Doctor’s orders – Tai Chi and Qigong in the real world

I’m not fond of hospitals. The only times I’ve been in one was either for the births of my children or the seeing out of elderly relatives – all of them traumatic experiences, though in different ways of course. This was why I felt nervous sitting in the waiting room yesterday with a complaint of my own, the prospect of surgery hanging over me, and the knowledge that the last few times I’d seen a hospital doctor they’d told me there was nothing more they could do and someone was going to die. Doctors, I assured myself, were useless. All of this was irrational of course, but analysing it into stillness passed the time.

It was my nose.

Years of Anosmia (no sense of smell) had finally led me to the Ear Nose and Throat department of my local hospital. My GP – not the most reassuring of characters – had referred me there somewhat half heartedly and with the caveat there probably wasn’t much anyone could do. It was partly his negative outlook that had led me to explore all the complementary therapies first, including acupuncture. The acupuncture had worked, but only briefly – a three week window of scented delights, late last year, but which had then closed, and in spite of the continuing administrations of my TCM practitioner, had refused to open again.

So, there I was, waiting to see the doctor – not your ordinary doctor this time – not like my GP who was merely a “Dr”. This guy was a “Dr Mr”. A surgeon. A proper sawbones!

My GP had  told me off for wasting time and money on acupuncture. Complementary stuff definitely doesn’t compute with him. On previous occasions when he’d asked me if I exercised, and I’d replied I do Tai Chi and Qigong, he’d looked blank. When he’d asked if I was taking any medication he was unaware of and I’d replied: “Does Ginseng count?” again he’d looked blank.

He wasn’t entirely to blame, poor guy; it was as much my own insecurity, perceiving his credentials as materialist and stereotypically unsympathetic to the traditional eastern world view, while I feared my own approach still lacked the proper grounding in verifiable fact. So, I was guarded when the Dr. Mr. Sawbones asked me these same questions and I muttered the words Tai Chi, Qigong and Ginseng in an almost apologetic tone.

He was a young man – late twenties I guessed, studious, smart, clean looking coupled with an easy smile and an effortless sense of humour. His manner, his energy, was a world away from that of my GP – which always left me feeling slightly depressed. I’d gone to the hospital that day jumping at shadows, ready to run if anyone came near me with a scalpel,  but I decided at once this guy could stick a scalpel in me any time he liked. I trusted him.

He then astonished me by saying he thought Qigong was a remarkably effective mind-body technique, that he practiced it himself, and highly recommended it. I said I was surprised, given his background in western medicine and its traditional antipathy towards the non-materialist world view. He replied that things were slowly changing, then went on to discuss the Chinese meridian system – this while he slid a camera up my nose.

I wondered if he was having me on. Don’t tell me you support that as well, I said – though it’s not easy to talk with a camera up your nose. He replied that given the amount of compelling research data, western medicine really had no choice now but to find a way of assimilating at least certain aspects of traditional energy medicine into modern practice, though he admitted ruefully it would probably take another hundred years. His own view was that emotion played a large part in determining both the nature, and the incidence of a body’s malfunction, that he equated “emotion” with the term “energy”. The meridian system, talk of chi or whatever, was a tangible way of getting a handle on the emotions, thereby curing ills that were unresponsive to medicine alone, or for simply preventing illness in the first place. It was all related to the so called Relaxation Response, which we need to be able to balance out the other side of the mind-body equation – the Fight or Flight response.

Healthy mind equals healthy body.

As for my own ills, he announced I had a load of polyps up my nose – little non-malignant growths that stop the air from getting to the smelling apparatus, and there was a good chance he could get rid of them without surgery. He said I looked fairly fit off my Tai Chi and Qigong, and I should keep it up, otherwise the sackload of medication he was about to prescribe would be laying me pretty low.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my encounter with this guy – almost forgetting I’d been to see him over my nose. But as well as identifying a concrete reason for my Anosmia, and a frankly positive assessment of the likelihood of curing it, my ten minutes with this highly educated western surgeon, working at the sharp end of the British National Health System had unexpectedly deepened my understanding and appreciation of  eastern energy yogas as well.

Any form of exercise is good for you. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it moves the body, it’ll improve the circulation of the blood and the lymph, and the body cannot help but respond in positive ways. But if, as well as moving the body, you can move the mind,… now there you have a powerful technique  – and not just as a health system, but also as a means of taking a human being to the very edge of what is possible.

I do hope this bag of pharmaceuticals helps me smell the world again, and they don’t make me too ill in the process. But I’ll also be taking my Tai Chi and Qigong practice far less self consciously in future.

Doctor’s orders.

Read Full Post »

How to make money without liking bloggers!

