Saturday 2 October
I have often wished it was possible to live more than one life. There are so many alternative routes I would like to have been able to explore, and it's frustrating only to get the one shot at seeing how things turn out. If you make a bad decision about the direction your life should take then you're stuck with it, no chance of a second attempt. That's the thought behind the quote from Philip Larkin that I put at the head of my bio page: "An only life can take so long to climb /clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never." What would life have been like if I had come out as gay instead of getting married? Suppose I had got a job in America after my first year in Philadelphia instead of coming back to England? What if I had taken the job that BP offered me when I graduated, instead of going into academic life? The only way these questions could be answered satisfactorily would be if I could lead several parallel lives and compare them.
Well, for the next couple or years I do have the opportunity to lead two parallel lives, sort of. Not the choice to lead a gay life as well as a straight one (sadly). Not the choice to live in America as well as Britain (in fact, now that the US government has instituted a scheme of fingerprinting and photographing all foreign visitors, as though they were criminals, I shall do my best to avoid going there until they revert to more civilised ways). No, the choice I have is to be retired as well as to stay in work.
From February to September I was a free man, the first time in my life that I have had such a long period without any commitments to work or study. I really enjoyed that, and because of the novelty of it I took things very easily and failed to accomplish most of the plans I had made for that time. Next year I probably won't be quite so lazy, and I hope I'll spend the time a bit more constructively. But my reaction after my first dose of retirement is that I'm going to enjoy it.
But for the next four months I'm back in harness, teaching a couple of courses at the University. After the first week of teaching, I'm really pleased to be back again. I enjoy being in front of a class of students, and meeting old and new colleagues in the departmental coffee room. In fact, this part-time teaching job has all the benefits of academic life and none of the hassles. It's almost like being on sabbatical. When I spent sabbatical years in Philadelphia I noticed that as a visitor I was immune from all the departmental feuds and politics, as well as having no administrative responsibilities, and I could spend all my time on teaching and research. Now, it's pretty much like that again, with the added bonus that I don't have any research responsibilities either. So although I'm notionally working full time this term, the only busy days are Mondays and Tuesdays. Wednesday is completely free, and on Thursday and Friday I only have one lecture. It looks as though I can continue to be lazy for another few months.
Sunday 10 October
It's a very long time since I had a poetry entry here, and it's time to put that right. Three years ago, I quoted a poem called "She Pops Home", by Cal Clothier. I came across it long ago in one of the Sunday papers, but it was never published elsewhere, and my site seems to be the only place where it appears on the web. Anyone who does a search for it gets sent to my site, and according to the site log this happens once every few months on average. Earlier this year I had an email from the author's daughter, who thanked me for brightening her day when she discovered the poem on my site, and told me that her father (who wrote the poem for her) died in 1990 and is buried not far from here.
Then, starting last Sunday afternoon, I started to get a flood of Google searches for the poem. There must have been well over a hundred hits in a couple of days, and they have continued all week. I guessed that the poem must have been featured in the press or on a radio programme, and I wrote to the author's daughter to ask if she knew anything about it. She wrote back to say that it had been included in the 25th anniversary edition of the Radio 4 programme "Poetry Please" as one of the poems most frequently requested by listeners. I went to the Radio 4 website and listened to the whole of this edition of the poetry programme. "She Pops Home" was included as one of two poems about adolescence. The other one, by Adrian Mitchell, was called "A puppy called puberty". It was read by the author, in a tone of naive, puzzled protest which I found hilarious.
A Puppy Called Puberty
It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants
A secret puppy you weren't allowed to show to anyone
Not even your best friend or your worst enemy.
You wanted to pat him, stroke him, cuddle him
All the time but you weren't supposed to touch him.
He only slept for five minutes at a time
Then he'd suddenly perk up his head
In the middle of school medical inspection
And always on bus rides.
So you had to climb down from the upper deck
All bent double to smuggle the puppy off the bus
Without the buxom conductress spotting
Your wicked and ticketless stowaway.
Jumping up, wet-nosed, eagerly wagging–
He only stopped being a nuisance
When you were alone together
Pretending to be doing your homework
But really gazing at each other
Through hot and hazy daydreams
Of those beautiful schoolgirls on the bus
With kittens bouncing in their sweaters.
Adrian Mitchell (b. 1932),
from: Blue Coffee, Poems 1985–1996 (Bloodaxe 1996)
I just discovered that Adrian Mitchell later wrote a sequel to "A Puppy Called Puberty":
A Dog Called Elderly
And now I have a dog called Elderly,
And all he ever wants to do
Is now and then be let out for a piss
But spend the rest of his lifetime
Sleeping on my lap in front of the fire.
Hmm, that's much too true to be funny.
[I'm probably violating somebody's copyright by reproducing these poems. If requested by the copyright holder, I will of course remove any such material.]
