Euan Semple's Blog, page 4

Alby is practicing making a perfect circle

The intensity of the mundane

I think it was Robert Paterson who first used “the intensity of the mundane” to describe the power of blogging. I still think the phrase captures what makes personal blogs different from the airbrushed realities of social media.

Two bloggers who I think are great examples of the power of “thinking out loud” on your blog and not worrying how shiny and special you look are Tracy Durnell and Winnie Lim. Both of them are so thoughtful and open on their blogs and I keep thinking I should be more like them.

I don’t write about everything I think or do. I am still selective. But on what basis? What am I afraid of sharing? I suppose when I was still working and felt the need to manage my online presence more it felt like it mattered what people thought of me.

Now it doesn’t…

Just a thing (Part Two)

When we were about to trade our original camper van, Connie, in for our new van, Ritzy, I wrote about how emotionally attached I felt to the van, despite it “just being a thing”. What is interesting is how long it is taking to form an equivalent attachment to our new van. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great step up, and was the right thing to do, but I still haven’t fully identified with it. Partly the weather. It has been so wet and cold on all of our trips so far that we have only seen one side of the van. It will be once the weather improves, and definitely once I get it over to France for a long trip, that I will really start to feel that it is really ours.

Couple of nice days in the hills.

Based in Llanthony in The Black Mountains I did the ridges on either side of it on Monday and yesterday. Cobwebs fully blown away.

Can snails hop?

The Kindly Ones

I’m not quite sure what to say about this book. It’s unrelenting, challenging and distressing. But the feeling of historical veracity makes the experience feel worthwhile. It gives you insight into what happened, why it happened and how it happened, which felt valuable.

I was also aware of trusting the author while following his line of thinking, to be doing it for the right reasons. But by the end I wasn’t so sure.

There were extended passages of bizarre fantasy. And even more bizarre plot twists, where the main protagonist faces death on a number of occasions and miraculously survives. So much so that by the end I was sort of wishing he would just stop.

And speaking of the end, the ending actually had that feeling of novelists who just don’t know how to end their novel and kind of give up.

So would I recommend it? No, it’s not that kind of book. It’s up to individual readers to find a reason to explore these topics.

Do I regret reading it? No, probably not. It made me think hard about things that are important to understand about mankind.

But there was a feeling of relief when it was over and that wasn’t just because of the subject matter.

Difference

My current reading includes large sections of dense academic arguments about language, nationality, race and tribal identity in the Caucasus, all with a view to determining whether thousands of people are in fact Jewish and therefore “OK”
to murder in cold blood.

I’ve gone on in this blog on many occasions about our willingness to label and by labelling to create a sense of other. Most of the time it appears relatively benign and innocent, possibly even necessary, but it takes very little for it to tip into pernicious, brutal, absolute definitions that bring out the worst in us.

Going back to my previous post about the state, when these perceived differences become manifest at scale, it becomes all too easy to pick sides, to draw lines. Arguably, the ordinary people on either side of the lines that have been drawn in the Middle East have more in common than they have taught to believe .

But we cling to these stories of group identity and fight for them, often to the death.

What a state we’re in.

I am currently reading The Kindly Ones, which is a harrowing novel based on an account of Nazi atrocities during The Second World War. So far, the overriding theme has been the ridiculous psychological dances that the characters in the novel do to justify, or even just cope with, the insanity of the horrors that they’re perpetrating on innocent people. The main justification is the state, allegiance to the state, or subjugation to the state, or even the German word “Volk”, the collective, whatever word you choose to give to it. It is that relatively modern vehicle of mass through which power is manifest.

We lose so much by succumbing to that model of how we should run things. Even currently and locally, it frequently occurs to me as I’m driving past the multibillion investment in HS2, a railway that doesn’t start anywhere or end anywhere, that I’m not even sure many people will use. And as I pass it, I’m driving along roads that are so riddled with potholes that unless you’re a local who knows how to duck and weave your way through them, you will inevitably end up bursting tires or breaking suspension. This feels like such a distortion of value and bizarre distribution of financial capability.

It’s madness. That centralisation of power such that power can be manipulated and distorted by relatively small groups of people isn’t healthy. And yet everybody is trained to be terrified of the alternative – anarchism. But actually anarchism is just an inclination to keep things small and local until absolutely necessary to do otherwise.

It may be that we’re too far down the road of centralising power to even consider this, or it may be that the centralised states around the world are crumbling under their own weight. But every time we’re faced with that choice of localising or centralising, I know which way I would lean.

On taking a walk

I know I am a biased, proud, Dad but I loved this post from Mollie about the joys, and benefits, of walking in a field near our house.

It’s all made up

I’ve just been chatting to Helen Blunden about a novel I may be about to read and confessing that I have an issue with fiction – namely that “it is all made up”. Goodness knows why I find this such a block. I have no problem thoroughly enjoying films and TV series, but when I am reading a novel the fact that it isn’t real gets in the way.

But then a lot of the non-fiction that I read is made up too! All of our stories are made up. Our narratives about our own lives are made up. Does that make them any less meaningful?

What do you reckon?