that define us and which others may like, tolerate or abhor.

"Doing loads of stuff" and the nature of that stuff may therefore tell us and others a lot about what that personality is. And by this I do not say "appears to be" because if that is how we appear to people, it must by definition be what we present to the world. Being "Not like that at all on the inside" is not really relevant with regards to how the world finds us. To all intents and purposes what we manifest is what we offer the world as our personality.

In the last year or so, I have divorced, moved house, lost my job, got another relationship. It is as if every single component of my life has been replaced by something new and different. And yet, I feel in all of this, pretty much the same person. Perhaps a little more carefree and dismissive of life's niggles. Maybe a little more outgoing. But essentially pretty much still me.

Is who we are immutable then? Is it not contingent on our situations? well, that is a complex question. But it is one I feel is a little bit clearer to answer in the light of my recent upheavals. My feeling is no. The essence of us is subject to modification in some minor ways (brain damage aside) but the essence of who we are remains essentially the same.

And asking what I do for a job isn't going to tell you what that is. So ask something else. It will almost certainly yield more fruitful results.

The new inhabitants of my life

I sat this evening in the rather too plentiful dark, looking into my pond with a torch. A few short weeks ago, the area was a thicket of hydrangeas with a small ash tree in the middle. Now it is a half-metre deep pond just larger than a king-sized bed with ledges just visible in in its murky depths and gently sloping beaches of tiny flint pebbles for the creatures to get in an out. It is a popular pond with the birds; An extended family of sparrows bathe in it noisily and fractiously every day and a grey wagtail visits in between their bickering baths. A hedgehog visits nightly for the mealworms which are left as incentive and a frog, narrowly avoiding the tread of my foot, leapt several metres to land in the middle of the water before making his way to the margins.

All of this endorsement of my pond-siting and pond-construction skills pleases me more than I can articulate with mere words. But leaping and whooping might perhaps go some way towards it. More alarmingly but, I suppose quite naturally, there has been a buzzard on the fence at the end of the garden a mere thirty or so metres away and yesterday a thwarted sparrowhawk, having missed his dinner in his assault on the pyracantha bush sat grumpily on a pot a metre from the patio doors. Word has obviously got round amongst the avian community, of a new and interesting garden to visit.

In the damp darkness, unseasonably warm for November, I watched for perhaps twenty minutes. There is no sign of the "supermoon", almost full this evening, due to the heavy blanket of cloud sullenly hanging over the Cotswold scarp. With the plain of the Severn to the South and the brow of the hills rising to the North the skies here can be quite big, with cloudscapes to fill the eyes. Tonight though, it is just inky blackness.

The pond seems to be teeming with life. there are several types of water beetle busying themselves with dragging their buoyant cargoes of air down to the depths, in search of.. what? what do they eat? Not the insect larvae that wiggle and wriggle convulsively just below the surface. And somehow a pond snail has arrived and is floating contentedly (as far as i can tell) upside down as if the underside of the water's surface is a pavement to be traversed. So much life is here, in this thousand or so litres of water.

Perhaps, in the bushes at the end of the garden - a formless and unintentional hedge resulting from neglect for no more than a few years - there are rustlings. It could be the hedgehog but his dense little blob of a body is usually visible as he ambles round the lawn. It is not too difficult to imagine tiny faces peering at me with bemused eyes as they perform their nightly foraging for worms or useful bits of string or anything else that takes their fancy. Did I hear a tiny chuckle as I tripped over a brick I had been using to elevate a fatball for the robin? No, i am sure it was my imagination...

In the quiet of the night, the not-too-distant motorway being less intrusive due to the hour, the noise in my head, appearing as it did at the time of my burst sub-arachnoid blood vessel, is almost deafening. This noise exploded deafeningly into my mind as the blood burst into my brain (albeit, the photos suggest, in rather tiny but still incredibly disruptive amounts) those near-five years ago now and refuses to leave. Mostly, I am not aware of it. But tonight, it is frankly annoying: A whine of such intensity that it competes with the eleven o'clock train to Temple Meads Station. So, i leave the little watchers and go back inside, content that the garden is progressing the right way to attract the wildlife I had hoped would arrive.

