David Hadley's Blog, page 181

All the Accordions of her Desire

Well, you know, that is just how it is sometimes. Sometimes, you just can't get the accordions. It is disappointing for her, true. At least though, you did make the effort, so all that shoe polish was not entirely wasted. It did give you the chance to engage in a bit of midnight surveillance of the supermarket car park to see the herds of shopping trolleys in their natural habitat, grazing on the detritus left by the shoppers as they made their way home. Thos shoppers, no doubt, going back to homes replete with all the accordions that any sensuous woman could desire.

Still, you consoled yourself as you made your weary way back home to write up your nature-watching notes, that up until now, at least , she has shown very little interest in the erotic possibilities of the bagpipes to bring back a little romance into tired lives.

Having said that though, however, she still has not admitted that the crowbar and the matching 'his 'n' Hers' cowbells was not a mistake on her part. At least, the neighbours seemed to believe your claim that the late-night metallic ringing noises were just the result of a bout of emergency plumbing, not the four cowbells of the apocalypse as predicted by the adherents of that strange religion they adhere to. This despite the fact that none of the Saturdays in January brought about the End of Times as they'd so confidently predicted with all the smug glee of the self-righteous looking forward to watching their neighbours go up in flames as just and holy retribution for their ungodly interest in accordions.

The Dangers of Helicopter Parents

There has been a lot written in the media – often by columnists eager to foist some old drivel off on their paying customers - about the dangers of helicopter parents. I – for one – do not see the problem with this. As long as the offspring of the aforesaid parents have a good healthy set of rotor blades and they don't leave their landing pads in a mess, then they should be all right. Some could even grow up and get a career in air-sea rescue, or as an air ambulance.

It is not like those main battle tank parents who let their self-propelled artillery run amok across other people's battlefields just when they are trying to settle down to a nice cosy long drawn-out war.

Then there are the mother ships that leave their young rowing boats and teenage yachts crowding up the harbours with no real supervision while the mother ships are off on cruises to faraway places.

However, the true menace of our time are those who have created a world where the bicycle can – seemingly – breed at will, infesting our roads and country lanes with something that is a best a menace and often no better then two-wheeled vermin. That has to stop and stop now, before everyone in the world ends up wearing lycra and silly helmets.

The Contemporary Art World

Nowadays it is not unknown for someone not well-versed in the art of ketchup-based artistry to produce significant works of great artistic merit through the accidental spillage of their ketchup – or – even on occasions – their brown sauce.

For example, the art world was shocked, astounded and then quite aroused recently when Trilby Dropkick, a former clerical worker from Droitwich exhibited her Breakfast No. VII at the prestigious Condescension gallery. This revolutionary art work consisted of the standard sausage, bacon and beans, but also with the rarely seen – certainly in London metropolitan exhibition breakfasts - black pudding, all with their individual blob of ketchup placed in the exact geometrical centre of each individual foodstuff item.

Not since Splurge Dollop, first exhibited his Thatcherite-Tyranny Bacon Sandwich Hegemony back in the late 80s had the London art world seen such daring use of tomato ketchup. Of course, Dollop's later works, featuring balsamic vinegar and some of the more exotic salad oils, were regarded by most critics as evidence of Dollop selling out to the art – if not the catering - establishment. Ever since then, the London art world has been looking for a new darling. It now seems Dropkick came along at just the right time. However, it remains to be seen if she can keep up with these first inspired ideas, especially come the inevitable time when her ketchup bottle runs out.

The Now

Here is now, waiting for you. It may not be quite the now you were looking for all those years ago when you set out on your journey to look for that time you could call your own. Back then, you lived the time carved by others: parents, teachers, adults and your young friends. Back then, you didn't even know that one day you would be alone with your own time, wondering what to do with it. Back then, you didn't even think about time that much, except noticing how schooldays dragged and the weekends were always over far too soon, descending almost immediately into that Sunday evening torpor when the threat of the week ahead grew huge in the mind, growing claws, teeth and talons ready to rip you away from all that mattered to you.

Then, though, slowly, all those other times faded away, leaving you here looking at this now you hold in your hand as you wonder what to do with it, realise every time you glance down at it, it has grown smaller, lost more of its shine and sparkle. There was a time when you almost held the whole world in your hand and the now filled that world, pulsing with bright possibilities. Now all you have is this one small now, pulsing with a fading light that you know one day will grow dark and then disappear.

The Safe House

I had not seen her in months. When we met again, eventually, it was almost like meeting each other for the first time. The safe house, this time, was a large bare flat up high in a tower block. It made me nervous, being up that high. It always limits the chances of escape. After all, there is only the one way to go, realistically, and that is down. Up this high you soon run out of options to go any higher.

Unless you sprout wings, of course, such things, though, require more planning and time than we had; although, it has been done. You do feel incredibly vulnerable though, up there, exposed to the gun sights of the chasing police officers. It only works, therefore, if you do it unexpectedly. If you do it and they have marksmen ready… well, I've seen that happen too.

Anyway, Mary was there in the flat when I arrived. I wasn't expecting it. Paths do cross occasionally, but never predictably. One of the first things the Underground learnt, back in the early, bloody days, was that predictability meant death, or worse – capture.

