MUSIC REVIEW - Sparks - A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

With this new album, a musical Annette directed by Leo Carax, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard and a documentary about their career made by Edgar Wright, both due out later in the year, Sparks are having another moment in the spotlight. After near on fifty years in the music business you'd be rightly wondering what they have left to say. On the evidence of A Steady Drip Drip Drip there are plenty of innovative ideas left in these septuagenarians yet.

The lively lyrical and musical driving force is, as ever, Ron Mael. It would be a mistake though to assume the vocal expertise of Russell is all he contributes. How Team Mael works has always been a mysterious two headed beast. Their lives outside of their pop personas are closely guarded, do they even have partners or children?  Not that we need to know, its just interesting that in our Instagram world there's still not a sniff of anything other than their brotherhood.

Like Hippopotamus, A Steady Drip Drip Drip utilises a song portfolio approach similar to Indiscreet, my favourite Sparks album from their Island Records period. But whilst there are knowing nods to their back catalogue, none of this is self-parody, it feels fresh and musically alive. Sparks remain at the top of their own particularly unique game as acute observers of the ridiculous side of human behaviour, and how recent social media technological developments, in a sense, only change the setting for them.

Of the many many delights on this album I'll focus on three to give a sense of the peachy perfections it contains. Ron Mael has always been able to write an effortlessly sparse song, a simple premise, simply executed, of which 'Lawnmower' is a classic example. Its about a chap who is so obsessed with mowing his lawn that his girlfriend leaves him.

'The neighbors look in awe at my lawnmower
With jealous and awe at my lawnmower
I'll never loan it out, not my lawnmower
La-la-la, la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la

You're pushin' on your lawnmower, lawnmower
Your lawn will be a showstopper, showstopper
Your lawn will be a jaw-dropper, jaw-dropper
La-la-la, la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la

What makes the prospect of the upcoming film Annette so exciting is that Ron Mael has been writing show tunes in a pop vein for years. There are a couple here 'Self-effacing' and a beautifully tongue in cheek song, about a woman called Onomato Pia who communicates without using words.

Onomato Pia came from Rome, had a head of angel hair
Couldn’t speak a word of English, no one cared
Onomatopia flowed out everywhere
Pia had a real communication flair

Every little sigh was oh so epic
Every little gasp for air
Every little yawn a yawn beyond compare
Onomato Pia’s gift was oh so rare
Pia had a real communication flair

There are a couple of songs with expletives in, which is unusual for Sparks, but used appropriately. The self explanatory 'Please don't fuck up my world' is one, the other 'I Phone' has the catchy chorus line of  'Put your fucking I Phone down and listen to me'.

Musically, they continue to be adventurous in their music arrangements, pushing at the envelope of what popular music can encompass, such as in the strident 'Sainthood is not in your future'   The wildest example here is 'Stravinsky's Only Hit' a song about how Stravinsky was convinced to make one concession to pop success that he subsequently regrets.

Stravinsky’s only hit
He toned it down a bit
He didn’t write the words, that was my job
He hated minor thirds
Thought them too absurd
I recommended them to make the girls sob

Adulation, how he loved it
All that action, Igor was digging it and
Party, party, rum and women
Party, party, a long way from Rite O’ Spring.

A Steady Drip Drip Drip gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from me.  

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF - Plagues & Peoples

written by William H. McNeill

Though first published in 1976 I read this probably ten years later. That was largely as part of my reading up on the whole idea of plagues in human history, in response to the general panic over the AIDS crisis in the mid 80's. I wanted to better understand what makes a plague a plague and how something like that could happen. It also has contemporary relevance in demonstrating the widespread effects of catastrophic disease spread in deforming and reforming societies, cultures and civilisations. It's way too early yet to say what lasting effect Covid 19 will have upon the UK, but it could well be quite significant.

Plagues & Peoples is provocative history, because it takes wide swipes at undermining the significance of wars and great individuals in human history. His essential premise is that plagues and diseases in general have had a far greater impact upon changing and directing humanities progress than those more lauded ( frequently male and white ) individuals and empires.

The world in the past was full of discreet disease pools, unique to a localised area, environment or culture. As humankind wandered the world, further afield they inevitably would cross, without knowing, a point that was a disease threshold. Once they did that they became exposed to a range of infections not previously encountered and without the anti-bodies to protect themselves, would die, at least initially, in huge numbers, sometimes decimating a whole civilisation. Though their widespread prevalence may have declined, these discreet disease pools still exist, we still never quite know where they are, until they make themselves known. Our responses are then always belated, the question these days is how much they are belated.