All bloggers like to get “liked” and we can’t help wondering what it is about the “liker” that caused them to “like” us. So, we click the links and see what those “likers” are up to. It’s part of the fun of blogging and I’m sure you’ve made many stimulating contacts this way – souls treading a similar path, and others who are not. But an increasing number of likers seem to be missing the point, mainly because they don’t read our blogs before “liking” them. I know this because I once posted a blank page by accident, and five people liked it within seconds. If we then follow these curious links back to their owners we discover a new breed of bloggers whose blogs have only one category, its raison d’etre being to share with us the secret of how we can all make a lucrative and easy living “online” – just by clicking a few links – and presumably by randomly liking other people’s blogs to attract “business”. You just have to send some money first. These poor souls are not bloggers of course, they are the victims of Multi-Layered-Marketing scams, whose promised millions in earnings, and retirements to the sun depend on getting others to sign up. So the victims sell out their friends and relations first, then wonder who else to target with their vacuous nonsense.

Anyone who has read my work will know how ironic I find this kind of thing. I am not a materialist. I work for a living, write for pleasure and view our consumer society with a troubled heart. So if you’ve not already fallen victim, listen to your uncle Michael – because clearly someone’s got to say this to you. There’s no such thing as easy money, and you can’t make a lucrative living by basically doing nothing.

In the pre-internet era we’d see adverts assuring us that we could do just that – “ring this number for details”. Nowadays it would be a premium hotline and the only person making money would be the one with the cynical “dog-eat dog” wit who’d set it all up. The jobs – if they existed at all – involved putting things in envelopes by the gazillion and mailing them off to people who didn’t want them – or some other bottom of the foodchain task related to marketing other dodgy, dog-eat-dog schemes.

Nowadays most of this nefarious stuff has moved online. Spamblasters try to filter it out, but it’s a relentlessly ingenious scourge that keeps finding new ways of breaking through. So dear professional “liker”, you’ll forgive me if I smile and urge you to pull out before the awful truth dawns. I’d also like to put my tongue in my cheek here and share with you the real secret to worldly success:

1) Get up in the morning. Do as well as you can at school. Go to college if you’re able, then university. Get yourself a graduate level job, preferably doing something you enjoy, because it’s less painful that way. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the bosses you’re willing and dynamic. Smile. Maintain a positive attitude at all times, even those times you think the place sucks. Make no enemies, even those people you believe to be incompetent. Always say yes to opportunities for extra training and when a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. Do all this and you’ll rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

2) Get up in the morning, do as well as you can at school. If that doesn’t lead to college, don’t worry – we’re not all blessed with academic ability, so skip that bit and get an ordinary kind of job any way and anywhere you can – preferably something you think you’ll like doing. You’ll work at least eight hours a day, possibly longer. Show the boss(es) you’re willing and dynamic. Maintain a positive attitude at all times – even when you think the place sucks. Make no enemies,  even those people you believe to be incompetent.  Always say yes to opportunities for extra training. When a better paid job comes along, take it – same rules apply. It’ll take longer than option one – no disguising that – but you can still rise over time to a level that suits your own ambition or ability.

Or:

3) Get up in the morning etc. At some point get an idea for a service or a product or a need, and start your own business. You’ll need a bank loan. Hard route this – and you’ll certainly be working more than eight hours a day while you build it up. There’ll be sleepless nights too, and periods of self doubt, and maybe the bank will pull the plug on the whole thing, but with a bit of luck and lot of grit you’ll win through and maybe even find yourself an employer of people following routes one and two. Of the three this route has the greatest potential to transform you into a self made millionaire, but it won’t be overnight and there’ll be times you wished you chosen routes one or two.

What? Don’t fancy any of these? Want your easy money now? Then go ahead, start “liking” us bloggers – and see how far it gets you.

Of course in all of this we’re talking about “worldly” success.

Real success in life is something else.

And I’m still working on it.

Read Full Post »

Got the time, mate?

This is a favourite little pocket watch of mine. I bought it off a market stall for twenty quid in 1996 and it’s one of the few in my collection I use on a regular basis for telling the time. I usually wear it with a short chain in a casual waistcoat pocket, though my children insist I must have my jacket buttoned up if I’m to walk with them. It seems waistcoats attract so many brickbats these days there’s even a risk of collateral damage.

Anyway, a little research reveals the mechanism of this watch was made in Waltham, Massachusets in 1888. I think the gold plated brass case is a Dennison, shelled out by the millions in Birmingham UK. The case proudly announces it’s “guaranteed to wear 5 years”, so it’s not done too badly, though most of that gold plate has by now worn away.

The mechanism is of reasonable quality, having a jewelled lever and a split bi-metallic balance  for automatic regulation of the time over a range of temperatures. There’s also a bit of filigree detailing which I think is rather nice.  But given the utility of the case,  I don’t think this was intended as a “Sunday best”  watch,  more something that would have been used during the workaday week – a workaday watch for measuring the hours at the office or the factory and for judging the trains.

The amazing database of Waltham serial numbers – entirely the work of volunteers at the NAWCC archive, confirms this, telling me the movement is of a fairly basic standard with seven jewels, and was unadjusted for accuracy. But even after 125 years, and with no obvious evidence of restoration, it’s still capable of telling the time to within a couple of seconds a day, so I’m not complaining. How many consumer devices can you think of that are being put together today and will still be working 125 years from now?

