I've finally finished pruning back the pyracantha hedge. Our front window is now free of verdant obscuration. It now resembles a rather prickly Chaise Longue, or an elongated pram. The small section I cut back a week or so ago, has already begun sprouting tentative leaves. I've been dutifully watering and feeding it since, to encourage this revival. So, It looks as if it will survive my hacking away at it after all. Hurrah to the pyracantha! Hurrah to the pyracantha! Hurrah! Hurrah!!
Walking along a road in Wells next the Sea, there was a small bright yellow car with a sticker on the back in pink psychedelic letter font saying - Tailgate Me Harder. Daddy! Also a sign on a building for a company called Norfolk Sealants, with the byline -.You do your best, we'll masticate the rest!
In the process of chatting with one of our very lovely neighbours, we were collectively musing, as you do, on the bizarre behaviour of fascists. She confessed she had difficulty saying the words Neo Nazis, that it often came out sounding like Neo Nancy, and we riffed for a while on an activist group called The Neo Nancy's, open to both ladies and gentlemen, dedicated to ikibana and all things floral, the obligatory wearing of flamboyantly frilly pastel aprons in the street. Material Girl playing discreetly in the background. Like some pastiche wet dream from the 1950's. The Neo Nancy's, you heard it here first.
I see the phrase Ambient Buddhism used a lot these days, and in wondering quite what that meant, realised - it's a spirituality that plays blandly in the background without overtly distracting your attention. If the Buddha knew what his realisation beneath the Bodhi Tree had been reduced to, maybe he'd have had more than second thoughts.
In our terrace there are six houses in the row, only two of them have house numbers on them. So sometimes you see delivery drivers anxiously walking up and down the terrace trying to work out the numbering. I mean, it is a miracle we don't have more things misdelivered or not delivered at all. We are one of the numberless houses. For the last year we have prevaricated, as only two gay men could do, over what style of colour of numbering, whether it should be in wood, metal or ceramic, but have failed to commit. But whilst recently in the Norwich Hobbycraft we saw some numbers in thin plywood for a £1 each. Which I have stuck to a stable wood backing, painted, varnished and now mounted. It turned out that what we really needed most, was it to be cheap.
And the question on most mens minds according to one You Tube channel is - ' How to become glute dominant in a week'. Basically these are exercises for men who want to cultivate a really plump arse. The instructor guy wears only his dark stretchy briefs, has a blackboard, a pointy stick, and a moustache that wouldn't be out of place in the Village People. So he is a serious legit gym instructor.
Life is pootling along at a pace at present. Craft wise the gallery in Blakeney is doing very well for us, which puts a certain degree of pressure on to keep up with sales. Generally we are, but there is the desire for doing short intense dashes, rather than a long sprint. Which is OK. Ideally it might appear better to be on top and ahead of the curve. But that does not appear to be our way. A series of short periods of making, just about keeping up with sales, rather than aiming for far too much which may burn you dry, or overwhelm you. My role and strategy in all this is to make sure there is just enough fabric cut for Hubby to top up our biggest selling items. Fitting this around periods set aside for my own artwork. Getting the balance right is forever tricky, and I have to be prepared to drop whatever I'm doing in order to meet the urgency of a sudden sales surge.
Idly wandering out of QD I noticed a large sign hung from the ceiling that declared very proudly The Home of Quality Discounts. Discounts are just discounts surely. I've never thought of discounts as having a quality before and pondered on what the opposite of 'quality discounts' might be. I came to no firm conclusion.
In the continuing heat, it's been a struggle to get a good night's sleep, as I presume many people have been finding. I've been aware for sometime of waking either with lower back pain or a cracking stiff neck/headache. And I know this is because my sleeping posture is incorrect. The mattress and pillow are not aligning my spine correctly. But whenever I've attempted to resolve this before, the solution generates another problem. Memory foam pillows, appears tobe ideal, but these make me incredibly over hot when all my body heat is thrown back at me. I tried a buckwheat pillow, and this seemed, like a lot of alternative solutions, to work momentarily, but not for very long. I've also consulted You Tube videos that suggest elaborate pillow solutions involving the creation of a veritable nest of them, propping up legs and arms in a supposedly correct alignment. I take one look and know this is not a practical solution. I'm a fidgety restless sleeper and have been since I was a child, where my Mother would often remark that I'd completely destroy a bed in one night. So some Jenga pillow rigmarole would last barely an hour with me. It turns out one nicely stuffed, reasonably firm but yeilding, pillow is currently the best solution. I am wary to say more, as it wouldn't be the first time an apparent solution to this problem lasts a few days, then all the supposed improvements evaporate. But three nights in, I have woken up feeling rested and relatively discomfort free for the first time in an age. But then another heatwave arrives and I'm kept awake, sweating like a pig, even though every vestige of night ware has been divested.
Walking away from Tesco towards the car park. I overheard a mother who was bending down to talk to her child in the buggy, and saying in quite a matter of fact manner of delivery - 'and over there is the pub where your Dad and I blew £750 in a one night binge.' - I'll bet the kid will remember that and feel proud.
