Thoughts of the day.

I’m getting off social media as a cure. The continual stream of bullshit is unfathomable, the only good thing to be said about the whole thing is that social media keeps some of the worst maniacs off the street. What did all these nut jobs do before social media? How did they express themselves then? Are these the people that would otherwise be into wife(or husband) beating? Child abuse ? or have we created a whole new sort of human? a sort of social media superman/superwoman -meek mannered off the keyboard but an abuse wielding warrior once the cursor flickers. If so I wish I knew what their kryptonite is, could it be satire? irony? I doubt it ,but we can try. I’ve tried sending love letters to trolls, blowing them cyber kisses, none of it works, they just go on and on and on, well at least they’re not breeding (let us hope). So it’s bye bye Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Fuxk it all, stop the madness. Let’s make humans great again.

Hello, These are the first words so I really want to get them right, I want to lure you in, this is a journey I’m starting on, it would be great if you could join me.  At the moment - everything is temporary after all - I’m a professional Stand-up comedian. I’m British but have lived most of my life in Antwerp, Belgium. This is where I started doing Stand-up, about twenty years ago when all other options had dried up, the bar I owned had gone bankrupt, there were no more factories that would hire me, so at the age of 44 I started to spend my weekends doing open mic spots at a local bar. Stand-up had just started getting popular in Belgium and I was in at the beginning - after a few lucky breaks and a lot of serious hard work I ‘made it‘ , I was actually ‘Big In Belgium‘ (Flanders actually, the Dutch speaking half).   That’s the short story, I’ll fill in the rest on the way. What’s the journey? Well it’s me again,starting out anew, I’ve just reached 65 and Stand-up, though s...

28th of October 2018 Birthday  Today was my birthday, another year passed, another number, another reason to evaluate, another moment to take stock of what’s gone and what is yet to come (maybe). For my Birthday weekend me and my wife organised a three day trip to Budapest, I’ve been there before to perform comedy a few times and there is something about the place that intrigues me. A city that has had it’s share of tears and fears, the Hungarians sided with Hitler until 1944, Hungarian nationalists played a big role in the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and everyone else who defied the nazis. The role of the Hungarian nationalists gets ‘played down’ by the present Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, himself a nationalist, but there are sites all over the town that still bear witness to the deportations and the murders.  Not far from parliament on the edge of the Danube there is a monument to the place where Nazis and Hungar...

I went for a walk this morning, not far, just the streets around where I live, I need the exercise after my hip operation. It surprised me how many nods and smiles and 'good mornings' I received. I remember thinking to myself ‘there must have been a ‘purge’ of all the miserable negative people overnight’, or they might all be indoors tweeting or whatever it is that we are all supposed to be doing nowadays. Maybe it’s the solution to safer and happier streets, if all the moaners and the groaners and the ‘end is nigh’ folk stay indoors and argue online, then the rest of us can get on with our lives and each other. This being said - I am a ‘twitter warrior’ myself, spent hours the last couple of years, on twitter or other ‘social media’ outlets letting people know about my views, provoking, disliking, annoying etc etc ,it was good fun - annoying people that have different political or social views than I have. But it changes nothing, nada , sod all. When you tweet nothing happens...

It’s a great time to be human! Why? Because........(drum roll)..........we won! yeah ‘we are the champions’ etc . We absolutely won, beat all other species into submission or extinction. ‘We do what we want, we do what we waaaaant we are human we do what we want!’  We used to sit cowered in our caves afraid of all the big animals out there, but where are they now? Gone! Dinosaurs? gone, only living family members are chickens - chickens ffs! so who’s afraid now dinosaur ? Not us, the animals are on the run, soon to be just a memory - we won hands down. This planet is our ‘hood’ and only ours, if you want to be here you better be usefull or you’re out- if we can eat you, screw you or take photos of you for instagram then you are on your way to the ‘little book of extinct animals’.  A truly great time to be human.

As far as I can remember it all started with the Brexit referendum in the UK, America -not to be outdone by the Brits- organised their own 'Apocalypse Now' moment by electing 'Big White Rich Bully' Donald -Brain Damage- Trump as president to follow that and since then nothing, absolutely nothing is as it was. It's only been a few years, but the speed with which we are losing all respect and dignity is mind boggling. I have just watched the President of the United States of America mock a woman who came forward to give evidence about her trauma of being sexually abused during her student years. What a complete asshole Trump is, whatever you think of her testimony it's obvious she suffered, and it took guts for her to come forward. The venom and spite that bully Trump spat out on her will not only verify the fears she had about coming forward but it is also a message to all other women saying " even the president of america will heap scorn on you if you dare...

Time moves on, it's Saturday now which means I've been home from hospital almost a week. I'm gradually easing off the pain killers and other meds, my blood (clotting) levels are back to what they should be and Monday I'll have my first gig (in Flanders) again and pretty soon the operation will be a distant past and all the little ups and downs I feel will have to be kept to myself as people don't really want to know how you are when they ask that question. Most of the time I don't want to talk about my bigger and bigger collection of replacement joints that I seem to be collecting either, nowadays ,with the science and technology we have ,it's not such a big deal. I've known for some years that one day my knees and hips would 'go' and would have to be replaced, so I taught myself to build up for it, get the leg muscles fit before the op, leave the op to the best professionals there are in the area, 'post op' do all the exercises and move...