I’ve had a fascination for pocket watches since I was a boy,  and my collection now consists of nine pieces, some inherited, some picked up as I go about my travels. None of them, however, are worth much, other than in sentimental terms. But my intention here isn’t to bore you with the details of another of my obsessions. What I’m trying to get at is what  this fascination for old timepieces might yield to a little over-analysis.

The watch or clock face is a good example of a mandala. This is a psychological archetype,  said to represent aspects of the unconscious self, and their drive towards integration, or wholeness. Mandalas are usually circular – either a painting or a drawing, or a physical object like a ring or a watch face, or even an arrangement of objects like a stone circle or a fairy ring. And they fascinate us. They usually feature some form of geometric division, commonly into quarters, but not always. Indeed, they can be quite abstract and if we draw them ourselves they can form a basis for psychoanalysis, because they weave a story of the psyche at a moment in time, one indicative of both a state of mind, and a direction to be taken if it’s wholeness we’re seeking. And whether we’re aware of it or not, wholeness is what we’re all seeking.

Sometimes, like with the Waltham, I’ll encounter a watch syncronistically in the wild, so to speak, at a “time” of auspicious transition. At other times – times of introspection and self analysis – a watch from my collection will unconsciously find it’s way into my hands,.. or my waistcoat pocket.  I’ve looked at all of this before, but that’s another thing with mandala’s – they tell us we cannot measure psychological progress in a straight line. Progress always involves a circumnambulation of the centre, encountering the same lessons, the same insights time after time – but hopefully with each full circle bringing us a little closer to home.

The time element might also be meaningful of course – especially the idea of being tied to it, indeed literally chained to it. The watch measures out the passing of time, the passing of a man’s life. It speaks from the past, also speaks of the future. It speaks of order, precision, regulation, of a desire to be on time. But to be on time also implies being lost “in” time. You’d better solve this, because “time” is running out. You can’t do this now because you haven’t got the “time”. How much more “time” must I wait? How much more “time” before my life improves, before I gain the satisfation I crave?

You get the picture?

At this level, the watch is more obviously a projection of one’s Ego with it’s ability to measure out, to analyse, to rationalise, to regulate. And there’s nothing like the fear of not having enough “time” for placing a strain on our nerves. The urgent and all pervasive sense of “not enough” is Ego pointing out our inadequacy. We become slaves to time. Look around: we’re obsessed by it! There’s a watch on our wrist, a clock on the wall,  a clock widget on our ‘phone, or a readout on our computer screen – reminders everywhere that we should remain in time and that time is constantly moving, constantly in danger of running out, and we need to keep up with it if we don’t want to be caught out and shown to be less than who we otherwise like to believe we are.

But on another level a pocket watch is different. You don’t see them much any more. They’re disappearing from general use, having been discarded long ago for being too slow, too fancy, too fussy with the time. But then there are people like me seeking them out from the junk stalls,  saying hold on; I think we’re missing something here.

But what is it?

Well, I was in the woods the other day, at a local beauty spot, down by the river – a weir roaring, sunlight filtering through bare trees, early daffodils nodding. I was lost in the motion of the water, leaning on a fence, breathing the air, not thinking of anything.

Then someone appeared at my elbow with an urgent enquiry: “Have you got the time, mate?”

A snatch at my sleeve revealed an empty wrist and a reminder I was “off duty”, wearing the waistcoat under a jacket, carrying the Waltham. So I had to unzip my jacket, feel for the chain, draw the watch up. I did it hurriedly, snagging my zipper, and altogether making a terrible fuss in order to get at the watch, when all the guy wanted was the time – instantly! Hurry. Hurry. Time is running out! He was even poised on one leg as if ready to bolt back into time, as soon as he got the time, and the time was soooo slow in coming. No wonder they invented the wrist watch.

“Half past twelve,” I replied, eventually, and off he went like the Mad Hatter, already late, because for too long I had delayed his re-entry into time.

But what time was it, really?

When he’d gone, I felt time slowing down again, and I wondered why I’d been in such a hurry. Half past twelve, said the watch. It felt warm and vital in my hand, having absorbed so much heat from my pocket. I flipped open the back and watched that balance bouncing. It felt alive. I could feel it through my finger-tips. The sun was shining beautifully, the water making a mesmerising roar – a little rainbow forming in the spray. A thrush was singing. I snapped the case shut, put the time back in my pocket, and settled once more into the moment. We become more aware of life, I think, when we can put the time away, and in doing so find the space in any moment, space enough to expand and rediscover the pleasure of simply being.

What time is it? Well, it’s a trick question and you shouldn’t fall for it. The time is always “now”. Not in the future, at some imaginary time that never actually arrives, a  time we might easily waste our whole lives waiting for. Our lives are not a destination but an experience to be perpetually explored – and this does not mean the more extreme or exotic the experience the better – you can find it in nothing if you know how to look, even in the beating of an obsolete timepiece, so long as you can see past its mere function and realise its inner beauty.