A classic incidence is when the indigenous Aztec civilisation met the Spanish Conquistadors. The Spanish who compiled the history of their conquest of the Americas, presented it as the justified victory of superior Catholic civilisation over a heathen one. However, their success could not have been so easily achieved, if at all, had not an epidemic of diseases the Spanish brought with them taken out the existing Aztec leadership and seriously weakened the ability of the citizens from a highly developed culture to put up an effective resistance.

Another, is the Ottoman Empire's advance on the Hapsburg Empire and why it stalled at the Siege of Vienna in 1683. This was due to the Ottoman military supply lines across the Balkans collapsing under the weight of infections running rife through its troops. Without these it could neither sustain a longer siege nor advance further afterwards, so it was forced to retreat. So all the historical bluster from Europe of a Holy War and the triumph of 'superior' Christianity over Islam etc etc, is very far from being the whole truth. Europe was saved from Ottoman invasion largely by a virulent disease threshold being crossed.

Mc Neill gives other detailed examples from many periods of history and different cultures, like China, India and Japan. So this is far from a western centric history book. The further back in history he goes the more conjectural he has to become, but some of his suggestions for what might have occured are thought provoking. One of these is the origins of the Indian caste system. This may have arisen from tribes in India crossing disease thresholds within the Indian sub-continent itself, or the arrival of new cultures into them such as the influx of Aryan migrants. The immigrant or indigenous people become the 'diseased other' over time transformed into a hierarchy of clean and unclean individuals. Given how vehemently some people blamed gay people for being the cause of AIDS or jumped on racial explanations for the current Covid 19 pandemic, this human tendency, though an old one, is unfortunately still alive and kicking.

This book significantly altered my perspective on history as it is traditionally presented to us. One small change in human behaviour can enable a new opportunistic disease to find itself a fresh infection host. With the increased intensity of global trade from the 16th century onwards, the rate at which such diseases reach pandemic levels has likewise also speeded up.

It would be so much simpler if diseases were caused by technology, such as a 5G Mast, because then we would just dismantle that cause, and the disease should then be extinguished. But the demographic spread and signifiers would be vastly different to that of an airborne or contact spread. So 99.9 times out of 100, a disease arising will be because of a small change in human behaviour that crosses a previously hidden disease threshold. We then become exposed to something we weren't previously aware existed or were prepared for.

200 WORDS ON - Contentment

An ideal of contentment fuels the endless battle with bits of our life we dislike and cannot sit easy with. Eradicating discontentment when it appears doesn't leave us with contentment. Relationships, careers, a luxurious home bring satisfaction, but such circumstances, like ourselves, are changeable. Despite longer life expectancy our era bitches and moans constantly from discontent.

Contentment evades us. Before lock-down we had busy lives with barely enough time to do what we needed to do, we craved a simpler relaxed lifestyle. The lock-down forced us into a simpler more relaxed lifestyle, yet we crave to be busier. External circumstances are dictating our sense of well-being. Not content with then, not content with now. The solution for contentment resides with us.

Children believe in magical thinking, the harder they wish for something, then it'll happen. Adults believe in merit, if we behave and work hard we’ll be rewarded. Reality, however, doesn't respond to our beck and call, its actually indifferent to our wishes and wants. Every human lifestyle is unstable, uncontrollable, unsustainable, everything coming to an end eventually. If we’re able to face this full on, to calmly accept things as they are, the foundations for true contentment will be laid.

CARROT CAKE REVIEW 21 - Where The Art Isn't

Cromer, North Norfolk.

This visit and review took place and was written before the lockdown.

This cafe is tucked to one side of the High Street facing the magnificent elegance and edifice that is Cromer Parish Church. The cafe is overlooked in many other ways, I'll mention two. One, in Winter its windows mist up so badly you'd think there was a sauna going on inside, and two, its a not fully convincing hybrid of cafe and art/craft gallery. From the street it presents a mixed message: what would make you go in there; what is this trying to be? Does the gallery have something to say other than the provision of quality caffeine and catering and is this integrated  into the ethos of the cafe as a whole, or is the rest of it solely a bit of arty set dressing?

We've been to here a few times, its never been atrociously bad, but any expectations of superlative coffee or cakes will always be shaken awake from their wistful dreaming. The art on show speaks volumes. The presentation and quality of them is quite average. Largely hovering in that twilight region between the amateur and the gifted semi-professional maker, where you know you've seen these ideas before, and that they can be done a lot better.