It seems like ages since I've written anything on my blog, sorry for that, whoever it is that reads it.  This blog is my way of clearing my head, I do the same on my Flemish podcast. On the podcast (called Downtime) I just press record and talk for 15 minutes, just to see what the brain spits out.  With the blog it's pretty much the same approach, no pre defined script, I just start up the laptop and see where the brain takes the keyboard. So let's see.  It's been a while since I blogged, not that I lost interest, I still find it a great personal development exercise but man have I been busy. This last three months have been a real roller coaster. During the heat wave we were moving house, then on holiday in Wales and then (last week) I had a hip replacement (my second), in between times I've still been doing comedy gigs all over Flanders and Holland and my daily podcast.  Not bad for some old guy .  By the way the hip is a week old today and it's healing qu...

I don’t want to become one of those old guys who’s only preoccupation is the weather, but we do need to talk about it.  It’s still May and the temperatures in places like Belgium, Holland and Germany are in the 30’s , now I don’t want to draw any hasty conclusions but may I just say that it’s not friggin’ normal, whatever ‘normal’ still means in this age of abnormality  being the new normal. It’s hot and I can’t handle it, if I were to convince myself that it would stay like this -for ever- I would consider setting up home in a cellar. We homo-sapiens don’t belong to the same family as lizards, this is not the environment we should be living in -end of discussion. I don’t get people who just lay in the sun all day and think it’s the best way to live. Anything above 28° and my brain goes into seizure, all I can do is find some shade or airco and wait until normality returns. But what if it didn’t ? What if this is the start of the ‘end times’ ? What if it just started ge...

Clothes might not ‘maketh the man’ (or woman) , but they have become a statement, a flag, an introduction to who we are and how we liked to be seen.  If clothes weren’t important we’d all just wear what’s easiest to put on and take off, we might stretch to a favorite color, but if they were of no importance then we would go for ‘easy’ .  But we don’t always go for easy, so there is an importance attached to what we wear. Clothes fit occasion and function, uniforms, (office suits are  uniforms as well).  In our ‘free time’ we like to dress to impress, whatever impression it is we are trying to convey. We may want to ‘tempt’ the opposite or same sex, we may be looking for a partner and want to look at our ‘best’. We may want to convey a message “look how relaxed I am, I care not about what people think of me or how I’m dressed” and probably put a lot of effort into the attire to convey that message.  I like my clothes to be ‘easy’, easy on easy of...

 Here in the garden it’s always peaceful , thousands of organisms, insects ,bees, flies, bugs, plants, trees and me. I’m the only one not ‘working’ , not contributing to the general well being of this little patch of nature. Me being human it’s probably best that I interfere as little as possible, our track record is not good and it hardly ever ends well for nature when we inflict our ‘idea of how it should be’. Humans - not the best curators of the planet, you wouldn’t trust them with your Rose Garden let alone with the rain forest.  Every so often I am compelled - by my fear of what neighbors, family and friends might think about the ‘state of the garden’ - to interfere. Mow the lawn, cut back bushes,trees and remove exaggerated weed patches, but I like to keep my ‘meddling’ to a minimum. At the back of the garden there’s a specially designed ( :-)  ) ‘wild area’ that I leave totally alone. A small space, left to weeds, wild flowers and all the creepy crawlies that l...

We humans just love splitting off into groups, I suppose we feel safer in group, ‘cos basically compared to other living things we’re pretty weak.  So we love groups - religions, political groups, sports teams, even gender-preference groups - so many groups and sub groups we contradict our own hate toward competing groups. That’s another given, it’s not just that we like being part of groups we also have to have other groups to hate, or at least dislike..........  Never happy ‘till we’re hating, that’s us. It’s no different now, the ‘alt right’ hating the ‘alt left’ , even though from each group there are probably people who share the love in yet other groups, they may support the same sports team at the weekend, but hate each other for political reasons in the week, and on certain evenings meet each other again at a local ‘dark room moment’ in a group hug.  I have this impression that it could all end in one of two ways. Either we come together and realize we ar...

I've just been stood in the kitchen, coloring my wife's hair, don't worry she was there with me. She's at an age and a stage in her life when grey roots appear every few weeks, and she is having nothing of it. Every few weeks I'm her 'special forces' in her personal war on grey terrorism, it always makes me nervous if I miss any enemy infiltrations it will be firing squad for me. Usually it turns out ok, and I'm the hero for a couple of days and then it starts all over again. When she buys the coloring product it's always a different chemical cocktail ,never does she use the same product twice, always looking for a better version of all the choices. What an array of products! just for hair, it's amazing, there is a whole industry helping (mainly women) cover up their natural color, and this is just the hair industry. We humans have a long history of not being contented with what nature gives us, always wanting a new hair color, eye color and m...

Will we ever 'get it' ? How things work, how the world is shaped? Why we do what we do? why the same old things happen over and over? I remember when I was young thinking that 'older people' must know, they must have that secret knowledge that was hidden to us youngsters...... but now I'm old, I seem to know less than when I started out. To me getting older just means giving less of a flying frig about the 'worries of life'. Politics and politicians? tricksters thieves and psychopaths- all of 'em. Life planning? wake up, see what happens, adapt,adjust and move on. Concentrate on what and who you like doing and being with, there are 7 billion of us, 99.9999% of whom  you'll never meet and only a few of the ones you meet will eventually be of any importance to you, so stop trying to impress people who matter not to your life. Just don't waste time, a lot of people want you to fail in what you do, only listen to the ones that encourage you in you...

BodyCam, Facial scan, Off Line But in the picture. Privacy is dead and gone No more secrets, no guilty fun. Your every move is kiss and tell Followed and glued data is corporate food . Humankind uploaded but downgraded, a data blip a tool a fool what does life mean when you stare at your screen? When your likes and your clicks are what make you tick.

New year same shit, Donald Trump and Brexit. Politicians telling lies, Fake news and Russian spies.