Read Full Post »

The Dao of Double Glazing

Once upon a time I bought a house. It had been in my good lady’s family for generations, passed through the hands of several elderly relatives, and by the time it came to us it was in need of modernisation. One of the first jobs was to install double glazing. This required us to endure the peculiar methods of a long line of double-glazing salespersons, one of whom I remember, sat me and my good lady down in our front room and subjected us to a couple of  hours of death by Powerpoint presentation – or what passed for it back then.

His windows were terribly expensive, and we were so bamboozled by his convoluted facts we had no way of deducing if those costs were justified. What was also puzzling was that if we agreed to the installation, and then ten years later, on a certain day, if we rang a certain telephone number, we would get all our money back. What? Get our windows for free? How does that work then?

Whatever the merits of this scheme, we were so cross and impatient by the end of this presentation, I’m afraid to say we bundled the man out of the house without so much as a cup of tea. His departure was hastened, I recall, by my equally frustrated son, then about eighteen months old, hungry for his bedtime story,  hurling Thomas the Tank Engine books at him as he went.

The next salesman was a pony tailed, oily, orange tanned sort of man who drove a bright red sport’s car. My good lady was already bristling when he stepped over the threshold and he hadn’t said anything yet. But his speal was much more succinct than the previous chap – just a quick measure up, a brief explanation of the style and construction of the windows, then a straight forward price. I was astonished and relieved by how easy the process had been this time. I was astonished too by the price because it was a fraction of the other quotes we’d had, but now I was wondering to myself, how on earth they could do it for that? There must be a catch! Darn it, what shall we do?

I left it a few days, in the hope my intuition would guide me through what was quickly becoming a bit of a minefield, where logic and reason were no guarantees of avoiding a ripoff. So then I had the idea of  telephoning the pony-tailed salesman and politely asking him if I could just confirm a few facts about his windows – thinking to discover the catch as to why they were so inexpensive. But it was as if I’d insulted his mother. He became rude at once, even aggressive – calling me stupid, that I had sat for an hour while he’d explained all of this and now I had the gall to ring him up and ask the sort of basic effing questions I should have asked him before, when I’d had the chance,…

Yes, indeed. He was very rude. But I sensed something else was going on here, something I couldn’t see, something lurking under the surface, and rather than take his tone personally, get all cross and hurt, as perhaps I should have done, I took a step back inside myself, puzzled, and I tried to see the bigger picture.

There’s the story of a king who goes by night in disguise to seek the counsel of a humble monk. While in the presence of the monk the king assumes an air of deference, while the monk, a happy-go-lucky, ragged, impoverished character, teaches the king the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Then one night the king says, okay I’ve got all of that, but what I’m really struggling with now is this concept of the Ego. What is the ego? What’s that all about? At which the monk laughs, apparently in disbelief, and says what kind of a stupid question is that?

Of course at this point the king drops all pretence, calls the monk rude names, says he’s just a destitute monk and how dare he speak to the king like that? To which the monk says, now that, your majesty, is everything you need to know about the ego.

Returning to my rather more prosaic story about the double glazing salesman, I don’t know what caused that momentary gap to open up between what should have been my natural reaction of hurling back some retaliatory insults, before slamming the phone down and fuming in hurt and humiliation for the rest of the day, and what I actually did, which was to make a calmly reasoned guess at the likely truth of the matter:

He’d made a terrible mistake in the price he’d quoted me for those windows – and as far as commission went, all he’d be getting was a good telling off from his boss for the error. His only hope of recovering his position was if I didn’t take him up on the offer, which was by then already legally binding on his firm – so he insulted me, thinking to lever up the lid on my ego and give it a good slapping, then my ego would tear up the quotation – after all a sale lost was better than a sale he couldn’t afford. I thought about it, but then I took a risk that this peculiarly egoless entity I’d discovered lurking inside of me wasn’t too far off the mark; I forgave his bad language, and accepted his offer.

Double glazing companies come and go, proving like nothing else the Buddhist adage that all forms are impermanent. The firm who offered me that money back guarantee after ten years folded after just two – so I don’t suppose their magic money-back telephone number is still working now. The one that actually fitted the windows did better,  lasting around five years, but at least the windows they fitted are still looking like new after – oh, it must be fifteen years now.

I did see the pony tailed, orange tanned salesman again – he came to make some final measurements before the windows went in. I won’t say he had that tail between his legs, but he was a little sheepish. He did however have the good grace to apologise for his rudeness on the phone. I mumbled something about it being okay, that it sounded like he’d been having a bad day, and not to worry about it. He didn’t mention the price and I didn’t rub it in.

I don’t know what he’s doing now, but I trust he’s found a way of moving on. I’m sure there are those who enjoy manipulating egos in order to get what they want, but it sounds like a tiresome business, and dangerous too because a roused ego can cause a normally placid human being to become physically violent. But it can be dangerous too in that every now and then you’re going to come across someone who’s ego’s too sluggish to be of much use in your machinations, or it’s like smoke and only vaguely there at all, because then they might see through you and the best you can hope for when that happens is that someone genuinely lacking in ego would never think to hurt you.