The cafe appears to have changed hands recently. The art /craft on show is grouped better. The real problem is curation, the third rate devaluing the better quality. With a cafe/ gallery hybrid both aspects ought to augment the other. The coffee /cakes matching the quality of the art and vice a versa. Here average cafe meets average art.  But then if you pitch yourself a notch or two above a church craft fair, this will let the whole thing down. If you are going to flaunt artistic pretensions by calling yourself The Art Cafe, then why not fulfil them to abundance?

So, that's all well and good, but what about the carrot cake? Come on Vidyavajra do your self- appointed job properly, you've painted the scenery, what happened here? I've had a previous painful culinary experience in this cafe, admittedly under the old management, with a courgette and lime cake that would've failed a blind taste test. The courgette and the lime were so finely balance they appeared to negate each other, producing a cake empty of all flavour and relish. Under new ownership, lets give them another chance. I ordered my slice of carrot cake with a flat white chaser and quietly sat awaiting delivery.

The usual cake & coffee photo lies imprisoned on my phone, so you will just have to imagine what the cake and the flat white looked like as served. The size of the cup the flat white arrived in was almost as big as the cake, which tells you only one thing doesn't it?  This will not be a flat white of small but superlative joy, but a downsized latte with jumped up pretensions. As such it was fine, but as a flat white it was not OK, and lets leave it there shall we, lest the vented steam emitted from all my orifices mists up the cafe's windows..... again.

Now to the cake, judged on outward appearance alone looked promising, a sizable slice, good colour and recognisable carrot texture, with very evident sultanas evenly spread across it. I bit my lip and held my suspicious nature in check for a while, sat back and really took it in. It might, after all the preening pickiness of my preamble, be a surprise pleasance.

Once rendered to the mouth, tongue and palate the texture held up well. The sultanas tasted succulent and there was a gentle suggestive amount of spices. It was perhaps a tad too airy for a carrot cake, it could have born being a little weightier to fully meet my admittedly exacting standard. The filling and frosting was a cream cheese one, thankfully, of adequate dimensions and not overly sweetened. The top frosting had the obligatory freckle of catering chopped nuts, which whilst providing welcome texture always exist in a culinary dimension where flavour can not survive. In short, it was quite good, in an above average sort of way.

Postscript
Later that day we both had badly upset stomachs. What was it that we both had?  Our minds cast back to those last two pieces of carrot cake we took from the cake counter and their cream cheese filling. Lets just hope it wasn't those, eh?


CARROT CAKE SCORE  - 5/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY 38 - Days And Days of Routine Verses

And this is how things go.

Arise, usually, around 5
make a slow cooked bowl of porridge
with fruit or compote
a soothing bergamot infused tea
I sip and compliment the cup.

Hubby has
coffee brought to him
in bed.

depending upon the satisfactoriness
or otherwise, of slumber
I read or find something
on I Player, to go down easily
without frisson or demand.

7.00 am, shower and relocate,
where do I go to? its where I
zoom zazen, with rituals plus
a brief codicil of 'I'm OK', concluding
daily devotion.

Hubby makes coffee
we take a walk
together, hither.

weekends divest themselves of
weekdays, the latter being
workdays, Hubby sewing or
computes,  whilst outside
in the petite dark workshop.

Is where I remake the world
in small steps, utilising slow sandpaper
transformations, consume the hours,
concentration and the curses
preceding victory.

11am
genmaicha tea
with buttered crumpets.

Working hours run on
til lunch tuck, when
the post prandial nappette
drugs my sluggish return
to making mode

I tend to grind my teeth
over dinner, daily briefings
news upon a pandemonium
Trump's daily tantrum
and the worldwide litany of deaths

We scour Netflix for a passable evening,
a two hour distraction, a read,
or be a proactive buddhist
with a wall of frames, containing
familiar faces, in unfamiliar rooms.

9 pm, as slumber
beckons to bed reading, a few pages more
of  Hilary Mantel's historical brick
til the spine cleft drops on my face
and its goodnight Hubby.

kiss, kiss, kiss.

And this is how things go.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF- The Buckminster Fuller Reader

• 
  

Buckminster Fuller was not a shy man, he knew the worth of his ideas and was not reticent in self promoting them. When I read this book in my late teens he was a familiar name without my understanding exactly who he was and what he'd done i.e geodesic domes, maps etc

If there was a person who personified thinking 'outside the box' it was Buckminster Fuller. To my teenage eyes his relentlessly practical idealism I found inspiring. Yes, some of his ideas might strike you as cranky.  But the questions he posed and his analysis were frequently right on the button,  though usually coming at you from left field. It was like briefly inhabiting the mind space of some one who dared to dream, then systematically brought them into life.

