Thoughts of the day.

  ‘About Town’. Cycling around town during the Corona ‘semi-lockdown’ is like a dream.  A lot of the Cafés are doing their best to accommodate people with ‘take away’ coffee, snacks, and such, but there remains a problem when it comes to the bladder -as the Cafes cannot offer toilet facilities, and Belgium isn’t really well known for its public toilets, but I must admit living in Antwerp gives the extra advantage of being able (as a man) to legally pee against the wall of the Cathedral in one of those enclosed by a wall, ‘old-school’, pee gutters that used to be all over town (in the old days' Women never used to pee I imagine). Cycling over the main pedestrian shopping street you see people collecting ordered items from shops (the minority) but also people just staring at closed shops like consumer junkies in ‘Cold Turkey’- or pigeons expecting to be fed, listening to the regional accents many come from out of town just to walk through the closed shopping area which see...

  Lockdown Diary.  7:00  De wekker loopt af, ik sta op, ‘vroeg begonnen is half gewonnen’ nooit vergeten.  7:30 Gedoucht en al aan de koffie, mijn eerste gedachte ‘Waarom ben ik om 7:00 uur opgestaan in godsnaam’.  8:00 Samen met mijn derde tas koffie beluister ik het nieuws op de radio, ik besef dat ik alle nieuws over Corona kotsbeu ben, idem Trump - Brexit - en de meningen van iedereen die geïnterviewd wil worden ’s morgens op de radio na het nieuws van 8:00 uur.  8:30  Ik plan mijn dag en merk dat ik weinig plannen heb, ik denk dat ik veel ga lezen vandaag.  9:00 Mijn plan is aangevuld, ik ga wandelen en nu onmiddellijk, als ik het Coronavirus wil overleven als oudere man moet ik fit blijven, in beweging blijven, ik schrijf ‘it’s harder to hit a moving target’ op een papiertje en pin het tegen mijn prikbord.  10:00 De wandeling viel tegen, het regende, ik besefte dat één van mijn wandelschoenen lekt. Het oorverdovende geluid v...

  Diary,15th of November, 2020. It’s Sunday again, these weeks of waiting, staying indoors, and trying to find ways to encourage creativity, fly past, whereas the plans I had to fill the gaps that have opened- up due to lack of employment- remain in the ‘planning’ stage. The ‘never to be done’ tray of my idler brain.  The lack of planning leads me to panic because of days and weeks racing by without anything to be shown for it, had to be taken on, head-on. These past three days I have tried to plan a schedule and keep to it.  The morning would be spent ‘out and about’, the afternoon divided between writing, reading, and my podcast. The evening was left for the idle consumption of Netflix ‘Scandinavian-crime’ series or other such time fillers. This planning has worked and made me feel more contented this weekend.  The morning plan today was to visit ‘The British Shop’ called Stone Manor, not far from Brussels. The drive would only be about forty minutes...

  House of Lard.   The American elections are a thing of the past and the judicial outcome is a thing of the future, Biden won but Trump wants to have another go, and this time through the courts. At the moment Trumps only evidence seems to be ‘There was Fraud because I say so’.  I take it for granted that ‘sleepy Joe’ Biden will be the next President and Donald- the ‘stable genius’-Trump will be resigned to a reality show or a mental health care facility for the next four years, maybe he can try again then, by that time he might have become an adult.  So there he goes, the first ‘Celebrity Culture President’, like it or not, this election got the biggest electoral turn-out in the history of U.S. elections, so if you are living in a country where there is a huge divide between the populace and politics, get yourselves a celebrity as candidate, and bridge that gap.  Looking at both Candidates I can’t help thinking that a lot of people must have been voting...