Of course that I can look back on all of this and still feel a smug glow of satisfaction proves my own ego isn’t quite so far beneath the surface as I’d like to make out. I’ve a long way to go then along the path of spiritual realisation – sure I know that – but in my defence I’d also argue it’s better to have begun the journey even if I’ve got nowhere at all, than not realise there’s a journey to be made in the first place.

So, beware, once you start to lose your mind, you’ll discover there’s potentially as much wisdom to be found in ordering double glazing, as there is in the whole of the Tao Te Ching, that even men with orange tans and red sports cars can become, for a time, your most important gurus.

Good night all

Enjoy yourselves, but stay safe.

Michael.

 

Read Full Post »

The secret of good blogging?

Nothing happened today. There was no news, no carnage, no politicians to be called to account, no food scares, no financial ruin. There was no one to hate, no one to pity.  The nation breathed a great sigh of relief and we all drove to work in soft sunshine, with lighter hearts, skipping along like children let out of school early. A gentle hush settled over hill and vale, I saw my first Snowdrop,… and the world felt like a much better place.

The opening of an impossibly optimistic fantasy novel? No,… our regular news and current affairs programming was off the air because of a strike by journalists, and oh,… what a relief!

I’m sorry. I know it’s important to keep up with current events, to be able to understand and talk knowledgeably about the world. But there’s also a terrible downside, being inundated daily with crap that you can’t do a damned thing about. You begin to form a picture of a world in which nothing good happens, and it doesn’t matter that it bears not even a passing resemblance to the world you personally experience, you feel cowed by it, intimidated, depressed, goaded into cynicism, even afraid to venture abroad for fear of having your head cut off by blood crazed trolls.

So I don’t buy newspapers. I don’t watch the TV news, preferring nowadays to get my snippets in controlled bursts, through my iPad. I read the news briefly, with a cold, objective eye, digest the main points, then turn to the blogs I’m following because they’re so much more interesting.

For example, yesterday evening, I learned about a play in which Freud’s fictional final consultation was with the writer CS Lewis. It sounded like a fascinating idea, but the writer who saw it had felt let down by it. I also read about Innis Oirr, one of the remote Aran isles, off the west coast of Ireland and how the way of life there has changed over the centuries. Then I read about the pope and his reportedly unsympathetic views regarding people who might be labelled gay, bisexual or transsexual.

I realised I knew very little about CS Lewis and have now chased down some more very interesting information about his life that syncronistically informs something else I’ve been thinking about. I also mused that although my grandfather is from the west of Ireland I’ve still not visited his birthplace, and I really must do something about that.  I also pondered on the fact that religious teachings are too often defined so narrowly they cannot hope to encompass the rather more eclectic nature of the human condition. And is that right or wrong?

This is so much better than being blathered at by assertive media types, evasive politicians and pontificating pundits. Through blogging you realise there’s a whole ecosystem of ideas out there, and you can get involved in shaping it simply by writing your own material. But like anywhere else there are abusers in the blogsphere. They contribute nothing, yet expect the globe to laud them in return, catapult them to the dizzy heights of celebrity. A bit like the conventional media then.

Case in point: something odd happened last night. I put my piece up on “Photographing Ghosts”, but in the process managed to lose all the text, so what I actually posted was just the title. I was wondering how on earth that had happened, and whether it was worth sorting out, or if I should just delete the lot and go to bed,  when my iPad started pinging like it had gone mad. Before I knew it I had 3 likes for that piece – which was very gratifying but of course I could claim no credit for my literary prowess because all I’d posted was a blank page.

What was that all about then?

Among the rules of successful blogging the most important is that, apart from posting our own sincerely intended content, we should also take the trouble to read the work of other bloggers who catch our eye, and comment on their blogs as we might in making polite conversation with strangers. If you really like the work, then “like” it. If you consistently enjoy the musings of a particular blogger, and you want a regular dose of them, then you “follow”. What could be simpler?

But it seems some of us are sitting at the gates of WordPress’s “what’s new!” list and “liking” anything that wanders through, even “following” with no more motivation than the hope or expectation we’ll get liked or followed in return. This indiscriminate technique is the same as jumping up and down like a petulant wannabe, shouting “Look at me! Look at me!”. Are  we trying to get ourselves into WordPress’s currently hot list perhaps? Maybe from there we believe it’s only a short step to a slot on whatever passes for our nations top celebrity chat show?

Hmmm.

You cannot be serious. Real blogging is for those with something to say, and who are perhaps denied any other voice. If you’ve nothing to say, if you’ve only web farmed stuff for content , or “products”, or yourself to “sell”, then shut up and go away.

Blog because you like to write, because you like to present ideas, and see what ideas ping back at you. I blog about writing fiction, about the creative processes, the psychology and even the underlying spirituality of it, and if some of my readers are tempted to have at look at my stories while they’re at it, then all the better for my ideas, but I’m not selling anything, not courting my own celebrity here. I’ve been writing for thirty five years now  – I can walk into a bar anywhere in the world and no one will know who I am. And that’s the way I like it. I don’t know how to transform a blog into a WordPress hottie, and to be honest I don’t care. I’d rather remain obscure than lose my virtue vainly trying to escape it. I blog because I enjoy the debate and because that debate informs my own ideas, and because also, crucially, it paints a very different picture of the world out there than the one I get from the TV news.