He was critical of traditional scientific and industrial research because he thought they resisted working outside the conventions of existing knowledge and technology.  If you wanted to find truly revolutionary ideas he said, you wont find them in universities, MIT or the Ford Company. There was probably some thing personal in him saying this, having had a lifetime struggling to convince those self same institutions to invest in and develop his ideas, but it holds a degree of truth nonetheless.

He famously once asked an architect how much his buildings weighed. This was his way of opening up the subject of how you made efficient use of limited resources, which he explored further in his book of futuristic thinking - Critical Path.  Within it inward looking nationalistic viewpoints are challenged by a book full of Big Ideas and global collaborative solutions to humanities resource and climate problems and ultimately it's survival. So not entirely without contemporary relevance.

Other Buckminster Fuller Reading:
 - Critical Path
 - Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

200 WORDS ON - Solitude

'I never found a companion who was so companionable as solitude' - Thoreau

We all need time alone. Solitude is a restorative experience. Removing ourselves from our high density urban world, slowing down, close to nature and away from the usual hubble-bubble. We may arrive bearing the existential bruises of city living, but through experiencing solitude we begin healing the wounds to our sense of who we are and how we relate to others. Its as though we are a computer that needs regular de-fragging of all the useless junk clogging up it functioning better.

Today we’re always in communication and available, the thought of even a day away from portable devices can feel alarming. Being alone brings worries and fears to the surface, but most recede once we sit looking out of a window at a wind tossed landscape, taking in nature, taking in ourselves. Doing nothing for as long as possible.

Solitude needs to be chosen. Self-isolating in a pandemic, feels imprisoning because it wasn't at our instigation. Solitude need not be viewed as starvation, but as nutrition. Learning how to enjoy being with just you, the only desire to be in better touch with oneself, content within solitude.

ARTICLE - Aesthetic Awakenings

Aesthetic Awakenings - To Art

It was the fulfilment of a long held wish to visit The Van Gogh Museum  in Amsterdam. Van Gogh being my first artistic love. It was such an immense pleasure to see all his fabulous paintings laid out in front of me. It was like conversing with old familiar friends. I ambled slowly around the busy galleries, trying to soak up as much as possible, staring for longer when I came across particular favourites. Then as I turned one corner on the wall facing me was a picture I hadn't seen before. It was a simple painting of a woodland floor called Undergrowth. The moment my eyes saw it I instantly felt a pulse of ecstatic energy awakened in me. This moved from head to foot and back again like a bliss filled strobe. This continued for some time, until that analytical bit of my brain kicked its way through my motionless transfixed state. I then rushed around trying to locate where my husband was to tell him what had just happened.

This type of embodied thrill of experience is not an everyday experience for me. I can only recollect two other occasions with a similar intensity. One, being strongly moved spiritually by a the oscillating shimmer of Rothko's brushstrokes, another, was a second painting of Van Gogh's called Long Grasses with Butterflies. It is significant that both experiences with the Van Gogh's were simple paintings of the ground - woodland undergrowth and grasses. That said, I don't need to fully pin down why this might be, I'm content to leave this with a little aura of mystery. To intellectually explain everything might rationalise it out of existence. My heart understands.

Aesthetic awakenings to art can span a wide spectrum of feeling, from fondness, to besotted love to full blown bliss. The opposite ( aesthetic terminations?) is also true when indifference shifts to mild dislike and ends up in violent hatred. However strongly a piece of art strikes us its leaving an indelible mark upon our perception and being. We tend to judge the worth of art based on our feelings, of our likes and dislikes, by its monetary value, or according to the current fashion, the personal taste of whether it would go with your curtains. If we stayed loyal to that first aesthetic awakening we would know it has nothing to do with any of those things. Once we've made the decision we like or dislike something, its then become solely an object for intellectual curiosity. Seeking out further information to back up and validate whatever our initial response was. The aesthetic awakening disappears beneath our analysis.

As soon as matters of taste or intellect become the primary mode, our way of swimming in the aesthetic awakening to an artwork, then enters the shallower end of the pool. We have moved from a pure aesthetic experience to one that propagates ideas and judgements, where well defined interpretive boundaries begin being set up. We cease being receptive to anything not previously filtered and passed through this self vetting. The aesthetic awakening becomes incorporated into your self view, as an informed discerning person with the sensitivity and refined form of taste required to experience this sort of thing.