We didn't say much. There is not much too say. The memories haunt us like ghosts. We can see it in each other's eyes. If the security forces ever invent some machine that can detect the ghosts of comrades lost in people's eyes, then the Underground will be finished. We all carry those memories, those scars. Sometimes I think we only carry on out of habit, the habit of always running, and not always just from the security forces and the secret police.

Monday Poem: The Way Back

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The Way Back

All of this is hidden in the darkest corners
of those places you do not want to go,
if these are memories, they haunt
you like malignant ghosts.

If they are not memories, you walk
these halls and corridors,
searching for a shape to bring forth
a new world from these ashes

Of a life you once held so close
that you could feel every breath it took
as it waited to be set free
to fly away to its own world

Far out of your reach
and long lost from your sight.
you thought you would be left
with something more

Than the ashes of memory
that life could leave its mark.
But now you wander these rooms
and all these meandering corridors

Looking for a way back to then,
so you can start all over once more
and find a route through, back
to that place you thought you knew.

Semi-Finals

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It was… oooh… easily as big as big thing. But, over the other side down by the purple end there was one of those things that is a bit smaller than one of those not very big things you sometimes see advertised as not being as big as you'd think they would need to be, considering the amount of petrol it takes to ignite a member of the judiciary.

Still, as Doreen said at the time, you wouldn't want to paint it. Frankly, I wouldn't even want to sketch it, but then that is why I had the camera and the two rather nice-looking underdressed young ladies willing to disport themselves across various items for a small no-questions asked fee.

Back in those days though, such things were much easier than they are now. All those health and safety regulations and still our newspapers are full of reports of wallabies abandoned by the roadside and cruelly discarded wildebeests still in their original packaging. However, as I said to the VAT inspector, you won't get that to come out in the wash.

She laughed, of course, but you mark my words (out of ten), she won't be laughing once they get knocked out in the semi-finals again. Still, the cheese was nice.

Maternal Theorems

As my wise old mum used to say: 'The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides'. But she was a mathematician and you had to think yourself lucky that she didn't recite the formula for solving quadratic equations at moments of crisis, especially as she always had trouble remembering it all and often had to work it out from first principles, which often necessitated carrying a blackboard and chalk on family outings.

Still, it was a happy childhood, even though we had to display our working far more than other children of our age. I still have the book of four-figure log tables she gave me for my fourth birthday, even though the picture of Bambi on the cover does make it seem less than grown-up these days. I can still remember the bedtime stories she'd read to use from Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and the necessity of repeating al our times tables before sitting down to the evening meal together as we checked to see which one of us she'd favoured with a prime number of vegetables.

Still, all good things come to an end, except those that are infinite, of course, and she seemed so disappointed in me when I said I was off to university to study Golf Course Management, instead of the Pure Maths she'd always hoped I'd choose. But I had to go my own way, even though she regarded my interest in the trigonometry of golf courses as trivial, at best.

Anyway, at night now, I've found myself reading some of the great mathematical theorems to my own children at bedtime and every now and then, my wife and I do a few equations together in the moonlight.

Scattered over the Possibility of a Day

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Then you shake the dark sheets of the night and watch the stars scatter and fall, twisting the shape of this universe into something new. A place where the possibilities arise and all your dreams become true. There was a time when you thought all of this was just some dust you scattered over the possibility of a day, to take it all into your hands and shape it into something of your own choosing. That this could be the day when that one special person would come, appearing out of the mists of the dawn to take you on into a day like no other you could ever have known.

These days you no longer expect handsome princes, or that dark-eyed wanderer of the highways to come and take you away from all this. You have heard too many stories like that to believe any more of them. You know that adventures are not for the like of us, we are those that plod through our days; no longer waiting, hoping or dreaming. We have all heard too many stories, and we know that none of them will ever come true.

Then, though, you hear the muffled sounds of movement deep in the morning mists and see a shadow forming into solidity and wonder, could this be that day, after all?

The Blue Llama Period

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Sometimes it all seems so worthless, at least as far as the llamas are concerned. Although, eventually you do get used to the looks of disdain from the llamas as you watch them taking it in turns to roller-skate past your pagoda and make noises of disapproval at your latest 'artistic' venture. Bitterly, you remember the times when your artistic ability was unquestioned and the sheer brilliance with which you placed primary-coloured eggcups at the cardinal points of the compass on a piece of semi-masticated cardboard was acclaimed by all. An artwork often regarded as the greatest stroke of artistic genius since Leonardo told Mona Lisa to stop being such a miserable cow and try to smile a bit.

Now, though – since the incident involving the llama and the tin of Magnolia emulsion - you have become the centre of an intense amount of llama-based protest and concentrated scrutiny by those selfsame mammals. Llamas – as we all know only too well – have always been rather careful of their portrayal especially in critically-acclaimed artworks. After all, famously, it was his botched attempt to paint a pair of llamas in moonlight that led to Van Gogh's depression and the argument with a llama-obsessed young lady that led to his ear-related incident. Not only that, Bruegel once became the centre of a llama protest when he attempted to portray a llama as a familiar of the devil that delighted in inserting red-hot pokers in the fundaments of disgraced clergymen. As for Picasso and his famous Blue Llama period, the antagonism towards the painter by a mob of llamas protesting outside his studio forced the artist to flee the country, taking with him only seven of his current mistresses and two paintbrushes.

All this means you should take to heart – whenever you wish to portray llamas in an artistic medium - this warning from history.