I’m currently following around 12 blogs. This doesn’t sound like many, but I do read the postings from these authors, and I allow their musings to tickle my own thoughts and if you follow too many, you’re not going to find the time to do any of them justice. And it’s in doing justice to the blogs of others, even in a small way, that enables the blogsphere to collectively reflect, and more importantly to inform the global zeitgeist. Thus begins the slow fight back from a position where our views of the greater world are dominated by an entirely negative and sensationalist press.

I’m glad nothing happened today.

It’s was nice hearing myself think for a change.

Read Full Post »

Too cold for Tai Chi?

I’ve been missing my Tai Chi of late, focussing instead on Kung Fu which I don’t seem to be making much headway with, grading nights coinciding with family emergencies of one sort or another with a regularity that seems almost fated.

The Tai Chi is something I’ve withdrawn from the more public arena of the class, and adopted more now as an integral part of my private life, practicing in the garden of a summer’s eve as a pleasant after-work wind down, or as a Saturday morning energy booster. But it’s winter now and it’s been a while since I was out there – and doing a compact freestyle in the kitchen while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil doesn’t really count. All that does is annoy the hell out of my good lady when she catches me at it, and I’ve grown kind of shy about doing it.

But I was tempted out this afternoon by the pale winter sunshine and the thermometer nudging its way above 10 Celcius. There were even little clouds of midges sunning themselves among the evergreens. But the garden isn’t at its most welcoming this time of year. I found the lawn thick and squidgy with moss, the pond choked with duck-weed, and the borders filled with the dried and dead remains of last year’s glory. There was also about a mile of fence, all lichen stained now, a luminous green instead of a rich brown cedar stain, and when I looked up at the roof line, I spotted we were missing a couple of tiles, torn loose in winter gales and now no doubt lurking in the gutters.

To be fair it was probably like this in the summer too, but there’s something about this time of year that makes you focus on the shabby imperfection of it all and makes life seem only the more burdensome.

Anyway, I warmed up, then ran through the Chen Style short forms that I know – the 11 and the 18, pausing afterwards in the post stance while I caught my breath and began to feel the juices loosening, and the palms tingling. Then I ran through the Old Frame, the 74 moves coming one after the other with the kind of memory that lives in the muscles, rather than the brain. It was imperfectly done, a bit wobbly, but not too bad after such a long break. Then I closed with the Yang 24, and a bit of Heaven and Earth Qigong – putting the energy back in the box, as we used to call it, pressing it down to the root, somewhere under that moss-throttled lawn. Then I opened my eyes to see we were still missing those tiles, and the pond was still thick with weed so I slunk back inside where the air was warm, feeling none the better for any of it.

Too cold for Tai Chi? Well, it’s still winter after all and I’m not expecting Snowdrops until next week, but there’s another kind of winter – one we carry in our hearts and that can take more than spring to thaw because the seasons of the heart keep a different kind of time.

At this point in my story, I decided to cut and paste from the notes app on my iPad, into WordPress, because it looked like we had the makings of a blog piece here, rather than simply a first circle diary kind of thing. But “Control C” on an iPad’s not the same as on a PC, and I lost the whole of it, stared at the blank screen a while, wondering if I could piece it back together from memory, figured I probably could, but then wondered if it was worth the effort.

Decided it was.

Graeme Out

Read Full Post »

Acupunture for Anosmia – did it work?

The short answer to this question, when I first posed it back in November, was a cautious yes.  I’d been anosmic – no sense of smell – for several years. A visit to my local sawbones had proved futile, yielding only a steroid nasal spray that made me ill. So I tried acupuncture and after about six weeks, my sense of smell came back! Hooray!

I enjoyed about three weeks of smelling the world again – and the world smelled good – even when it smelled bad. So I rushed to press and blogged about how successful I’d been and wasn’t this acupuncture business amazing.

I spoke too soon, because it disappeared again, even though I was continuing with the acupuncture. Twelve weeks later, it had shown no signs of re-recovery and the acupuncturist finally sacked me as a hopeless case. I was very disappointed – not just to be left anosmic, but because having those pins stuck in me had become the highpoint of my week. Sounds strange I know, but you need to try it.

Anyway, the longer answer, right now, appears to be: maybe acupuncture doesn’t work for anosmia, or at least not in my case, or rather not in any meaningful, long term sense.

Reluctantly, I returned to the sawbones with my tail between my legs. He wasn’t impressed by my acupuncture story.

“But it came back,” I assured him. “It definitely came back.”

He admitted it was curious, but still told me off for not having gone to see him sooner and for wasting time  on new age nonsense. No surprises there, I suppose. Then he sent me away with a prescription for some powerful antibiotics.