Aesthetic Awakenings - To The Truth

When I first heard The Four Noble Truths my initial response was like an aesthetic awakening.  My spirits were uplifted at being given important sustenance. Since then I've had a few such significant moments, when I first heard the Ten Precepts, when I first heard the words of Dogen from his Instruction To The Tenzo, to name two. Each time they resonated with an often unrecognised need within me. Suddenly I was awakened to a different way of seeing my self or the world.  I could never go back to how I was before. Sometimes the spiritual path is a gradual evolution in our awareness and opening up to a truth, but these aesthetic awakenings are more abrupt revolutions, overturning our previous way of perceiving. Its the essence of vidya an aesthetic knowledge or intuitive sense for the truth when its laid out before you.

Afterwards of course you think about it endlessly, often in great detail. You read the background books and learn all you can. This is what the intellect is good at, explaining and expanding the breadth of your understanding. This intellectual rationalisation of an aesthetic awakening has a unfortunate side effect of neutering the original experience. Creating inhibiting obstacles that further direct communication of the truth has to overcome. Our practice can turn into one of self-improvement, refining personal spiritual tastes and self-expression, where openness and receptivity get demoted or lost.

I know I have particular preferences for certain types of Dharma, I hold that these are things that 'work for me'. Overtime these self-definitions can close down experiencing anything that doesn't quite fit within the autobiographical brief I've now set out for myself. I create an equally strong dislike to reinforce my strong like. Though knowing what works for you can be useful, when times get difficult you need to know where to go to find sources for inspiration, support and guidance. At times my hold on faith deserts me. Time and again reading Dogen reminds and reconnects me.

I recently experienced a strong aversion whilst studying The Diamond Sutra.  Its a text I've read numerous times over the years and not had any noticeable difficulty with before. The Diamond Sutra should never be light reading, it is extremely challenging, the repetitive literary style alone can be confronting. But, considering my familiarity with it, the vehemence of my indignation and frustration, took me completely by surprise. I was struggling to find a way of relating to it.  I found myself trotting out all sorts of self justifications, why this translation of the Diamond Sutra wasn't a good one, as a teaching I connect better with impermanence rather than sunyata, that studying it just didn't work for me. This wasn't a lack of intellectual understanding, this was emotional and personal, it was about my individualistic preferences being traduced, the exclusivity of particular Dharmic preferences. I was putting up a fight with these and resisting engaging or changing them with all my might.

Like with art, whenever someone pulls out justifications of taste or intellectual rationalisations for why a Dharma text doesn't work for them, we have entered the same shallower end of the pool.  I'd turned away from the possibility of an aesthetic awakening and tuned in to Radio Self Justification. There are artists whose work I didn't like or understand when I first came across them, whom I now really love, value and appreciate. Partly what changed was me or my perspective, over time I'd become more receptive. Usually I'd encountered something that provided a way in, an aesthetic sense for how to appreciate what the artist was trying to do.

Our responses to Sutras and other Dharma texts can follow very similar pathways. You may simply not be ready for it yet, but how will you know when you are if you walk away every time you encounter it? My resistance and insistence upon dislike was flagging up that I needed to sit with and hear what lies beneath this response. There will be a way for you to appreciate any text. But this needs to be allowed to emerge, unsolicited and arriving often from an unexpected direction. Whatever way they arrive, they will arrive despite our reservations, because we've been willing to stay open and stay with it.

Rather than over indulging in emotional re-activity and rationalisations for why its justified to loath The Diamond Sutra. I'm trying to take a step back, to not close and bolt the door entirely against it. Trying to stay open to the possibility that the inflexible nature of my views could change. Remaining patient with both the Sutra and myself. For the time may come, when something will present a particular key to a teaching, an aesthetic awakening that opens up the Sutra and point out a way to the truth.

SHERINGHAM DIARY 37 - Nothing Happening But Bluebells

We take our half hour daily 'end of the road walk' down to the bottom of Weybourne Road, our morning coffees travel cupped in our hands. Opposite the end of that road is the sign photographed above. Just to leaven that sense of having our ability to travel restricted we imagine which direction and place we'd like to go to, run across the road, jump up the bank, touch that place on the sign then return to the end of our road and then back we toddle. Our small imaginative lock-down rebellion complete.




The Bluebell Path

The path to the gate
is short, of adventure
we crave, the novelty
of being, somewhere else
takes possession of the heart.

