The comeuppance of a sloth

I am a sloth.  

If anyone is determined to be kind, they could say that I haven’t always been a sloth, and certainly there was a long period of my life when I gave every appearance of diligent industry.  

It was all a facade.  

I married a man who whistled tunelessly as he ran a finger through dust on the mantelpiece, and the arrival of children unearthed a certain pride in the state of their school shoes, and a reluctance to launch them into the world with the belief that slothful was good.  Employers are not impressed by sloth – a fact that extended my diligent phase far beyond its use-by date. 

But those days are long gone, and I have slipped seamlessly back into slothdom with the happy sigh of one who’s at last come home.  

Until now. 

Some weeks ago, it was borne in upon me that my shower was leaking. To anyone less bone idle, pennies would have been dropping so fast for so long I’d be a millionaire by now: big blisters in the plaster of room next door are hardly subtle hints. And I did notice them. I did. But addition was never my strong point, and why bother with two and two if no one’s marking you on the answer? Fortunately – or unfortunately – my visiting daughter is a whizz at domestic maths, and once she’d pointed it out, blissful ignorance was no longer an option. 

This is the result. 

I probably could have coped had that been all. Certainly, I’m sick of having a bath instead of a shower, particularly when baths include seeping grit invisible to the naked eye but all too apparent when sat upon. I could even have coped with the dummy-spits of a cistern unused to plaster dust in its innards. 

But when it comes to this…

 

…even a sloth will rise up. Not willingly. Not with the joyful cries of housewifely fervour. 

But even slothdom has its limits. 

I wonder if it’s karma…

Computer chaos – the new road rage

I’ve just spent an entire day (Saturday, of course) stuffing up my computer, panicking, doing serious damage to my blood pressure, panicking, having a nervous breakdown, and finally weaselling enough access to find a way of restoring it to the way it was before I started. By which time it was beer o’clock (or coffee, in my case) and far too late to do anything but dump my shattered self into a chair for a few soothing hours of mindless telly.

And all this was because…? Because I tried to do the right thing and install an external hard drive designed to run continuous backup. Plug and play, they said it was, to which I say Ha-di-ha-ha – or at least that’s the printable bit. 

Now yes, I am old, and yes, I did come to computers late, but when I press the button for English as my preferred language, I do expect to get English, and not some rarefied computerese gobbledegook incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t slurp it up with his or her Farex. I mean, “powercycle the device”? If you mean unplug the thing, count to ten and plug it back in, why can’t you say so? Although I guess if it takes you 77 A4 pages of online users’ manual to say “plug and play” (I kid you not) then every word counts. Numerically, if not intelligibly.  

I still don’t know what monumental blunder I committed to set this whole process going, but I do know I won’t be touching the “device” again with anything less than a barge pole. I shall take it to Sydney along with my computer (both travelling in the boot lest it contaminate the auto-electronics) and hand the lot over to my dear, kind son-in-law, who’s a whizz with computers and still manages to speak English. 

If I were that way inclined, I might say that this was all a conspiracy owing its origins to that highly productive financial concept, Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, and little fleas have smaller fleas and so ad infinitum; every computer spawns additional equipment, and every piece of equipment needs a bell or a whistle (or both) to make it work properly, and if all else fails, call your friendly IT man who might at least understand the manual – for double time on a Saturday. But sadly, conspiracy theories are far too simplistic in this instance.

 The truth is that this is just another example of history repeating itself. Technology now has its head so firmly wedged in its own – “devices” – that its aristocracy has lost sight of the peasants.

An outsider’s view of American gun laws

Two people have been shot dead and a gunman is still on the loose at Virginia Tech. In 2007, 32 people were killed and 25 were injured at the same college.

Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association of America, is quoted as saying, “America has this freedom [the right ‘to keep and bear arms’] and it’s very difficult for non-Americans to understand why we feel so passionately about it. It is the most unique freedom ever given to a people.” 

He’s right. Please believe that I am not setting out to be critical, hostile or otherwise offensive, but I am not American, and I simply don’t understand.  

