Victor has been in my life now for over twenty years. Most of the time he has that look of quiet, patient dignity, occasionally it changes to a look of suppressed rage or weary indignation. Here he is looking natty and cool in a baseball cap. For twenty years I have kept him hidden away, a secret all mine. Now I think I need to share him with the world, I’m not sure what the world will do with him, but let’s find out.
This is Victor the Head. He will be back soon.
A lot of bad things have been happening in the world recently, and now it’s cold, everyone is miserable and I keep forgetting to notice all the good things that are around me.
So I’m going to make a point of, every Monday, posting something good from the week. Either a photo, an observation, a piece of news or a delightful fact.
So what about you, what has brightened up your Monday? What good things are in your life right now?
If anyone feels like joining in, that would be fantastic, I’m happy to link or feature.
This Monday’s good thing, some photos of the frost where I work…
So, I saw this model build-it-yourself engine last Christmas and figured maybe this was a way of better understanding how my car worked, plus the chance to just build a goddamn engine. It even had a starter motor so it could fire up like a proper engine. Buying it was no idle whim. As I child I wanted to be an engineer, but didn’t seem to have any real aptitiude for it – maybe I just didn’t try hard enough? This was an opportunity to find out.
It sat on the shelf until now glaring at me while the rest of the world got in the way, but now is the time.
There were lots of pieces and I was worried about getting them muddled up, so I put sticky labels on them all.
I managed to put lots of bits together and when I’d finished they turned other bits. Just like in a car!
When it was all put together, I flicked the switch so I’d finally see the how hours of work could turn a load of plastic chunks into a fully functioning engine.
Nothing happened.
Not a spark. I could turn the wheely thing, and that caused other gizmos to move, but the chugging and rumbling that the instruction book promised me didn’t happen. I tried wiggling some elements, removing others and putting them back, but still nothing.
I’m glad I did it though, now I know that my childhood ambition was bollocks all along and I did the right thing by becoming a gardener.
If anyone has any use for a piece of plastic shaped like an engine, let me know. It has parts that move!
I have variations on this dream quite often, but I think this is the daftest. I do sometimes drive a tractor for my job and occasionally I have to check on trees after a storm to make sure none have been uprooted or become unstable, so it has some basis in reality.
So I’d been driving a tractor out in a field and had stopped to check that none of the trees had toppled. Suddenly I noticed that it had got dark so I needed to get back to base. I reached down to release the handbrake, but it wasn’t there! I felt for the gearbox, but it wasn’t there either! And there was no steering wheel! I was really panicking by this point and there were a few minutes of fumbling about, wondering why I wasn’t wearing shoes or a coat, before I finally worked out that I was in bed and not on a tractor at all. Instead of deciding that everything was fine and going back to sleep, my brain started on a new course of panic and I thought,
“But if the bed has got no gears or steering wheel, how am I going to get to work tomorrow?” Feeling frantic, I switched on the light, muttering to myself,
“I drive to work everyday, how do I normally do this on a bed with no steering wheel?”
A few more tormented seconds passed while I looked at my bed in confusion, before finally realising,
“I don’t need to drive my bed to work, I’ve got a car.”
“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
This is my third and final quote. It’s more important to me for its meaning rather than where it comes from (no critcism of the Narnia books though).
It reminds me that you should strive to act like a good person, no matter how much the people and situation around you are not good. It’s frustrating when I see others acting cruelly or selfishly and justifying it by saying, ‘that’s just the way things are’, and even worse when I find myself doing it. We all help to make our society and by acting as if being kind and rational are defaults we are helping to create a society where they actually are.
When I remember this and start acting the way I would like everyone to act, then people respond to me with kindness, and I realise that I’ve been part of the problem.
And in case that is a little too serious, here is a quote from Catch 22…
“Yossarian was flabbergasted. His leg went abruptly to sleep.”
Second day and this is the quote
“When the brain blazes like a bonfire, we no longer need to ask why we are alive.”
From The Occult by Colin Wilson.
The Occult is a book I read many moons ago and enjoyed, but don’t remember now so well. However, that quote leapt out to me at the time and I wrote it down and kept it, because it is for me so totally true. When I get bored in life, I start to feel a bit lost and pointless; not unhappy, just feeling that maybe being here on this planet is a mistake. Then something stirs me awake (usually when ideas for a story start jumping around, but it can be spending time with good people or studying or discovering some bizarre truth about the world too) and all doubts vanish as my brain blazes. It’s like pure energy bouncing back and forth, sparking up neurons and connecting ideas. At the moment I’m going through a sluggish phase, and I need that quote as a reminder, I hope it means something to someone reading too.
So I’ve been nominated for a quote challenge by Making Sense of Complications, who has an interesting blog of scolarly ideas and curious words.
For this challenge I need to
1. Thank the person who nominated you
Thank you Making Sense!
2. Post 1- 3 quotes in three consecutive days.
First quote:
“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
3. Nominate 3 bloggers
Always good to give some attention to bloggers I like, but I wonder: where will it end? If each blogger nominates three more, won’t it spread like a virulent disease? First one, then four, then thirteen, then my ability to do maths runs out. Eventually we’ll exhaust new nominees and we’ll be stuck renominating and quoting each other for all eternity. Still, I guess it will keep us out of mischief. Anyway, I nominate the following, it was tricky, because there are many to great bloggers to choose from, but these three have either threatened to stop blogging or cut down and so I’m hoping to lure them out to open ground, because they are all great.
I haven’t posted up many stories on here recently because I’ve been away in Munich on a work trip. During that time I went up to see the alpine garden at Schachen. If you have an interest in plants, or just pretty photos, then you can find it here. There are also other blogs about plants there, plus orangutans and weird jungle insect pictures.
inkbiotic 