Inside the house, i have lit the fire. I didn't need to really as it is quite warm, but it makes me feel less lonely for some reason. The seemingly recent memory of a houseful of family rings in my mind's ear, and treasured though the memory is, my resultant regrets crowd in on me and accentuate my alone-ness in the house.This is not a house for the lone resident. It deserves more people. There are three bedrooms of which two have very infrequent but welcome visitors.
But now, as the heating turns off from the prompting of the thermostat as it is warmed by the heat of the fire, it is as if unseen occupants shift restlessly in the beds and others make their way across the landing in search of the bathroom.
Old ghosts perhaps. How nice that would be. I would invite them to sit with me and we would converse about such things as they have seen, and perhaps they would be equally enthralled at my own experiences, though I suspect theirs might be more enlightening.

But there are no ghosts. None that is, except the ones in my mind: The laughter of children splashing in the sink before bedtime, happily now grown to be admirable adults who indulge their old dad with irregular but welcome visits but who no longer fight over the toothpaste. And the singing of one once so happy in a shared life but now elsewhere doing who-knows-what?

Life is so very different now. Things change, children grow up, parents grow apart, lives are dissolved and reconstructed in ways not better but merely different. The birds still quarrel and the beetles still swim. And probably all is as it should be. Probably.

Words for a Thousand Lunchtimes

A friend died a couple of weeks ago. I am vainly attempting to write a eulogy to deliver at his funeral. I sit looking at my pen, at my keyboard, at the quarrelling sparrows on the lawn and my mind is immobile. It refuses to elicit the first words with which to describe this man. Not because there is nothing to say, because there is an abundance; But because of a sincere desire to do the memory of the man due justice. My fingers hover hesitantly over the keys, paralysed by the multitude of suddenly facile and cliched phrases that suggest themselves in such cases. So, I come here, in order to tangentially, obliquely, begin the task by proxy. Perhaps if I fling enough words onto this white rectangle, something will emerge, like a speck of gold in the vast pile of rubble from a mine in promising ground.

I was surprised to be asked by him to speak just a few days before his predicted but untimely death. He wasn't someone I saw often but he was someone with whom I formed an unlikely connection. You come across people in your travels through life and have no idea mostly what their facades hide. A bland affable exterior might elicit profound wisdom regarding the relevance of millennia-old ideas to your life, a curmudgeonly misanthrope could throw your perspective of them completely off balance by letting slip about their weekends volunteering with autistic children. We often do not wear our identities on our faces or demeanours it seems.

So, a chance observation, after a decade of knowing this previously distant man, sparked an unexpected connection that was to last a decade or more of lunchtime conversations. An observation of an article he was reading in New Scientist, which I had read the previous day, opened up a world of discussion and exchange of ideas which I am told he looked forward to immensely and with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
Our conversations ranged from the seemingly magical behaviour of radio waves within metal computer enclosures (his specialist field and one in which he would have unjustly have declined to describe himself as an expert), through religion and the more popular forms of irrationality to the neural basis of consciousness, as revealed by my own, and others' experiences of cognition with respect to the machine that creates it. A contentious conclusion but one I feel is an unavoidable inevitability. I think this may have been the topic of our very last conversation, in fact.
Ours was a particularly materialist universe, the evidence for this having been carefully and systematically examined, for this is the rigour that characterised his thinking.

So, the grumpy old bugger that refused to suffer fools gladly and would bluntly point out inconsistencies in a particular position, softened and became a man of immense curiosity when given the opportunity discuss his ideas without judgement. People really can surprise you if you give them the chance. No longer scratchy and irritated by imprecise opinions, he became wistful and enthusiastic in his examination of them. Many a lunch hour was taken up this way.

Perhaps, this is a lesson I take from this (and as you know, I always like to extrapolate from the individual experience to the general principle when observation suggests I can): Perhaps the grumpy, the spiky, the vague and the seemingly dull, hide deeper treasures which need careful uncovering. Ok, some are just what they at first glance seem and many a time I have suddenly remembered imaginary appointments to escape tedious expounding of irrelevant facts or a stream of poorly constructed opinions. But maybe it is worth persevering.  Maybe some people hide, for reasons of their own. a world of fascination, imagination or experience.

I would suggest it is worth persevering just in case.

I am still no closer to an opening, but I do feel I have freed up the hinges on the gates of my thought somewhat.