The Long Now

The highlight of my week (in fact, the high light of my year so far) was seeing Brian Eno, one of my all-time heroes, speak at a conference on the reform of the financial system.

The Long Now Foundation has started a Long Finance project to look at long range planning and investment. Someone who is twenty years old today, can expect to live until they are 95. So at the very least, we need a financial system that looks seventy-five years ahead. And that's only one generation.

I was very encouraged that 400 people, mostly from banking and investment, turned up for the day, and took the ideas very seriously.

Brian Eno managed to make U2 interesting. Compared to that, reforming the banking system should not be especially difficult.

Apollo 11

The perfect moon
Was huge above the sea
The surf was easy
Even on the reef
We were the lucky three
Who slid in our canoe
Through the flowers on the water
And tried to read the signals in the sky

We travelled with our necklaces of shell
The moon was waning
Through the nights and days
And how we dreamed of home!
But we couldn’t find the island
Where you trade the shells for feathers
We fainted in the sun’s reflected blaze

With cracking lips
I turned to tell my friends
The time had come for all of us to die
“She’s out a whole degree”
I told them as I floated
Checking readouts at my shoulder
“Re-enter at this angle and we’ll fry”

The go for override came up from earth
We took control
And we flew her with our hands
And how we dreamed of home!
We saw the South Pacific
As we fought to get her zeroed
Before the heat shield started hitting air

We came home in a roaring purple flame
And gave the mission
Back to the machines
We were the lucky three
The parachutes deployed
We were rocking like a cradle
As we drifted down in silence to the sea
Lyrics by CLIVE JAMES
Music by PETE ATKIN

John Mortimer 1923 - 2009

Writer, lawyer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, and all round English good egg, John Mortimer died in his sleep yesterday.

I found out from Stephen Fry, on Twitter.

Nothing like seeing some of your childhood TV favourites turn up in the Obituaries column to make you get serious about leading a more healthy lifestyle.

Be Seeing You

Every One Of These Sentences Is The Expression of an Illness

This man is my hero, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I'm thinking of him today because he once found a copy of one his own books (the Tractatus) belonging to a friend (Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle), and he wrote on the flyleaf:

"Every one of these sentences is the expression of an illness."

This week, I've been writing. And last week too. My whole bloody life has been writing. And I have felt so inarticulate. I've been feeling constipated; not literally but verbally and intellectually.

I come to my blog to try and express something. I go to other people's blogs to read them and leave comments. Not much happens. A joke, a cartoon, a fragment of a song.

Somewhere inside me, I have a PhD. And once I have written it, I have a life beyond it. (Go me!) Today, every one of my sentences feels like the expression of an illness.

I first discovered I could write when I was six years old. Until then, I'd read books, devoured them avidly.
Is there anything left?
Maybe steak and eggs?
Waking up to washing up
Making up your bed
Lazy days
My razor blade
Could use a better edge.

Books were wonderful things.

As soon as I had a school teacher who encouraged me to write, I started telling stories, and didn't want to stop.

But that was then.

I've been talking to my Friendly Neighbourhood Wise Woman about the hell of writing for almost a year.

A couple of weeks ago, she suggested that maybe "constipation" wasn't the right medical metaphor for what I'm doing.

She thinks I am giving birth to myself.
Will we still be writing
In approaching years?
Stifling yawns on Sundays
As the weekends disappear?


Ummmm...

Right...

Okay.
I think I can work on that...


We could stretch our legs
If we`d half a mind
But don`t disturb us
If you hear us trying
To instigate the structure
Of another line or two
Cause writing`s lighting up
And I like life enough
To see it through

ELTON JOHN
& BERNIE TAUPIN

My Reward

When you're a teenager, things happen that fuck with your head.

And sometimes, you say

"Thank You - I feel much better now."

Julian Cope was one of those things.

Something made by outsiders for outsiders:
a stray word,
a piece of feedback,
a great haircut,
a guitar drone

could suddenly open the door into
a different way of looking at the world

"I was goaded into becoming a rock star by Bill Drummond and the pseudo-intellectual side of me thought it would be quite charming."

Bless my cotton socks
I'm in the news
The king sits on his face
But it's unnassumed
All wrapped up the same
All wrapped up the same
They can't have it
You can't have it
I can't have it too
Til I learn to accept my reward

Policemen stand in queues
they stand accused
We live in solitude like Howard Hughes
All wrapped up the same
All wrapped up the same
Silence has it
Arrogance has it
I can't have it ooh
Until I learn to accept my reward

Suddenly it struck me very clear
Suddenly it struck me very clean
We're all wrapped up the same
All wrapped up the same
They can't have it
You can't have it
I can't have it too
Until I learn to accept my reward

Until I learn to accept my
Until I learn to expect my
Until I learn to accept my reward