Thursday, October 19, 2023

One Sentence - 000030*

 


“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway

Storm Babet.

I have to admit I seriously thoght "Storm Babet" was yet another zed lister tv personallity type, someone off the latest round of Big Brother.

This is where I find myself now. Stuck between endless repears of horrible sixties, or seventies, television comedies, like endless reruns of "On The Buses". Not even funny at the time of first airing, and on the other side endless "real life" fly on the wall style programs. Any program with "The Real" in the title somewhere is diametrically the opposite. Absolutly the observation effect, basically the act of looking at something changes its fundimental nature.

I'm not really pointing out anything that is not obvious. It's cheaper to stick a camera in a room and just film the hard of thinking bounce off the walls, than it is to actually commision a script with actors, props, and costumes.

I have said before the future of television is everyone watching each other, watching each other on set top cameras. Oh wait isn't that just goggle box?

Too late!

This is todays sentence.  

"Storm Babet is not a person!"

* I am incrementing the numbers by tens, in the style of basic programming, so if I think of something else to add, I can later. So as all counting starts at zero, the first is 000000. The second then becomes 000010. The third is 000020 etc, etc.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

One Sentence - 000020*


“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway

It's funny how certain tunes follow you through life, reminding you of previous times you heard them, and adding to the memories.

I'm not really sure where, or when, I first heard "The Flower Duet" (Delibes: Lakmé - Duo des fleurs (Flower Duet)). There is no arguing it is a beuatiful piece of music.

Early experiences have to be the film "The Hunger", a disapointment that the film can only be found (by me at least) in a mono soundtrack version on DVD.

Yes the heavy use in a couple of adverts (BA, and a washing powder advert). Both failing to diminish my love of the music.

Finally, possibly the best end to a computer game ever, Hardw[a]r. At the end of the game (spoilers for a bit of an old game) you have to strip your craft down, and run the gauntlet of every other ship hunting you, as you attempt to deliver the last part of a star ship. You only just make it to the final destination, to be offered a place on the ultimate escape ship. As the ship soars into the sky, the planet is destroyed behind you in nuclear explosions all to the background of this piece of music:

Delibes: Lakmé - Duo des fleurs (Flower Duet), Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa

This is todays sentence.  

"The Flower Duet"

* I am incrementing the numbers by tens, in the style of basic programming, so if I think of something else to add, I can later. So as all counting starts at zero, the first is 000000. The second then becomes 000010. Finally this the third is 000020.


Tuesday, October 17, 2023

One Sentence - 000010*


“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway

Last night I had steak for tea. Not big juicy steak, thin strips of steak. Nice but not the way I like my steak.

It then occured to me, as real meat becomes more, and more, rare, or just too expensive, we will more and more have to rely on bugs and maggots. Just the impractical problem when considering space travel. Easier to store a tank of grubs, and bugs, than a cow. Foregoing the cubic pigs from Space Truckers.

"All new Synth Meat Neu Steak (tm), artificially knitted protein and fibre, extruded automatically, then sliced into individual, convenient portion sizes. After all this is the closest you're going to get to real meat on your salary bracket."

 

This is todays sentence.  

"Bugs for dinner!"

* I am incrementing the numbers by tens, in the style of basic programming, so if I think of something else to add, I can later.




Monday, October 16, 2023

One Sentence - 000000


“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway

I have tried many stops and starts. I considered Neil Gaimans "write for fifteen minutes a day". Unfortunatly that hasn't worked.

I thought working from home would help, but, obviously, that hasn't succeeded. Funny how having gained more personal time, I of course waste it. I don't read as much (if at all), or write as much as I used to.

This is another attempt to restart.

This is todays sentence.

"Reflections on past failures!"

Monday, August 09, 2021

More Blogging, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

It occurred to me the other day that blogging is a bit like keeping a private diary, but then leaving the thing open on a park bench in the hope someone is going to come along and actually read the thing. Just a very strange way to carry on.

A few months back I decided to return to some of my experiments in positive thinking, mind over matter and the like. I began daily chanting along to a YouTube video following the Buddhist chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

A couple of months later the results are in.

So far:

I have a tax demand for £1200, paying £100 a month straight from my wages (which is nice).