Vidyavajra 28/04/20

I had a birthday card to post urgently, so one morning we both walked not in our usual direction but to the post box then along Cranfield Road away from the village. About halfway up we discovered ,just to one side of the road, a really lovely section of Sheringham Wood we hadn't encountered before, here, close to our doorstep. This 'woodland walk' has now become our regular alternative to 'the end of the road' walk. each time trying to explore a different area or path. At the moment with spring and the bluebells in full flower it has a particularly elfin quality to its beauty. Without the lock down we would probably be unlikely to have had cause to come across it.

We have well established week and weekend routines, and this can help us keep mind and body busy and sane. But we nevertheless have moments of emotional exhaustion. This week it was a jaded weariness with working from home that descended upon us for a day or two. Normally, to change the energy, we'd just jump in the car and go somewhere we're fond of like Wells next the Sea or Walsingham, but we can do this only in our imaginations at present which never quite cuts it. It was Hubby's birthday this month, so to make his day I bought him a book he wanted on pattern making for menswear, made him a lovely Genoa cake and we bought in a local Indian takeaway with lots of nibbles and alcohol free wine. So we did our best to make it special.



I've reflected lately on what we are currently experiencing, that its all about staying put, looking out for your neighbours, not venturing far from the place and locality in which we live. Until the industrial revolution in the 19th century, that was most people's way of living, with perhaps a once a year trek to Norwich, if that. With additionally no TV, social media, phones, radio, theatre, films or fast cars to distract themselves with. They also had to learn how to spend acres of time not just alone with themselves but cooped up in small houses with many generations of relatives. Which is not to say people didn't become bored, restless or frustrated with their lives, anyone whose reads Jane Austen will know that's not the case. They too probably went for a walk in the woods if things got claustrophobic, But if we rediscover one or two of their abilities and personal resiliences it may not be entirely a bad thing.

We've had the £10,000 grant from the government come through which will help tide Cottonwood Home over the lock down, hopefully. We can't claim any other support, largely because we are in our first year of trading and having not submitted any yearly accounts we can't prove what loss of income we've incurred. So this grant alone will have to do. Continuing to make products in a vacuum without any idea when we can take the shop out of being mothballed provides its own moments of motivational lethargy. Once we know when we can re-open then I suspect we'll be re-energised and focusing on what needs sorting out before normal retail service is resumed. I suspect this may still be a good month or so away. 

MUSIC REVIEW - Richard Dawson - 2020

How would I describe Richard Dawson's music? For a start, it appears to be beyond accurate categorisation, it has in a way carved out its own category. But what you'd call that I couldn't say. You only have to listen to the sixteen minute long The Vile Stuff from 2014's Nothing Important about a teenage school trip gone wrong, and its accompanying hallucinogenic video, to realise this man works off the usual beaten track.

The current album has clearly arisen out of his earlier folkish origins, but it now occupies newer territory where folk can only be used in its original sense of 'of the people'. By 2020 he's evolved a style of guitar playing that builds in clumsy execution, embraces dissonance and veers wildly from grungy riffs to an anarchic atonality. Lyrically his subject matter is frequently the day to day inconsequential details of ordinary people and their lives. His words often sounding as though they're verbatim transcripts of actual conversations.

Open your eyes, time to wake up
Shit, shower, brush your teeth, drain your cup
Wolf down a bowl of Ready-Brek
Fasten a tie around your neck

All over the city we arise, arise
For a job we despise, despise, despise

I don't want to go into work this morning
I don't think I can deal with the wrath of the general public
And I don't have the heart to explain to another poor soul
Why it is their Disability Living Allowance will be stopping shortly

Bus fulls of meat slumped in our seats
Staring at phone screens and our own feet
Shuffling off at the business park
Let's linger awhile in the smoking bubble

From every direction we arrive, arrive
With a swipe of the fob, the fob, the fob, the fob

I don't want to go back to that seething viper's nest
I can't listen anymore to the bleating of the terminally depressed
Or the stream of opinions from the creep in the office next to mine
I dream of bashing his skull into a brainy pulp with a Sellotape dispenser

(from Civil Servant )

His subject matter is, local football matches ( Man On ), the agonising resistance to doing a job you hate ( Civil Servant ) and the anxiety depression and paranoia you can develop when you either lose or no longer can do your job ( Jogging ). This could seem on paper to be all quite resolutely grim and gritty, but he is attempting a more truthful representation of the lived reality of a lot of people's lives. Much of this one assumes draws on Dawson's own experience. There is always a good deal of humour, sometimes gallows, sometimes self-deprecating, but frequently touched with an affecting poignancy, as in 'Heart Emoji'.

