Tag: dailyprompt

Collecting First Editions

Somewhere in several cardboard boxes I have books. Now, I know not where they are. Most of these books were published by Hodder and Stoughton. There were numerous print runs. Popular fiction.

What attracted me to these books was a character played by Roger Moore. No, I’m not talking about James Bond. Moore is probably best known for his portrayal of Bond. This was before he got that cinema role and global fame.

Author Leslie Charteris created a character called The Saint. That is Simon Templar. Roger Moore, as The Saint ran as a British TV series in the 1960s. What ran was an honest crime mystery series, with a Robin Hood style hero, who always won the day. His nemesis was a police inspector, even if they did cooperate towards righteous ends. The Saint didn’t always play by the rules. He fought tooth and nail to topple the ungodly.

Collectables are first editions of Leslie Charteris books. At one time they would appear forgotten in High Street charity shops. That day has gone.

The Saint Plays With Fire is worth revisiting. It’s a warning – especially now.

Work-Life Balance

Now retired, I sure didn’t always do this daily balancing act well. It was a difficult one to master at the best of times. Especially when work involves travel and was dictated by unpredictable events and demands. In aviation, I mean experiences like accidents and incidents, and the more unusual, like the closure of airspace by the volcanic eruptions in Iceland in 2010.

The maxim: “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” can be a deceptive little ditty. That’s because time travels incredibly fast when busy and working at interesting problems.

What advice would I give to my younger self? Learn to say “no” in a smart way. Don’t let pride or guilt, those testy emotions, influence too much. And don’t let others use them against you.

Additionally, jobs with responsibility do have unpleasant and mundane aspects. Say, someone’s performance appraisal didn’t go well, or the budgetary forecast were way off or the advice you gave was based on flawed assumptions. These situations happen to everyone. The message is don’t take this baggage home if you can avoid it.

What Does Freedom Mean?

Daily writing prompt
What does freedom mean to you?
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Freedom. There’s as subject that’s banded around as if it’s a simple matter. It’s not.

Let’s start with Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century.  He says freedom is the absence of external obstacles. Thus, if a person is not restrained from doing what they will then they are free. That’s an individualistic view. However, what happens when the theory is applied to a murderer, a thief or conman? I would like to see such a person presented with obstacles. By the way, I’m taking liberties as Hobbes was more nuanced than my description of his philosophy.

Let’s say I’m more inclined to John Stuart Mill’s thinking. Liberty (freedom) is to be free to think, say, and act as one wishes on condition that resulting actions do not harm others. Autonomy has a condition. This is nice. Hold on, isn’t the range of what might be generally considered as “harm” a wide one? In the past, school children may have chanted: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Quaint, and in the modern context a saying that is clearly utter nonsense.

In Britain individuals are free. However, boundaries are placed on that freedom by law and by social convention. Freedom of thought, speech and action are to be cherished and defended. In my mind that means challenging boundaries where constraints might be overzealous.

Words used with intent to harm others should face public objection. Words that may annoy or unsettle or question others, well that’s a different matter. A dynamic balance must be sought.

Embracing Uncertainty

Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
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Best time to get a job is when you already have one. One of life’s conundrums. If you need work, it’s not so easy to find. If you already have work opportunities spring up. This phenomenon is strangely true in my experience.

It’s those situations where I’m doing something I enjoy and getting reasonably well paid for it. Then there’s an urge to see scan around to see what potential next steps there are out there.

It’s not extreme risk taking. It’s a risk, nevertheless. Throwing aside a comfortable and rewarding position for a much greater degree of uncertainty. Especially when going from a job with no end date to one that offered a five-year contact with only a vague possibility of renewal. Not only that but going to a start-up organisation that was not entirely guaranteed to thrive. Facing the fact that some people would have been happy if it hadn’t succeeded.

I did it. No regrets. In fact, in retrospect it was the high point of my professional career.

Plug and sigh

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Weird, I know. My first thought as I looked across my tatty desk. Cables are irritating. Even the alternative is irritating. Tapping away at this keyboard I’m tied by a slim black wire that runs off into a darkened place. If I had a wireless keyboard, I’d be doubly irritated. Sure, as eggs are eggs the battery would not be charged when I needed it to be charged. And I would have put the battery charger away in a box and forgotten where I’d put it.

They’re everywhere. Cables and connectors. This could be the century of the cable, much a the last one. Dam things are cash cows too. Companies like to extract the maximum consideration out of us. Our fantastically capable new tech is useless unless we dip into our pockets and buy cables with just the right connector[1].

Fine, there have been attempts to overcome this bond we have with wires. Wireless charging and wireless connections don’t always deliver what they say on the box. They can be as much faff as plugging in cables. Physics dictates those energetic electrons like conductors. When power is needed, travelling faster and further through wires. Whizzing along with the potential to do work wherever they end up.

If I take the bigger picture, the situation is not so simple. Wires dedicated to communication are going out of fashion. Once upon a time copper wires brough the telephone into the house. Now, that communication is optical. Light flashes to the tune of the ones and noughts we seek.

Getting power from A to B, storing it and using it as needed, there lies unending challenges. From the mega to the micro level. Controversies about huge electricity pylons straddling the countryside. To powering the lean electronics hidden in the plastic case of my keyboard.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of wires. And danced the earth on laughter-powered things.