My job has extended my probation period by a further three months rather than confirm my job after the six month period.

The firm that is meant to be replacing my windows has continued to fail to arrange the installation. Having cleared my ground floor for the process I have been sleeping on my sofa for the two months because I'm unable to get upstairs to the bedroom at the moment.

The pandemic has turned me into even more of a reclusive, paranoid, shut in. I've been working from home, and also furloughed, for more than a year now. The furlough was with John Lewis for a few months.

The recent heavy rain is leaking in through my roof (different place than last time).

So all that chanting and visualising is working wonders in my life. I can only recommend the process to anyone. Personally I'm going back to sacrificing small children.


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Sunday, August 01, 2021

Not Sleeping Again,

 It's half two in the morning and I'm blogging again by the light of the laptop screen.

Getting annoyed by the horrible banality of the TV adverts, I've just changed an Eric Clapton concert for Rick and Morty on the television, step up there at least. Who in the Mc Donalds company really thought that set of adverts with people laughing like morons was a good idea?

I finally have got round to placing my (am getting round to, but by the time you're reading this, will have) part of Mum's funeral up here. Even now just reading through the order of service there was a tear in my eye. I promised Jonathan a while ago I would do this to pair it up with John's.

This was going to be far more extensive, but I've just run out of steam.

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In Memory Of Rosie Burningham.

Mum and Grandpa at Mum's First wedding.

Order of Service:

___________________________________________________________________________

Funeral Service for the late ROSEMARY JILL BURNINGHAM

Opening Music – ‘Let It Be Me’ sung by the Everly Brothers

Welcome and Introduction

Opening Prayer

Hymn – ‘Jerusalem’ (Words needed)

Psalm 23

Reading – ‘Remember Me’ by Christina Rossetti read by Jonathan Burningham

Thoughts – Simon Kennedy

Tribute & Address – The Reverend Canon David Nason

Reflection – ‘Let It Be’ sung by The Beatles

Prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer

Commendation and Committal

Blessing

Closing Music – ‘Three Little Maids From School’ by Gilbert and Sullivan

 __________________________________________________________________________

My Part:

__________________________________________________________________________

 

For Mum

2018-07-30


I have to thank you all for joining us here today to remember Mum with us.


To start with I want to share something I try to do every morning. It’s an adaptation of a yoga exercise. I want as many of you to join me and try this now. You push the corners of your mouth up as for as you can get them. You do that almost to the point where it hurts, then you try to hold it. Now you relax, and part of it stays. In Buddhist yoga circles they tend to call this smiling.

I was going to pretend I was trying to make a phone call, and Mum was doing her usual. Too many calls with Jonathan with Mum in the background saying “Don’t forget to tell him!”, and “Have you said?”

I was going to pretend she was doing that now, but the only thing I can actually hear her saying is “Why are they so sad? Tell them to stop that, I don’t want them to be sad!”

That’s why I just asked you to smile, because I really think she wouldn’t want us to be sad today, and to try and remember the funny, ever so slightly eccentric individual Mum was.

What follows is a few cuttings from my personal scrapbook of recollections of the woman I used to insist when I was much younger was called originally called Rosemarie Jack and Jill Kirk.

My earliest story is not my memory, but a story Mum liked to tell me. As a small child, about three, I went through a bit of a biting period. As Mums story goes, we were living in Ireland, were round a friend of the families. Myself and their daughter were playing in the garden. At some point the girl comes into the house crying and saying “He bit me!”

Mum instantly charged out to the garden and took my hand and bit me, to the friends daughter saying in the background “Not Simon, the dog!” Once she had an idea in her head no-one was going to change it.

I did suggest for one of the pieces of music to be played today was the classic Dave Dee Dozy Mick and Tich’s “Bend It!”, but the spectacle of me trying to dance on a chair the way I did fifty years ago, that Mum was so fond of reminding me about, is probably something some of the younger people here should be spared from, even if I think I can still do it.

I still say the reason I was complimented on my dancing at a recent company Christmas party is because it was Mum who taught me to dance.

As Rob and Kay will remember, it wasn’t a family holiday without Mum falling flat on her face, or screaming and pushing Paul or I into a stream with the dead sheep she hadn’t noticed until that moment. I think that was Paul on this particular moment. I can’t count how many pictures I have of Mum lying face down in various different counties around the world, it was definitely a holiday tradition.