  Another one of those days, one of those days without a goal or the capacity to create one.   He asks himself what to do.  ‘It can’t just be like this, the emptiness, the total lack of passion or creativity’. ‘There must surely be yet more to come, I read and study about the self, about creativity and finding my own ‘uniqueness’ and yet all I want to do is sleep, watch films - the dumber the better.’ He feels tired and unloved.  The frustration builds.  ‘After all, the last 30 years I have had a career, maybe not the best in my chosen field but I certainly didn’t go unnoticed’. ‘How can it be that this is what is left, no calls, no new projects, not even an old friend or colleague calling for a chat, nothing, was it all just fake? Am I really that unpopular among my peers?’ ‘Or is it just a case of me no longer being relevant, it was just work, just business that I misinterpreted for friendship.’ Then the self hate.  He despises the person he...

Following all the social distancing rules so as not to get infected with Corona is one thing, staying sane is another.  I know one thing, for me, social media isn’t doing it. ‘They’ say that social media is a good way of staying in touch with loved ones etc, is it? Whatever happened to giving them a call? Do we need social media to stay in contact? Not really, it’s a myth. We don’t need social media to stay in touch we have phones, zoom calls, or Skype. It’s just a ploy to get us to scroll up and down FB, Twitter, and Instagram and the likes, the longer they keep us hooked to their screen the better it is for the data fishing algorithms. They milk us for data like farmers' milk cows. I recently asked myself -in all honesty- to write down what benefit or good I get from being on Twitter for example. First I tried to kid myself that I get news updates and get to read the views of people I respect etc, all nonsense, of course, I can follow those people and news media on their web...

Good afternoon, although I don’t know you, may I wish you and your family a safe and healthy voyage through this pandemic? Stay safe.   How many people do we see during an average day? Lots and lots, of course, most of them we don’t know personally, so they might as well be shadows, or robots that pass us by on the street. We don’t pay any attention to most people, unless they look weird/scary/peculiar or get in our way, block a parking space, ask for money, annoy us in any way.   We are aware of all the people around us, and that we are just part of the ‘human herd’, but we ignore most people because we can’t handle more people than our family and friend groups (our bubbles as they say since Covid19), according to specialists on the subject it seems that we can handle roughly 100 to 150 people in different levels of familiarity.   We all know people from the pub, from work, from football matches, neighbors, people we see every day but have not much contact with. To say w...

  I don’t know about you, but for me the Novelty of this Corona/Covid19 plague is starting to wear off. At first it was a welcome break to the routine of the rat race (as long as we all stayed healthy) , loads of free time to do all the odd jobs that have been lying around the house waiting for me to change into my handyman super hero disguise. Then there were the vague ‘doomed to fail’ promises to myself that I would write a book, learn a new language, learn yoga, get fit, learn a new skill etc etc etc.   The D.I.Y. jobs are almost complete, I have started some more or less creative projects like these columns (I write mainly for myself). Getting fit is a slow burner, it comes and goes, somedays I go on really long walks and then spend a few days thinking ‘what’s the point’, but I try.  Now I’m starting to think that this could be how we live for a good few months yet, so I have to get my head around the feeling of a new reality. A new way of living, a total change ar...

  It’s Saturday, that used to mean something, pre-Corona.   It’s 5 pm on a Saturday afternoon that meant even more pre-Corona.  Saturdays, 5 pm , pre-Corona that meant getting ready for the Saturday crowd at whatever venue I was performing that evening, while listening to the football results on the BBC .  Saturday crowds are different to Friday Crowds, Saturday crowds have had time to get over the workweek, they’ve had more time to get dressed up. Comedy would be just part of the evening ahead, food and drinks before the comedy  then maybe afterwards out till late, no commitments on Sundays except for those who fear hell.  Saturdays were always special, pre-corona. Now it’s just another day. Another day to sit around, worry about the virus, about work, about the future about- well anything (nowadays we worry a lot).  It’s Autumn, dark days ahead, the days I love (I’m not a summer person the heat sucks my energy) Autumn born and bred that’s me...