Dawson would readily admit he's not in possession of a great voice, but a characterful one, which, like all the best singers of this type, he uses with an honest passion, bellowing away as though singing uninhibitedly in the shower. He's not trying to be anything other than himself. Take him flaws and all. Because of this I guess Richard Dawson will never be hugely popular, he's one of those artists existing on the periphery of popular music, garnering critical praise and slowly growing a band of followers.

2020 is his most accessible album to date, moving on from the contemporary medieval inflected tales of 2017's Peasant. Whatever he does I find its usually worth bearing with, because here is a person with a rather unique perspective on music making and life, even if his appearance does resemble an out of work extra from Lord of the Rings.

My entry point into appreciating Richard Dawson began with the video for 'Jogging' so I'll leave you with that to savour.

200 WORDS ON - Boredom

'boredom, is the desire for desires' Tolstoy

Boredom arises when we become distanced from, or disinterested in, the familiar litany of our desires. What we really want is harder to fathom. The nature of desires is their transience, ceasing to satisfy us shortly after achieving them.  Does boredom mean we’re essentially boring? Quickly we switch the existential focus around, it’s the world that is boring and we who are bored with it.

It’s perfectly possible to be alone and not be bored, we desired to be alone and now have it. When isolated not through choice, because a pandemic makes it necessary, we become socially distanced from a variety of things, one is having our desires fulfilled. Isolation from this was never a desired outcome. We become frustrated not just with the situation, but with ourselves for being bored.

We can do little about the current situation, apart from be patient within it. Can we also be patient with our boredom for a few minutes, without hurling ourselves towards what pops up on Instagram? We are capable of being bigger than mere vehicles for the fulfilment of our desires, and this is what fully experiencing boredom can face us towards.

POEM - For Now

I open my door onto a world
even quieter than usual, still
on my doorstep I can stand and consider
the christmas tree field opposite
hear birds, distant geese,
and the thin thrum of traffic
on the A149, though today
I feel more like a milk bottle, transparent
and clearly resonant with the milk
of a semi-skimmed form of kindness
souring under the stress
of too much information with nowhere to go.
any empathy I hold, floundering
to be enough, not fully matured
or sufficient,
for now
who could hold societies hand whilst it is lost
in the swamp of a new disease? when
everyone’s lives flicker like nervous candles
isolating in their TV rooms,
friendships confined to rectangles on Zoom
the sting appears to be everywhere, except here,
invincible to the invisible
for now.
I think a few voodoo thoughts then retire within
shut my door on the infected world
there is nothing else to do
for now.

Except to imagine
those unnamed casualties
the total unknowns
whose lives are all but clinker
rolling down the steep precipice towards
whatever and wherever the ineffable is
after the lungs filled with fluids
eyes fixed upon bland ceilings, beseeched
their chest to keep heaving, to catch
the last train of breath, these
expired lives
are not just some cold statistic on an elevating line
upon a graph
they are point in time worthy of grief
packaged in bundles, with each private moment
posted on Instagram, XXX
the chained curtain, heavy on the swags, 

framing the lounge window, are pulled too,
shutting out the light of the world, loss
invites memories round for a weak cup of tea
and whatever biscuits they can stomach
for now
relatives cannot cluster
commemorate, recollect or
stare blankly at each other, bewildered,
not knowing quite what to say to the bereaved,
for all this mournful Greek tragedy, in three acts,
is put on hold,
closure will be paused at death,
for now

Stephen Lumb
14/04/2020

SHERINGHAM DIARY 36 - Retreat Then Press the Reset Button

As Buddhists of long standing both Hubby and I are used to periods of solitude and time away from the usual stresses and distractions of daily life - we usually call it being on retreat.  I've been approaching the lock down as though it was a retreat, which generally has worked, but has one flaw - retreats usually come to an end. At a week or two in length, by the last few days of a retreat your mind can naturally drift into dwelling on what you'd like to do once full liberty is restored. By day eleven of the lock down I was finding myself physically restless. On some level I knew this wasn't really a retreat, its a lock down, currently without any definite end point. I became bedevilled with resistances and a fed up tone came up and sulked with me whilst I sat on my meditation stool.

As the first 'phantom fortnight retreat' came not to an end and I was still 'at home' I had three or four sleep spattered nights. This unsettled feeling settled down again. On my four month ordination retreat your mood would slip through similar peaks and troughs then cycle back through them again, if you were lucky diminished in intensity. This is how you respond when circumstances restrain your liberty to make choices, one chafes and baulks at the boundaries. I suspect this is what the lock down will be like. Some days OK, some days with a bit of a struggle going on.

