Stories, Rhymes and Brain fallout.

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...