To borrow a poetic line on flying[2]. If only we could loose this bond forever. Unlikely as it seems. In my profession we contend with the fact that civil aircraft, where lightness equals profit, there’s between 100 and 200 miles of wires.

Let’s think. Will this be perpetual? Put aside all the steps that machines may advance, at some level they come down to wires and multiple connections. In a way, lucky for us. That means there will always be an off switch.

[1] https://newsthump.com/2018/05/21/man-decides-to-keep-box-of-cables-hes-has-since-2002-for-another-year/

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7

Don’t forget your towel

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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Excursions into the improbable. It’s the way that people look at life that reveals the absurdity of existence. We are highly improbable beings and that’s best approached with humour.

I’m not all that original. I’m going to celebrate the HHGTTG[1]. When it was first broadcast, I clung to the radio, wondering what imaginative excursion it would take us on next. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of abstract ideas that surround a wacky plot.

Why is it funny? Radio has a wonderful way of forming pictures in the mind. The creation of Zaphod Beeblebrox takes a bit of getting one’s head around. Notice what I did there? Such a mad romp of absurdity opens huge vistas of comic horizons. Cosmic even.

[1] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction created by Douglas Adams.

Speed

Daily writing prompt
Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
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There was a plain envelope waiting for me when I came through the front door, on Thursday last. It didn’t look like the regular ones that are house bills, statements or unwanted advertising junk. Yes, I’m primitive. I’m still paper based, to a great extent.

When I did get to opening it, my heart sank a little. Now, I hadn’t seen one of those for years and years. Inside was a formal bold printed form. Simple question. Was I the person driving my car on such and such a date, in the place named? They got me. I followed a link to a site that held motorway pictures. These images had gone from my recollection but there they were in curated digital realism. Big electronic signs, in bright red, hanging over the M25 motorway saying 60 miles per hour. Trouble is the calculated speed on the form was not 60.

By a small margin of error, the indicated speed of my car was enough to trigger the plain envelope that was not a welcome addition to my correspondence pile. Unintentionally I’d broken the law. I say unintentionally because I’m in the habit of using the speed limiter on my car to make sure such occurrences don’t happen. On this occasion my lapse is almost certainly going to turn into the need to go on a speed awareness course. Never mind.

Question mark?

Daily writing prompt
If there were a biography about you, what would the title be?
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That not an easy one. There are titles that stick for the strangest of reasons. One for me is David Niven’s: “The Moon’s a Balloon”, which is autobiographical. Simple and captures an actor’s life being one of illusions.

Spike Milligan gravestone epitaph could be a title of a life story: “I told you I was ill…”.  Which sums up the unexpected and terminal nature of life. Not to take anything too seriously.

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a good source of inspiration. I could take: “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” and convert it into “Bye, and Thanks for All the Toast”.

There are a lot of titles that big-up their subject on the basis that book sales might be higher if the story is about untold struggle and marvellous achievements. Epic tales can be repetitive even if they are universal.

I don’t know if anyone has used it, but I have in mind the title: “What was all that about?” Imagining that my biography is published after I’ve past. Although, I doubt if such a whimsical publication would hit the streets in our cosmos.

Sun up to Sun down

Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
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Arise from a slumber as sharp as a nail. Gaze out of the window on a sun filled world. Remain completely stoical about the morning’s News. Drink that first cup of tea whilst marvelling at a crazy Squirrel upside down on our bird table. Open to the notion that it’s possible to learn something new as the day pans out.

Have a plan to do tasks entirely of my own choosing however meaningless that might be. Tick-off those tasks with a smug satisfaction as the six-o’clock News looms. Sit back without a care. Chat about whatever it is that bubbles to the surface. Slowly subside into a comfy armchair. Realise how fortunate it is to live in a part of the world not blighted by conflict.

Snakes

Daily writing prompt
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
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Scary? That’s the moment when Indiana Jones is sealed into a tomb full of snakes. A young Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones finds himself face to face with his worst nightmare[1]. 100% that would be me. If asked to step into a room full of hissing snakes, I’d run to the furthest hills.

Now, here in the UK, Channel 4 are airing a series called The Fear Clinic[2]. It makes great watching. If you have a strong phobia, you are not alone. Rats, mice or small dogs, I can understand. For me, those don’t kick-off a fear response, but I can understand.

The approach taken by the Amsterdam clinic in the TV series is to “encourage” their clients to face their worst fears. That’s supposed to trigger a cure that lasts. For some people that does seem to be the positive result. I guess we are not shown any destructively negative results of clients confronting their worst nightmares.

If asked to enter a room filled with slithering snakes, I’d be shouting “help” very loudly indeed. Luckly, since I have no need to encounter lots of snakes, I have no need to find a cure for my fully rational fear. The last time there was a snake looking at me, he/she was sitting behind solid glass[3]. Sitting on a tree branch not the least bit concerned about me standing there feeling uncomfortable. Safely I passed by trying not to make eye contact.

Since we are now entering the Year of the Snake, I ought to be careful.

[1] INDIANA JONES: RAIDERS OF THE ARK – The Well of Souls

[2] https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-fear-clinic-face-your-phobia

[3] https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g190745-d1575308-Reviews-The_Living_Rainforest-Newbury_Berkshire_England.html