Not long ago, a US toddler mistook the semi-automatic her father left on the table for the special gun-shaped controller used to play their Wii game. She, picked it up, pointed it at her stomach and pulled the trigger, with inevitable results. She was three.  

Is it enough to say that her father should have been more careful, or that the gunmen at Virginia Tech were mentally unstable? 

In her article Batterers Shoot Holes in Protective Gun Bans (06/13/08) Marie Tessier states that “There are 283 million privately owned guns in the United States, according to the anti-gun Violence Policy Centre in Washington, D.C. Licensed firearm dealers sell more than 4 million guns each year, and up to 2 million more are sold through other venues. Some sales are unregulated.” 

This means that there are at least 283 million privately owned guns circulating amongst a population of 304 million people, including children – 93 guns to every 100 people – and this figure is being topped up at a rate of approximately 16,000 per day. If 1% of these gun owners are careless and another 1% are mentally unstable, then by now there are at least 60,000 firearms disasters in America just waiting to happen – quite apart from those perpetrated with deliberate and malicious intent. To someone who is not American, this is incomprehensible. 

One of the problems with weapons has always been that they become self-perpetuating: “He’s got one so I have to have one to protect myself from him”, and then “I’ll give up mine if you give up yours first, but how do I really know you’ve given yours up?” In this day and age, the issue is further complicated by the fact that we have become almost inured to guns. We see them constantly on television, in movies, on the belts of cops on the street. We even find ourselves embedded with journalists in war zones. But guns aren’t props that make a loud bang on television and when the director calls “cut”, the dead man gets up and has lunch. Guns blow holes in people, and when that happens, they don’t ever get up. 

I do understand how this situation has come about, and I recognise that once it was part of the Constitution, the Second Amendment became as sacrosanct as any such document must be to preserve the nation’s integrity. I’ve also read something of the debate that surrounds its interpretation. But surely just as a nation itself is a living thing and thus constantly evolving, so must its Constitution evolve. What I find so hard to understand is the average American’s passionate defence of a practice that makes the tools for violence and tragedy so readily available, when clearly those who bear arms are now so willing to use them in ways that have nothing to do with the original intention of those who drafted the Constitution.  

In the 200-plus years since this “unique freedom” was given to the people, the people themselves have inevitably changed. What was once a relatively small population in a very large country is now a very large population, with all the attendant pressures of high-density living, rapid communications and global interaction. Added to that, the social structure has changed, and rules of behaviour are not set in stone as they once were. Where once it might have been safe to assume that a citizen bearing arms “in defence of himself” (or herself) would only use that weapon as a last resort, such assumptions can no longer be made. Life isn’t like that anymore. Shots are now fired for reasons the Founding Fathers had no way of foreseeing, and surely, when it reaches the point where guns are the answer to road rage, romantic disappointments and perceived slights, it’s time to wonder whether the Second Amendment has become counter-productive. In 2005, there were 12,682 gun homicides in the US, and 30,694 gun deaths including accidents and suicides.* Every day an average of eight children in America die from gunshots.  

So help me out here. Apart from its “uniqueness”, what is so glorious about the right to keep and bear arms that it must be protected at all costs – particularly when the cost is in human lives? Is there some honour in it that escapes me?  And does uniqueness justify a “right” that most of the rest of the world sees as a criminal act?

*Data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Highlights from the homepage

The site I use as my homepage is a load of unmitigated tabloid…rubbish. I’m not apologising for this, and I’m not going to change it. Why would I, when each time I boot up my computer, I’m bombarded with revelations too intriguing too ignore? When every day my eyes are opened to aspects of human nature that have previously passed me by? It’s fair to say that I’m gobsmacked daily, and who doesn’t need a good gobsmack to get them going some mornings? 

This isn’t a question of virtual ambulance-chasing – genuine tragedy is not their style – and I do read the proper news on another site.  But I’ve obviously led a very sheltered life and missed a myriad of opportunities, and it’s never too late to learn.  