  All over the world governments are trying to get to grips with the Corona/Covid19 pandemic, balancing between economic interests and healthcare.   It’s a 'hit and miss' social experiment trying to minimize infection rates and keeping an economy going, there are success stories but in the main, most of us are stilling feeling around in the dark.   Nobody (as yet) really knows completely how to stop the spread, we could all just stay indoors and only go out to get food but then the world wide economy would just collapse, so we have to have these ‘hit and miss rules’. Stay home, unless you really have to go out for exercise or your job, keep away from large gatherings but if you can’t wear a mask, non-essential businesses like bars and restaurants should close but they can still do a take-away service and as many of us as possible should work from home… that’s about the sum of it.   It’s not a problem that we can solve with a # hashtag, likes, or retweets. Fake news d...

  Fail again, Fail Better.* I can’t remember who said ‘Fail again Fail Better’* but it must have been someone that eventually made it, otherwise we would have never heard of it.   Fail again, fail better, do what you want to do, don’t let others put you off, don’t let others fill you with self-doubt - do it. Whether you paint, sing, play an instrument, or act, whether you are a comedian or poet, it is impossible to just be good at the get-go. Every day you practice your art, you work on it, producing stuff that isn’t that good in the beginning, but with each ‘failure’ you get better, bit by bit.   Self-doubt is probably the biggest threat to anybody who is creative. The fear of negative comments can lead a person to be defensive or over self-confident to compensate for the doubt, it can lead to that ‘creative murderer’ imposter syndrome  which leaves you afraid of being ‘found out’ because your self-belief is rock bottom. Whatever you do there are the criticasters wa...

  ‘Bad news sells’ is an old but true cliché, reading all the news websites, doing your daily, time-wasting, social media tour, it’s all doom and gloom out there (I covered this in a previous post), but is it? Of course, there are some really frightening things going on, threats to our way of life and our planet are real, but should we, therefore, lose faith in humankind? What’s more, should we lose faith in human kindness?   Our society is built around an economic system that needs us to consume and not just the things we need to survive, we need to buy, buy, buy, whether we need the stuff or not, in order to get us to consume, companies need to advertise and get us hooked on the instant gratification of something new and preferably ‘shiny’, the dopamine hit that makes real drug addicts look like amateurs.   Bad news sells, we seem to seek out bad news items more than the good news ones, why? Well, it could be evolutionary that we humans have always had to be on the look...

  I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m suffering from an information burnout and overload, we are living in a constant stream of news (fake or true, who knows) that gets us outraged, angry or makes us even more apathetic toward a society that seems to have not only lost its way, but also has no idea of the GPS location we’re supposed to be heading to. You would think that the Corona/Covid19 plague would bring us together, after all it is non partisan, neither left or right, not communist or fascist, neither ‘boomer’ or ‘snowflake', it’s gender neutral and non racist. So hell yeah we could at last all come together and show that human solidarity, ingenuity and science can defeat anything, right?.  Wrong again!  Here we are a year after we first heard of it, and we are all raging against one another either in the streets or in the cess pool that social media has become. There are the deniers (some of whom have since died of the illness, or from Karma), the ‘deep st...

  How the f**k am I supposed to concentrate? The radio is on in the background, the coffee machine -although smelling good- is making this sort of gurgling sound and I have wet hair from in the shower and some droplets are running down my neck.   ‘Silence is golden’ who sung that song way back in the 70’s? Or was it the 60’s? Who knows, everything fades and gets muddled, how do we know any of our memories are trustworthy.  I struggle on, trying to make meaning where there isn’t any, digging into my soul to mine the last bit of creativity and at the same time thinking ‘what if I am just not creative?’ I read all these books and listen to all these tutorials saying ‘we are human therefore we are creative’, but what if we aren’t? What if evolution, and especially the tech revolution has taken away some or all of our creativity? What if ,what if.  We often ask the question ‘does anyone still read books?’ The question in the future might be ‘does anybody write books a...