Our usual walking route

However you're view of the current situation, staying at home and going out for a half hour daily walk, plus a food shop in town on Friday, will never provide enough human contact for even an introvert to feel overwhelmed by. The ambience in town you can cut with a knife, everyone guarded and on a mission to get the hell out again as soon as possible, preferably with their magic protective bubble intact. It's understandable, but it feels and is weird. It is hard not to get a bit freaked when you are out amongst it all.

The media is just a wildly speculating machine at the moment, of all sort of impacts the pandemic might have upon the fabric of society long after Covid 19 becomes a curable disease. These all appear to be jumping the gun a bit as we are not at the peak of infection yet. so this looks and is wishful thinking or doom mongering being re- presented as if from a sage like oracle. No one can know, everything is a shot in the dark, too many factors are at play. We all wish for it to be over and everything to return to normal, if indeed that is at all feasible. But if it doesn't, then who knows what may ensue? Please press the reset button and retire to a safe distance. This might take some time

May the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas bless the winged messenger of Zoom. I've been through my learning curve with it, and I'm beginning to take for granted there will always be someone who's broadband turns human speech into that of a gobbling chicken. At the Norwich Zen Priory, once any teething problems were ironed out, they're pretty much running the usual programme of evening classes, plus morning meditations and devotional rituals. My usual circumstances mean I cannot physically attend more than one evening class a week. Now, with Zoom, I can be at all of them should I wish. I'm also getting to see and know more of the Sangha than I did previously. So this aspect of the lock down is proving a real win win situation for me and for anyone else who lives outside the Norwich boundary.

We've started watching the National Theatre Live. The first one. One Man, Two Governors, even though it had James Cordon performing in it, was actually an enjoyable and thoroughly excellent production. It did begin to slightly outstay its welcome halfway through the second half, and the final scenes was a bit clumsy and felt perfunctory. But it still got a big thumbs up from us.

The second play was a transferred Bristol Old Vic Production of Jane Eyre. I respect them for choosing not to take their adaption down the easier route of a more traditionally staged production. Initially I thought 'well this is unusual staging' that quickly progressed to irritation with the constant climbing up and down ladders and walking meaninglessly up and down ramps and all the way round the houses. To be honest it resembled an up-scaled version of a hamster's play frame.

It was an overly fussy and fidgety production with the stage often resembling Kings Cross in the rush hour. Narrative was constantly being sacrificed to the theatrical staging and novelty tricks, hurtling the small cast about from scene to scene, and making it feel bitty and episodic as a result. In all this motiveless kerfuffle any emotional connection you may have had with characters became clinically neutered. But this was not Brecht it was Bronte. At 4 hours the original production was the length of a Greek epic tragedy, though it was shortened by an hour for the NT production, this still made serious demands upon ones bum. We lost patience with it by the interval. Oh, yes, some of the Yorkshire accents were really very dodgy with a capital D.

*******************

The wisest and most human piece of writing I've read recently was a short article written by Rev Master Daishin Morgan. He is the former abbot of Throssel Hole Zen Priory and is I've found quite an inspirational figure. It was written in response to the national lock down, its theme is loneliness and the opportunities as well as the difficulties feeling a sense of loneliness presents us with. Here is the link to the full talk to download.
https://throssel.org.uk/author/rev-master-daishin-morgan/article-by-rev-master-daishin/

 I'll end with a short poem he includes in the article.

Space is a poor analogy for emptiness,
It is the lightness of things being free.
Being in a room is the same
If the door opens easily or I am locked in
But so completely different
remorseless positivity is only pretending;
The cries must be heard, you must enter the room.
The lightness is not the condition of the door.

200 WORDS ON - Thoughtless Consumption

'the time for thoughtless design, for thoughtless consumption is over'

I came across this quote from Dieter Rams recently. I'd been looking through Netflix for any film not already seen or wasn't a piss poor duplicate of a more famous film, finding nothing. The genre lists appeared to hold the same roster of films but in different order. I became quite frustrated at the empty-headed distractions offered. I wanted something that could offer a more thoughtful level of engagement.

It's clear the film industry loves thoughtless movies, they produce a good return. Lots of fast moving action, dramas and high tech Science-Fiction films which, enjoyable though they are, are basically hollow entertainments. Easily half watched on the sofa whilst eating food, making out, checking what else that actor has been in or film gossip about its production, all from the comfort of your I Pad.

These films put minds and emotions on pause, to be mildly entertained by experiences that leave no trace upon us afterwards. They leave little in the form of substantive meaning, depth of emotional response or mark upon our human imagination. Once the consumption is over we are still left hungry for a richer form of sustenance.