A few weeks later, I was still anosmic. I also had a bad stomach and had  contracted the worst chest infection I’ve ever had in my life – because antibiotics are a bit of a blunderbluss, swatting dead any harmful bacteria, but blowing a hole in your immune system while they’re at it, leaving you wide open to anything else that’s going.

So I waited for all of that to clear up, then went back to the sawbones. This time he said my septum was very narrow.

“What? Oh, sure, I know, but it’s always been like that doc, and I can breathe through it very well – breathe through it all the time because I meditate and do Qigong and stuff – and I used to be able to smell very well through it, and if you remember last November I told you when I was having acupuncture,…. my nose was obviously working, narrow septum or not so,….oh,… never mind.”

He was looking a bit blank by now, like I was speaking Esperanto, so I shut up and let him grumble some more about my suspiciously narrow septum.

Now I’m off to see the Ear Nose and Throat specialist at my local hospital. The sawbones is favouring surgery for that deviant septum. He tells me the surgery’s nothing to worry about. I tell him I’m not worried at all because no matter what the outcome of the ENT diagnosis, nobody’s going to be sticking a scalpel up my nose. It may be useless for smelling the coffee but it works very well in other respects, and I’m for leaving it well alone thanks very much.

So I was feeling a bit glum about the whole business, but the very next day I experienced a minor epiphany. I was in the works canteen when I found myself staring in disbelief at the guy  next to me.

“You all right, Mike?” he asked, a little worried.

“Em,… yes. You’re having fish and chips?”

He looked down at his tray in order to confirm the obvious. “Yes.”

I couldn’t believe it. They smelled great! So did the coffee I had with my lunch. So did the canteen, which was suddenly filled with the rich fatty smell of cooking odours.

I walked away puzzled. It’s November since I last smelled anything.

When I got home, I flipped the lid off the coffee jar, stuck my nose in deep and took a long luxurious draw on the contents,…. nothing.

My nose, it seems, has a quirky sense of humour.

Graeme out.

Read Full Post »

Sorry no, I do not follow.

qwyut hjuit dfgty akitl ghjki gthu akjhu laksj tiueo oiurt

Sorry dear knee jerker. No, I do not follow, unless you talk to me, unless you interest and intrigue me, unless you win me.

Graeme out.

 

 

Read Full Post »

Austerity?

Got a utility or home and car insurance bill recently? Don’t just pay it, query it. It’s expected of you!

Finances in the Graeme household have been coming under scrutiny recently. I’m constantly being told by TV pundits and politicians that the financial crisis will involve lots of “difficult” decisions, and that  we’re all in it together, which I interpret as meaning the state we’re in is is as much my fault as those artfully dodgy bankers and other financial types, for being so wasteful and spending above my means. I’ve therefore been looking at my bank statements ans scrutinising my monetary inflows and outflows, so to speak – dull, I know – but in the process I think I’ve discovered something rather shocking.

The reason my coffers have been dwindling  isn’t my profligate ways at all!  In fact, I’ve discovered to my relief I’m rather frugal. No, the reason my finances are so stretched at the minute is – well, I can hardly bring myself to say it.  While I’ve been busy with  my nose to the grindstone, my coffers have been raided by a sophisticated kind of  – well,…

Fraud!

It’s complex, widespread and totally bamboozling, and it’s hiding under this smokescreen of austerity – that times are hard and it’s only right and proper that we should all be feeling the pinch.

Let me explain:

I  took out a house insurance policy in 2000 and have never queried it, just kept paying the premiums year on year. And those premiums have been creeping up at a rate way above that of inflation. The last four years in particular I thought I was probably paying far too much, but I let it go because I was busy with other things. I queried it this year because I thought £1400 was definitely a mistake, that my suburban bungalow had somehow been misclassified as a country mansion.

But it turns out it wasn’t a mistake at all, just that my “product” was rather old, “sir”. However, the telephone salesperson hastened to reassure  me there was  another “product” that gave me the same insurance cover for £600, saving me £800 a year.

Just like that!

It was a hassle sorting all of this out – expensive phone calls on the mobile in my lunch hour at work, but it was obviously worth it. And this was not achieved by threatening to change insurer, or by losing my temper, or projecting any other emotion that attracted negative energy back at me. I simply queried it. Precisely how and when my insurance “product” became “obsolete” eludes me, also the reason why it should have become incrementally so much more expensive over time. I can only conclude this is the modern reality and we have to get used to it.

Fraud a bit too strong a word perhaps? Well, I’ve been searching for a less pejorative noun, but I can’t find one, and fraud is still the closest fit to the facts as I see them. Taking money for a service, and not telling me I was paying way over the odds for it, relying on my ignorance or reticence for change to query it? I think that’s fraudulent, or at the very least dishonourable – the kind of sharp practice you’d expect from a street hustler or a payday-loan shyster, not a respectable stock market listed company staffed by graduates with degrees in Business Studies.