Everyone has a childhood picture they will never forgive their parents for. Mine has to be the one of Paul and I in matching Paisley shirts and ties, mine green, Paul’s blue, me at the age of nine in the garden in Germany. Mum loved that one.

Or the time she forgot to order something from the milkman and made me wear her dressing gown and slippers and shoving me after him so I had to run down the road in London to stop him and get him to come back. For those of you too young I’m sure you can find someone to explain what a milkman was.

I can’t hear Gilbert and Sullivan without thinking of Mum, especially certain of their operas. I still remember how proud Mum was when Grandpa tied all the rigging for her comic opera company when they did the Pirates of Penzance, when he was staying with us in Germany.

Some of you remember Mum won the Miss North West Phones competition when she worked for BT. My favourite moment from this period was when she was invited to the Post Office Tower and managed to get herself standing one on the static part of the restaurant floor and one foot on the revolving part of the floor so spent about twenty minutes scooting round the restaurant to stay in place, being introduced to people.

I look back with great affection on a whole period of television from when we lived in the new forest Roots to “I Clav Divs” (I Claudius) and so much more that we watched together. Anything with a certain historical period, mostly the Plantagenet’s were her favourite. It was very interesting to visit the national portrait gallery with her because she knew most of the “B” players as well as all the famous portraits, so could tell you this was so and so and the who they were a lover of.

Mum always said we shared a sense of humour, it was always her friends that were the funny, slightly strange ones, sorry Ray.

One of my personal favourite moments has to be when Mum, my Dad, and I went to see “Life of Brian”. If you can imagine the entire cinema is full of Python fans, and, my Dad. So the first film is the Python false travel film and it gets to the point where John Cleese is shouting and swearing about more bloody gondolas. The entire cinema is in tears apart from my Dad, who is sitting there saying things like “Well I don’t find that funny!” and “That’s really childish!” and so on. Mum and I couldn’t look at each other, he made it even more funny for the pair of us, bless him.

Finally we have to talk about what Jonathan calls her “I Don’t know what to do with the penguins” moments. In her later life she had that wonderful habit of looking like she was awake, only to have one of those bizarre little conversations about having put the blancmange in the wellington's but not being able to get them to stand for parliament.

I mention this because a couple of weeks ago when I visited her in hospital she had spent most of the day sleeping. She awoke briefly and looked at me and said “You know I do love you!” and I for probably the first time in my adult life didn’t fob her off with the usual “Me too Mum!” but actually said “I love you too Mum.”


I love you too Mum”

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Friday, July 30, 2021

Not sleeping Properly.

 I can't  call my self an insomniac because I do sleep. In fitful little patches.

The interesting thing is the strange programs you find yourself watching just trying to exhaust yourself enough to sleep. Last night I followed a brief viewing of a wig teleshopping channel with a biopic of Hemingway, each depressing in their own special way. The wig program only because it seems such a strange thing to be trying to sell, like any of these telesales channels with (artificially) "limited" stock with a countdown. The Hemingway was the last program in the series, so covering that sad period as his drinking and a number of airplane accidents add up to a serious decline in his health, both physical and mental, and inevitably to his death.

So I'm not the best state of mind, being sleep deprived and brought a bit down by my TV viewing, but I am blogging momentarily.

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Walking Home Tonight.

Just occasionally I feel I may have stepped sideways into another parallel universe.
This evening I get back to Portsmouth and Southsea close to nineteen thirty, got an early train due to going into work early today. It's that time of year just before the clocks go back when it's dark by the time I get home.
It starts with what I initially think is a an abandoned guy. They start early in Portsmouth. It's about now the kids roll out the classic plastic bag sticking out of the neck of some shell suit jacket and them yelling "penny for the guy". The locals having managed to associate the time of year with another way of getting money for nothing. Well this particular "Guy"looks pretty gruesome, stain on the wall behind it, looks like a head shot, slumped down the wall. I even have to go back and take a second look. Only to realise it's actually a guy slumped by the wall reading his phone. Leavening him to his own busyness I wander round to Tesco/s.

 

This is four years old but I'm publishing now.