Mum and I were sitting watching England play Kazakstan earlier this evening, and we started chatting as Beckham came on.
Mum: Was it Capello who said Beckham would never play for England again?
Me: No it was the other one, the one before.
Mum: Ericsson?
Me: No, the one after him, the one with the teeth, who got sacked .
Mum: Can’t remember him.
Me: Neither can I.
How completely are the non-victorious rewarded.
I am often fascinated by those rare moments of resonance that are established between people. They are unexpected and can seem to hit the most unlikely people.
I am not necessarily talking about anything as basic (although not crass) as sexual electricity or similar. I am referring to those fundamental moments of recognition that can suddenly spring up between two people, those instances where a lifetime of instinctive communication, comfortable familiarity and understanding comes is established in a smile, a glance, a simple ‘hello’.
Even should that be the extent of that relationship, bound in it’s entirety into the infancy of its evolution, that would be enough. Sometimes, simplicity, ease and that vast expanse of unexplored potentiality is all that is needed.
Whilst I remember, I was astounded at the large number of people who were in this place buying cars.
No matter how regulated these companies say they are (and remember – I don’t think they are dishonest, as such, but work the system and apply psychology to maximise their return on their product), the fact that there were a large number of people willing to subject themselves to what can be an expensive yoke in the current financial climate is quite alarming.
To take this a little further, I popped into PCWorld on the way to looking at the Mondeo, and I was similarly taken aback by the number of people looking at queueing up to buy laptops. J (the brother) made a pretty astute comment about how people loosen up financially when everything looks to be going wrong, and I think this was reflected in what I saw today.
Today was meant to have a day of clearing out my mother’s house of all the extraneous and unwanted junk she has collected over the last few years.
Instead, I spent the day helping my brother buy a car.
Unfortunately, due to having 2 young children, a wedding coming up and the other financial paraphenalia of life when you have a young family, he’s a bit strapped for cash. So, the previous car had died, and due to issues elsewhere, the only real resort was to go to one of these car finance garages. So off we tootled to this place.
Interesting psychology is applied in these places, and we were treated to the full range of the techniques. They range from concealing the true price of the car, the APR, focussing on a ‘weekly’ budget (although their interpretation of ‘keeping to the budget’ was intriguing) and using honesty as obfuscation.
“This one is £40 a week.”
“So – what is the price of this car?”
“I’m not sure but I can go and find out.”
later on:
“What exactly makes up the £40 a week?”
Same answer, although with a little more certainty.
I recognise that places are there to service a need, which is for people who are desperate for a ‘new’ car, who don’t have very much in the way of good credit and deposit and who are likely to fall for the patter. The fact of these places are: they tend to operate within the law but they do stretch the interpretation quite far, the cars are extremely expensive (£10k for an otherwise £4k car), the finance is horrendous (typically 19%-ish) and the pressure is on to buy there and then, although you would be hard-pressed to recognise it as such.
The upshot was that I sat down with my brother and his partner, realistically ran through the numbers, said ‘thank you very much but no thank you’ and left.
We, after searching on the internet, bought a very decent , if slightly old, mondeo for £300, which will easily run for the next year whilst they save some money for something a little more polished, and won’t cost them a fortune monthly in outlay and interest with respect to the real value of what they have bought.
South Southeast by Steve McCurry
This is one of my favourite photographic books of all time. McCurry’s sense of timing, space, colour and humanity is unparalleled and continues to invoke in me feelings of wonder, compassion and sadness.
Beautiful.
bloody tangles
in my head
knotted strings
and bundled clots
inseperable strands
hand in hand
daft jumbles
and silly kinks
interweaving
and intertwining
with lunatic abandon
snarled and snarling
oblivious but
laughing
twisted
and confusing
tangles in my head
and its morning
tangles in my head
and I’m lying
tangles in my head
and I’m waning
tangles in my head
its you
damn you
all tangled in my head
140502
“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
William Gibson – Neuromancer
As per usual, when I have had a day off I have been fairly prolific.
Blogging in many ways is a solitary activity, particularly where a personal blog like this is concerned. It’s the electronic equivalent of sitting in the cafe/bar, having a mocha and watching the world go by. You are present but not necessarily part of the scene, observing but non-participatory. You sit at the computer/laptop and project your thoughts onto the fabric of the web, and the same happens in the cafe.
I have managed, as is my wont, to do both today. I sat and read another’s interpretation of the world whilst drinking coffee that somebody else made, watched other people play, talk, drink, read, laugh, watch and be. In a sense I was isolated within that space, observing everything outside of my bubble. What has just struck me is that I am doing exactly the same now, reading other people’s blogs, looking at their photographs, reading interpretations and perceptions of the world that are not my own, sitting in bubble that is my study whilst the world goes on around me, so very much of it beyond my ken.
Sometimes the sheer volume, the absoluteness of human endeavour/sloth/happy little accidents that occurs every moment, all the time, without end or stop or brevity beggars my self-belief and comprehension.
Things are happening and I am not.
The world spins and I remain stationary. That thought leaves me feeling bereft. Like someone just died, and that someone was me.
Interestingly, I wrote this last night as a scheduled post for tomorrow. It all came of the back of a very large list I wote a while ago regarding things I wanted to achieve but hadn’t got around to yet; usually through sheer laziness but time, money and circumstance having their part to play too.
Anyway, I zipped over to Mighty Girl’s blog and noticed that she had a similar list as a permanent feature on her blog, which I really like. I’m not sure if it was an independent idea on my part or some sort of subconcious-osmosis-mental-meme-thing, but here’s my slightly less comprehensive list:
There is whole lot more, and some are probably defunct now, and others will have been added, so i suppose there is as much interest in how the list changes as well as what actually get’s done, but I guess that is a very personal interest.
My addiction to eBay long since passed, I am now addicted to freecycle.
Aargh! There is an offer for a set of the Chambers Encyclopedia (from the 50′s) complete with dust-jackets, and I can’t email for them, as I know I would be crucified if I turned up back at the house with them under arm (figuratively speaking). Dammit.
Things ‘won’ on freecycle to date:
At least I’m not paying for these things any more…