You Tube appears to use a somewhat crude, but essentially stereotypical 'gay' algorithm. And I have at times, as a gay man, undoubtedly triggered this. It emerged most strongly a while back when I was trying to find resistance band exercises for a troublesome shoulder, and has resurged again recently when I was again investigating beneficial exercises for strengthening hip muscles. My search found the helpful exercise advice videos, but mixed in amongst these were more than a scattering of what were basically soft porn. I've read recently, that even your average young straight man gets bombarded with imagery of the ideal male body, and videos about exercises you must do to obtain the perfect body form. I now get a lot of supposedly 'instructional' videos of outrageously pumped up men, young to middle aged, ready to abandon their T shirts and flash the pertness of their nipples at you. It happens in the drop of a hat, the shirt is whipped off, and they're jogging their pecs like horses. Displaying what is obviously the prime achievement of their life so far, a beautifully sculpted musculature. But what this most resembles is 'exercise porn'. Once you've seen one carefully posed armpit or crotch to camera, have you not seen them all? Take it from me, it may be tempting, but do not get drawn in.
Be aware of the seemingly innocent opener. There are those chaps making sincere heartfelt confessions about how much better they feel now they've come out as gay, or how beneficial taking a beautiful walk in the countryside is round here, whilst just casually displaying their handsome hairy bear bod, in a corn field, by a babbling brook, or relaxing across a rustic bench. Are they simply not getting enough real love and attention? Some of this undoubtedly is designed to be titillating, but not all of it. It becomes bewildering when even the straight guys appear to be having body buddies to show off there muscles too. It feels as though there's more than a gay thing going on here. An increasing insularity and narcissism in men, perhaps. A self preoccupation with their own idealised body beautiful. None of this is done to gain women's admiration. At best it is to bolster self esteem and catch the envious eye, a need for masculine attention and approval. Feeding the nascent aspirations of young men to also become painfully self preoccupied and obsessive about being visibly fit. It would be mistaken to couch this solely as sublimated homo eroticism, there is also a profound need for brotherly masculine camaraderie buried within this too.
A Norwegian guy makes these videos, which start out doing the innocent extolling of the virtues of being outdoors in nature shtick, but ends up with you voyeuristically watching him. He takes his camper van to a very remote place in the countryside. Mostly we view the proceedings through leaves on gently waving tree branches. He films himself from a suitably discrete distance, as the morning sun rises, undressing down to his undies, before going for an undoubtedly vigorous but chill wild swim in the lake. Then comes out Adonis like, backlit by the melting wet dream of dawn, to discreetly towel himself down. Then eat a very hearty meal cooked over an open fire, fully dressed in a parka, a wooly hat, with a cuppa coffee warming his cold numbed hands. His idyll has now become yours. The exact same thing happens every time, in every place he visits. Yes, I have checked this out! The border between male body positivity, outrageous showing off, vain preening, and simply being a titillating cock tease, is extraordinarily narrow these days. Though I guess these muted 'not quite porn, but close' videos, studiously avoid being censurable, but does earn this guy a living. How do you make them go away? - Ignore them for an extremely long time, and don't allow any of them ever to 'peak' your interest. And puritan - do not try to tell me your interest has never been peaked.
Within days of me writing these last paragraphs, and before I actually published the blog post, all the stuff I was talking about has now disappeared from my You Tube feed, except for the Norwegian guy. It's almost as though You Tube were aware of my draft post. It may of course be coincidental, and You Tube were already in the process of cleaning out this sub porn stuff. But interesting, is it not?
Greatly saddened to hear this week that Jason Arday took his life, and if I'm honest really angered by it ending in this way. Watching him being set up to be disgraced and his career sullied and trashed by the right wing media, has not been at all pleasant to watch. Any integrity or achievements he had, being literally ripped to shreds in public. I doubt many of us could stand that level of lacerating scrutiny. And even when he resigned this didn't stop. The press never really cared about him, but simply wanted to make an example of him. Jason Arday was used to blow up a culture war bete noir, much beloved of the far right - DEI initiatives. His alledged plagarism could have been looked at within the broader framework of how academic standards might generally be being weakened, not just by DEI, but increased internet and AI usage. Plagarism is rife in academia. I'll bet there are white Professors out there already shitting themselves, lest their CV or academic credentials now get a serious look at. But here it was specifically weaponised against one psychologically fragile black academic. Turning this one man's alleged untruthfulness into an all out attack upon DEI, by people who don't remotely believe in it's aims. They would prefer DIE - Deliberate Insular Elitism - which appears in this case to look more like white supremacy, given the protective gloss of upholding academic standards and rigor. Arday's suicide brings shame on them, and unfortunately also upon us all, because it happened during our watch. Jason Arday may indeed have been a needy fantasist, ( Who hasn't been at some point in their life? ) but did he need to be excoriated for public shaming in this way?
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