Sometimes I think I’m the most gullible and trusting person on the planet, but even my easily won trust has been broken, and when ordinary citizens like me lose trust in those institutions that are supposedly the bedrock of our existence – for a family man cannot live without house insurance, any more than he can live without food or water -  then what of society at large?

Gas and electricity bills are another area where this sharp practice is rife of course. Again, it’s an area I’ve been reluctant to meddle in because it’s so complicated and I don’t want to end up getting my energy supply cut off because of a clerical error. My gas provider has eight different tarifs, none of which I understand. They’re also constantly on at me about providing my electricity as well, just as the electricity lot want to provide my gas – but that’s equally complicated, so I’ve never bothered.

You think about doing it every time you get the bill, but then something else comes along competing for your attention, so you set it aside. But my gas and electricity bills have been creeping up to around £2000 a year, so something really had to be done this time, because I’m heating and powering a suburban bungalow, remember, not a mansion or a factory.

I finally got to grips with this over the Christmas period and switched to a company who buys gas and electricity from the utility companies who actually generate and pump this stuff, yet by some weird financial trick this third party company who generates and pumps nothing can sell it to me cheaper. I’ll save £350 a year if it all works out as planned. I don’t understand how this works, and my instincts tell me only a fool would sign up for something he doesn’t understand, but £350 will cover the next service on my car (I hope).

And speaking of cars, vehicle insurance has yielded similar significant savings  -  50% on my own vehicle. Simply by switching insurer every year, there’s always been a cheaper deal to be found. But the irrational nature of this business was brought home to me when my good lady’s car insurance became due for renewal. I’m a named driver on her policy and since I had the misfortune to pick up three penalty points on my licence for speeding, I reminded her to inform her insurer that she had a bad ass husband who was obviously a risk to life and limb. Common sense told me it would probably increase her premiums, and that if it made a big difference, then she should take my name off her policy, that it wasn’t worth it for the number of times I drove her car.

It did make a big difference – it made it cheaper.

Clearly there’s is no real logic to any of this, other than the fact that if you don’t constantly query what you’re paying you’re rendering yourself vulnerable to this systematic fraud – one where you do not get what you think you’re paying for, and one in which you pay incrementally more, way above the rate of inflation, for exactly the same thing you’ve always had, unless you say: “Hang on a minute!”.

Whether we have the nous or the energy required to plunge into this impenetrable jungle of financial double-speak is another matter, but it’s expected of us now – it’s built into the system. Refuse to join in, or can’t be bothered and you’re like a lone cowboy out in the desert with the indians circling. And as citizens of a free-market and totally de-regulated economy, we are unprotected from this kind of merciless predation. There is no government cavalry coming to your rescue. Indeed in many ways, these financial predators are the new government, setting the agenda for the way the world works, and how we all fit into it.

None of this is personal of course. It’s just business.

What could possibly go wrong?

The troubling thing is, these are not luxuries. They are things we either cannot do without, or they are legally required of us, yet I’d say by far the greater proportion of us lack the awareness or even the basic confidence to challenge the system.  I was lazy. It took me a while to wake up and do something about it – and I groan at the prospect of having to constantly keep doing something about it every time a bill appears in my inbox. I’d rather be out walking, or writing, or contemplating my navel. I can do it, if pushed – and I’ve definitely been pushed in recent years – but for many this game is simply too complicated, and they’re vulnerable.

It takes time keeping one step ahead of this game, and I think most of us would rather be doing other things. It will be a sad day when the only satisfaction any of us get is bragging about how much we managed to save on our utility bills. Really, life’s too short. But it’s precisely this attitude the direct debit leeches seek to exploit, bleeding our bank accounts, growing fatter and fatter on our indolence.

So wake up!

It seems altogether the wrong vision for society. Utilities and basic financial services are the bedrock upon which we build our lives and strive for greater things – they should not be so conspicuous in our lives that dealing with them becomes our raison d’etre. In the long ago, the providers of these things were few and trusted (rightly or wrongly), but anyway costs weren’t so great they caused us to tear our hair out in frustration. At eighteen I could easily afford to insure my own car, but my own eighteen year old son cannot. At eighteen my mother’s house was warm enough on bags of coal to keep its heat until late into the night. Now my own modern home is so expensive to heat, we knock the heating off at nine and creep to bed when the January chill seeps into our bones. So this free market free for all, this culture of endless consumer choice, and cut-throat competition, isn’t providing the efficient and all-enabling service to society it so often claims to be, but is in fact slowly crippling it.

Surfing the tempestuous waves of this shark infested free market ocean always leaves me feeling soiled. It seems to insist I declare war upon it, or be eaten. But I am not a soldier, and I still dream of Shangri-la.

Graeme out.

Read Full Post »

An Enigma?

Just testing – forgive me:

 

asxct wfrty kloit sdfty nmgjr

wpaok jslle fhtue rtuap hfkty

idsop rthyt sdjuy kajsh lopqw

hjdkt jklel utkld kflrl utioe

ipgfp tueie tklam opqhe lopsn

 

Cipherclarks please do beware, don’t waste your time, there’s nothing there.

 

Read Full Post »