I’d never have thought, for example of giving my daughters a boob job voucher for their 7^th birthdays. (What a good thing none of them needed it by the time they reached the legal age.) Neither would it have occurred to me to have my backside enhanced, and particularly not by my friendly neighbourhood cosmetician who favours a mixture of cement, superglue and flat-tyre sealant. But would life have been richer if I had? Have I missed out? Harder to sit down, of course, and I’d have sunk in the surf, but surely a small price to pay for such a significant beauty aid. 

I’m not quite so taken by the antics of a British woman who ended up dangling (naked) by the ankle above the foyer of a Tenerife hotel when she inadvertently slipped over the banister at the height of a bit of holiday couple-bonding. But then I always was a coward. Neither would I go for the gold-plated casket specially imported by the family of the Australian crime boss murdered in his prison cell. A bit OTT, I would have thought, when it was only seen for an hour or two – unless, of course, the rival mob comes up with foolish alternative uses for the gold-plating and retrieves it.  But in that case, there’d be enough gold-plated caskets to keep everyone happy. 

I must admit, though, that today’s headlines were a tad disappointing. Kim’s had to have a new Christmas-card photo-shoot (aaawww) because the pic chosen in August included Kris (who’s Kris?) and Angelina keeps her kids’ bandaids… Eh? No, I’m not even going there. 

But the biggest disappointment was the bunch of bananas above the caption ‘Take the fight to bacteria at home’. Aha! I thought. I always knew bananas were shonky! But even that turned out to be a dud. Closer inspection revealed that the bananas weren’t bananas at all, but a pair of rubber gloves (yellow) on a bar of yellow soap. What a rip-off!

A squeak from the trumpet

This self-promotion business really sucks. I mean, I guess some people find it easy to blow their own trumpets, but I’m not one of them. 

Anglican boarding school. That’s what did it. At the tender age of twelve, I was plunged into an alien world of strangers, dormitories, communal bathrooms and rigid rules overwhelming in their foreignness. Bells chopped time into horrific confusion and the dining room smelled of wet gabardine rain capes and cold dust. Confidence? I didn’t even dream about it. I was a tall, chubby loner adrift in a sea of cliques and claques, social status and hockey sticks, too cringe-worthily inappropriate to aspire to anything beyond survival.  

And if I had? There was a whole bucket of pain waiting to drop. I knew this because we were reminded daily, lest hubris creep in and corrupt our souls. We are not worthy to gather up the crumbs under thy table, we said, and being a child far from home and out of place, I had no trouble believing every word. 

The chaplain’s God was a fierce and vengeful being, I discovered. Omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, He stalked the halls not, presumably, seeking those whom He may devour – that was the devil’s job – but keeping a gimlet eye out nonetheless for anything that could be construed as self-serving, self-indulgent, inconsiderate, thoughtless, frivolous or otherwise less than self-abnegatory.  

Duty and service were the catchwords, and it was understood that each should come with a maximum of suffering. No Brownie points for enjoying yourself. The only true joy was self-sacrifice, and loving thy neighbour made no mention of sparing a thought for thyself. 

Thy body, however, was another matter. Mens sana in corpore sano. But if the corpus in question is large, slow and irredeemably earthbound, the whole concept becomes a daily torture and a source of sniggers. I lumbered, I fumbled, I swiped ineffectually, and in five years of weekly gym classes, I never once made it over the vaulting horse. Humiliation and I were intimately acquainted. 

And none of the above makes for a healthy self-image. 

You’d think I’d be over it by now, wouldn’t you? I’m older, I’m wiser and I’m no longer fat, and enjoying myself is something I embrace  with enthusiasm and no fear that the axe might fall. But when it comes to self-promotion, I might as well be twelve again. 

Shame, really, because I’m told I’m actually good at what I do. Have a look at http://www.authonomy.com/books/37213/six-weeks-in-summer and see what you think.

The elephant in everyone’s room

Nobody talks about death. Not really. 