Friday 15 October
In the not so distant past, when I still had a full time job, I was responsible for maintaining a number of web pages. I discovered that this is not so negligible a job as it might appear. It's surprising how quickly information goes out of date and has to be amended. The most time-consuming part of this task was keeping links up to date. I always made a point of testing each link on every page at least once a year, but really I should have done it much more frequently. I usually found that several of the links on our pages pointed to sites that had been reorganised, or had moved to different locations, or had disappeared altogether.
The same goes for the links page on this site. I last updated it in January, when I revamped the entire site. But when I looked at it today I found that of the 20 online journals listed under "Favourite journals", six have not been updated for months and have probably been abandoned, six have moved to LiveJournal and three have moved to other locations. Also, three of the four web rings that I belonged to seem to be defunct.
My homework for this evening has been to update the links page, and for the next few days at any rate it should contain only accurate information.
Saturday 23 October
Maybe I have been keeping an online journal too long, because when I look back I see that the same things get mentioned in the journal every year. In October, I invariably catch a cold, and watch the world series.
The reason I catch the cold is that term starts in October, and I stand in front of classes of unhealthy, unhygienic students who cough and sneeze in my direction. This year, I thought I might have escaped from it. Both the classes I teach are fairly small, and very few of the students seem to be at all sickly. But a couple of days ago I could feel the first signs of an incipient cold – that scratchy feeling at the back of the throat, and sudden fits of sneezing. Mary suggested that I should try one of her homeopathic remedies, and in order to please her I agreed (although I also took a dose of a more conventional medicine, Beechams FluPlus™, at bedtime, just to be on the safe side).
When Mary developed multiple allergies three years ago, she found that she could not tolerate any conventional drugs, and she started to consult a homeopath. For her, this has been a lifesaver. She now has a whole pharmacy of homeopathic remedies for everything from headaches to twisted ankles, and she has become quite evangelistic in recommending homeopathy to everyone she knows. I must admit that I have been very skeptical about it. I have tried homeopathic treatments several times and they don't usually have a noticeable effect on me. People seem to vary a lot in their sensitivity to homeopathic remedies. Some of Mary's friends find them as effective as she does, and others are more or less immune to them.
I'm still not convinced that homeopathy works for me. But I have no patience at all with people who dismiss it as unscientific. The Guardian has a weekly column called "Bad science" by a journalist called Ben Goldacre, who makes a living by denouncing what he sees as abuses of science. He regularly sneers at all sorts of alternative approaches to medicine on the grounds that they are not derived from scientific principles. But I think that his column is itself thoroughly bad science. The essence of the scientific method is that it is pragmatic and inductive, starting from observations and using them to build up theories. But Goldacre in his column often argues in the reverse direction, dismissing phenomena that don't seem to be explained by known theories, without pausing to consider the experimental evidence of whether they actually work. If the great experimenters of the past had taken this attitude, science would never have developed at all.
Whatever the reason, my cold seems to have been halted in its tracks. I'm not saying that the homeopathic remedy has anything to do with that, but I'm grateful to have been spared my annual cold (except of course that another one may yet come along), and next time I feel the beginnings of an infection I'll follow Mary's advice and take whatever she prescribes. I'll also use the Beechams FluPlus, so as to cover all bases.
'Covering all bases' brings me back to the world series. As usual, I'll tape the games, which are broadcast live on Channel 5 starting at 1 am, and watch them the following evening. I have no preference at present between the Cards and the Red Sox, but I'm sure that by the end of the first game I'll know which team I want to win.
Friday 29 October
So the baseball series is over almost before it started. The world series is the only time when British TV covers this sport,
and I was looking forward to six or seven evenings of it. But the Red Sox won in a historic clean sweep, and now I have to wait until next October for the next game.
There is a shortage of good looking baseball players. It's definitely a sport that you watch for the athletic skills rather than the eye candy. In a particularly thin field this year, the Lobo-solo choice for MDP (Most Desirable Player) is Danny Haren, relief pitcher for the Cardinals.
Coming back to the other topic from the previous entry, homeopathy, we had a phone call from an old friend who reckons she has been much helped by it. Frances used to come on our annual walking holidays in Scotland. She was a PE teacher, and an expert orienteer. In fact, sports and exercise were her whole life. Then a few years ago she started to develop a disabling condition called peripheral neuropathy. The main symptom was pain and numbness in her feet, leading to loss of muscle control, which eventually got so bad that she needed a walking stick to get around. She had to give up her job, as well as practically all the activities that she loved.
She lives down in the south of England, and the only time when we usually see her, now that she is unable to come on the Scottish holidays, is at Christmas when she comes to stay with her brother who lives near us. Last January she phoned to say that she had not felt strong enough to travel which was why we hadn't seen her at Christmas. She sounded very depressed, and she asked us to send her some postcards on our round the world trip, which of course we did. When we got back home, Mary mentioned Frances's problems to her friendly local homeopath, who said she thought she might be able to help. Mary put Frances in touch with her, and the news from Frances's latest phone call is that she is feeling very much better. She says she is now able to walk up to a mile without assistance. Considering that conventional medicine doesn't seem to be able to offer anything much in the way of effective treatment for this condition, this sounds like dramatic progress, and we're very much hoping that it continues.
