I must stop saying I’m tired

I am genuinely tired, but I gotta stop saying it. It’s like tourette’s, and everyone seems to do it. It’s almost like a status symbol… the more you say you are tired the more ‘stuff’ you must do, and the more worthy you must be.

Maybe how I feel now is just ‘default’, I’ve felt the same for about ten years, so maybe this is just ‘it’, I need to recalibrate my idea of what tired is. Truth is I find time to watch TV, play golf and football, read books and sit in the garden… if I was that tired I could just go to bed, which I don’t seem to do till around midnight.

Maybe it’s a mater of acting like ye are full of beans and tiredness will be taken from ye,

Also, it’s quite boring when someone asks you how you are and you reply with a sigh and a moan about tired you are.

Good evening Belgrade

Good evening Belgrade this is the Jungle calling, these are the results of the Monkey jury…

2 pts – Bosnia http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/bosniaherzegovina.shtml

4 pts – France http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/france.shtml

6 pts – UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/uk.shtml

8 pts – Spain http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/spain.shtml

10 pts - Ukraine http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/ukraine.shtml

12 pts - Greece http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/participants/greece.shtml

The randomness of guilt

An estemend blogger wrote about the ‘drama of forgiveness’… he injected lots of god mumbo, and yes, some jumbo but the sentiment was an interesting one.

Guilt is a funny thing and from my experience, quite random. I’m sure (know) I’ve done lots of bad things and hurt people along the way but for most of these incidents I feel only passing guilt and in the most cases I would imagine I don’t remember. But there are somethings I’ve done which stick with me and fill me with genuine guilt.

I’m gonna lay them out before you here not as a confessional, but to show you how random and quite puny these things are.

Both are things which I did or was involved in when I was in primary school, at the age of about 7-8. I wonder if there are any psychologists out there who can make some assessment of me based on this. It’s gonna come across that I was a goody-two-shoes as a boy, which I suppose I was… but I did ‘bad’ things like lighting fires, chucking crab apples at peoples windows (windys), once pulled a pen knife on someone during a fight (seriously)… zero guilt attached.

These are the things which I find myself thinking about occasionally on the bus to work

The first is the most puny I’d say… simple as this… stole a fiver from my mum’s purse and spent it on loads of sweets then scoffed them all. Back in them days a fiver was ‘something’ probably equivelent to a £20 today… I was able to buy a carrier bag full of sweets and treats. I think the guilt is made worse because my mum asked me directly if I had taken it, and I lied through my teeth. SERIOUSLY I’ve felt guilt about it since then, so much so that on my mother’s death bed when I was 25, I had to tell her, she laughed and couldn’t even remember.

The other thing is a wee bit worse, all the females reading this are gonna think I was a orrible little boy. It all involved a girl whose name I remember well but will call her Kate… she was my ‘best friend’ when I was a 5 yr old. Crucially she was the first girl in the class to get boobs - not her fault, and some would also jump to my defence and say it’s not my fault. All of a sudden the boys in the class decided that they were supposed to ‘love’ her. No one was quite sure why and what exactly we were supposed to do. About 5 or 6 of us started to hang around outside her house to see her (I think her dad actually did come out with a big stick one time). Kate didn’t really know what to do with all this attention, she remained friendly and one fated afternoon she agreed to kiss us all. Very nice of her, but ill advised. There was an actual queue, I think I was toward the end of the line so I could make sure everyone else was actually gonna do it.

This is when it all changed. I’m not sure who it was, I don’t think it was me but it might have been, that decided to call her blubber lips. We were suddenly all very ‘aware’ and embarrassed - like Adam and Eve in the garden of eden, if you will. We all ran for the cover of mockery and made her life hell. We all decided we hated her… that she was fat, ugly and had blubber lips (which she hadn’t… she was just a normal little girl, who’d been early to develop). For a few months it was our sport… mocking her, laughing at her, refusing to stand beside her in line-ups. She moved school. I was 8 years old, and still I feel bad.

There you go.

The Ethical Bomb

Diplomats from around the world are gathering in Dublin for a conference that aims to secure a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

But some of the world’s main producers and stockpilers - including the US, the UK, Russia and China - oppose the move.

There is some controversy at the moment in UK military circles (at least as reported in the media) with some high ranking personnel campaigning for the ban and some against.

It strikes me though, what is it about a cluster bomb that is so unethical? It does its job quite well - kills people. I grant you that some of the bomblets hang around after the fact to affect unsuspecting passers by, but by and large a cluster bomb doesn’t kill as many people as an a-bomb or even the massive bombs dropped on buildings during the gulf war… not even as deadly, I propose than an AK-47 in the wrong hands for 25 years of its life.

Since when did bombs become subject to ethics? I doubt the receivers of any bomb payload ever think of the hardware as suitably moral in its construction.

is it not closer to the truth that most people find most weapons pretty unethical until the time comes when they need to use them. Cluster bombs might seem nasty until their use stops the proverbial hun from killing you and yours. In 1945 japan found out that the USA was planning to drop devastating A-bombs on their cities, they decided that it was ethical to use ‘waterboarding’ to extract information from POWs… the people who carried this out were eventually executed by the Americans for unethical war crimes… skip forward 50 years when the USA has similar fears about ‘them and theirs’ and the ethics of such a thing are is lot more grey. Such is life.

New Job-itis

My Mrs has a theory, I usually roll my eyes at her theories but this one might have legs - New jobs bring illness. I started a new job/contract last Tuesday at this weekend I’ve got a nasty coldy/fluey thing (ive tried to ramp it up to Meningitis/ME, but I’m only being allowed to call it a “slight flu”).

The theory goes that people get ill on their first week at a new job because they are exposed to a range of new germs around a new office. Or at least, that’s one explanation to of the phenomena … a phenomena I’m not yet accepting, I must say.

Any one else experienced/heard of this?

I’m originally from

A very subtle moment occurred in my life this morning, so subtle that it passed me by. I met a new person in my new job and upon hearing my accent he asked where I was from. My automatic answer was ‘Bristol’, then followed by ‘but originally from Belfast’. I think the moment when an ex-pat starts saying the phrase ‘…originally from…’ is a moment of transition from long term visitor to resident. This status has crept up on me.

Women arn’t up to being world leaders

BBC Newsnight are running a weekly feature visiting various families in a little Virginian town called Culpepper. It will follow their views and opinion on the run-up to November’s US Elections. 

It’s not the most interesting thing in the world, I must be honest but one thing did strike me. One of the ladies, a democrat, was asked if she would vote for Hillary Clinton. She replied that she probably wouldn’t because she thinks that it’s a job that requires a man, simple as that. She continued that there are just some jobs and decisions that she would rather see a man making.

It’s important to understand that this woman wasn’t a weak and submissive bonnet wearing 50s throwback, she was a smart professional go-getter. On further investigation they found this view to be not unrepresentative. I was very surprised, but then it hit me… they never had Mrs Thatcher. I just can’t imagine even the most misogynistic Briton or even European saying those things and the reason is surely Thatcher. It’s a whorey old cliché, but the best thing she ever did for women was becoming PM and then being a war-mongering tough-talking union-bashing battle-axe. No women in this country ever need to worry about being labelled weak and emotional just because of their sex… or at least you’d think.

Rockin Robin

This is nothing other than a ‘look what i did!’ post.

picture of a Robin Redbreast, named Tony i believe… captured in mid flight by my photographic luck skills