They talk about how to avoid it: don’t smoke, eat less, exercise more, give money to medical research – as if immortality were not only the Holy Grail, but almost within our reach. They talk about it in relation to violence: the casualties of war, the victims of natural disasters, the results of crime. Religions talk about it as the passage to a higher place and the mercy of God.  

But no one talks about the pervading reality that most of us will face sooner or later: the fact that someone we love has come to the end of their allotted span not by chance, bad judgement or bad management, but because that’s the way it is. The Number One killer is not heart disease: it’s being born that ensures our ultimate demise, and while society has progressed in many admirable ways, we have become wantonly blind in the matter of dealing with death. 

For close friends and relatives, the period immediately following a death is limbo. Whether they have been stoic or emotional, the defining moment is over, and in that moment, the world as they knew it has been wiped out. They move through the following days in a bubble of unreality. They deal with the business of death: the arrangements, the legalities, the condolences. But once the funeral is over, the reality of bereavement sets in in earnest. And that’s when society turns its back and walks away. 

Different cultures have different rituals and traditions surrounding death, but in most of the western world, it has become almost an embarrassment, to be whisked under the rug as quickly as possible. Perhaps it’s superstition: don’t look too closely in case we catch its eye and it turns its attention to us. Or perhaps it’s a sense of failure: for all our apparent brilliance, we haven’t managed to conquer it. Or is it simply that in the fast-paced world we inhabit, we don’t make time to care. Life moves on, we mumble, and go about our business as before, too uncomfortable in the face of grief to make allowances. 

But for those who grieve, moving on is slow and painful. Every day must be reconstructed around the hollow place once occupied by someone integral to our lives. There are all the ‘firsts’ to contend with: birthdays, Christmas, significant anniversaries that were previously shared occasions. And there are reminders everywhere: images, phrases, pieces of music, likenesses. You don’t want to forget, but remembering jabs at the all-encompassing bruise that is mourning, while people around you look sideways and wish you’d get over it.  

But you don’t get over the loss of someone close. You get through it, and that takes time. But the time to mourn is these days considered a luxury, or even a self-indulgence. 

Nobody talks about death, not really. Once the wake is over, they prefer to pretend it hasn’t happened. And that makes grief a long and lonely road.

 

Hanging yourself on a hanging phrase

Big enough to sleep in, Mr Boddingham believes he might just have a claim on a new world record.

I’m thinking of starting a collection of similar gems I find in places that should know better. This one was in today’s paper. Shame on them! It wasn’t poor Mr Boddingham who was big enough to sleep in, but a giant slipper he’d been sent by mistake.

And what about this one? With his toupee awry, the cat hissed at his owner and fled.

If you write something like this, then true, a lot of people won’t notice. They’ll make the mental adjustment to work out what you meant. But as Abraham Lincoln said, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Hanging phrases create a nonsense, and there’ll be enough people rolling around in unseemly mirth to have a serious impact on your writing credibility.

In the old days – good or bad depending on your point of view – kids were taught grammar at school, and back then, they’d have learned that a phrase is a group of words constituting an element in a sentence. If you want to know the complete ins and outs of phrases, you can check here, but for our purposes, what you need to know is that a phrase can’t stand on its own. It’s not the full quid, because it doesn’t contain both a subject (the doer of a sentence) and a finite verb (the action the subject takes). So like all good parasites, it attaches itself to the nearest host (noun or verb) and hopes for the best. The worst happens when its proper host has gone AWOL.

Having tied his shoelace, the traffic had built up.

Perhaps I’ve missed a myriad of life’s little treats, but I’ve never seen traffic tying a shoelace. But what choice did the phrase (having tied his shoelace) have? The traffic was the only available subject. The man doing the tying had disappeared.

Hanging phrases are also known as hanging or dangling participles, and hanging (or dangling) modifiers, depending on their structure and purpose. To know more about these sneaky little suckers, you can read this. It’s entertaining as well as instructive.

The moral is that whatever you write, purge it of hanging phrases before it sees the light of day. They can drill holes in your manuscript faster than white ants in a house frame.