Art's blog

Here I am, sitting in my rocking chair with my knitting and minding my own business, when this voice comes over the television, asking ‘Are you having trouble getting insurance? If you are between the ages of twenty and eighty you cannot be turned down. Just a few simple questions will be asked and you cannot be denied for pre-existing conditions.’ I wonder to what pre-existing conditions this bird with a clip-on telephone is referring. While working out this conundrum (my mother said I didn’t have an attention deficit disorder – I’m just thick), the image switches to a depressed-looking creature cracking on for eighty who has obviously seen better days. She is with a younger woman I take to be her daughter and she, said daughter, is doing her level best to cheer up her miserable-as-sin mum. Then we’re back again to the telephone operator, who I reckon to be a customer service rep in a call centre and she is saying as oily as you please, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to pass something on to your loved ones?’ Next thing we know, a couple of happy, well-fed and well-dressed youngsters are at the front door and our granny figure, looking as bright as a button, is there to welcome them. Granddaughter at table blows out candles on birthday cake (made by gran, I presume) and all is one with the world. Now this as is about the same as one of those CHIP home-income ads telling viewers over sixty that if they own their home instant tax-free riches are available and no one will trouble them until they choose to sell. The insurance ad and the CHIP home-income ad have one thing in common. They want your money. Doesn’t everyone? Well now, on behalf of a good many of my generation, I have news for you. We don’t intend leaving anything to our loved ones and we’re not going to help them buy their first home. Let their mums and dads get them through college and do whatever else is necessary to dig them out of the hole they’re in. They shouldn’t have run up a credit card debt and now be working for the bank. For our part, we’ve pulled up the ladder, Jack, and we’re all right!

The first time I entered Saudi Arabia was in the late 1940s, which dates me I know, but we do have to be truthful about these things. There was no blacktop on the desert then, but the process was well underway when next I visited in the early 1970s. I mention this because construction was underway and bustle was everywhere: new airports were under construction, farms, factories and industrial units were springing up left, right and centre. I was in Jeddah at the time, shortly after slavery had been forbidden by royal decree. Freedom was everywhere and for everyone. Visiting a six-story building with an elevator technician with whom I’d struck up an acquaintance, I sat on a richly-padded bench in the magnificent lobby reading a book while he worked and here I became engaged in conversation with the owner of the building. This six-story building, I learned, had four identical and generous apartments on each floor. Each apartment housed one family of the owner. Work it out for yourself, but that is all by the way. As an interesting point of discussion, I said that, of course, it was now against the law in Saudi Arabia to own slaves and he said, ‘Yes, my friend, but not exactly true. With the way our oil is selling, we can afford to have our black slaves to keep our houses clean – of course, they’re free to leave if they wish – and our white slaves to build them. They, too, are free to come and go as they please.’

Here am I, lying in a hospital bed, calm and sedate as a kipper in a box. Three days have passed since an event that brought the fire, rescue, blood wagon and paramedics to the dwelling, all within two minutes of being called. The passage of time is like the Bellman’s map of the ocean for you literary types, ‘a complete and absolute blank’. So here I lie, supine and quiet, arms lying flat on the sheets, palms facing upwards, a pace maker neatly sewn into my chest. Then into this private space that is all mine pops the perky face of young paramedic with a happiest of grins. ‘Hello. Can we come in?’ she says. ‘Sure come in,’ I say. She beckons her companion out of sight, hidden by the wall enclosing the bathroom. He steps gingerly into the room, a huge, burly fellow with an open, rustic face. Both medics are in full regalia. ‘We had to come and see how you were doing,’ she says. ‘We’ve never had a call like yours. It was hilarious.’ Mystified, I ask her how so. ‘Well,’ says she, ‘We get this call and arrive within minutes. You’re slumped under the desk, out cold, cardiac arrest. We’re busy straightening you out, you being a bit crumpled up and all that, head in a pool of blood, when you wife comes in and says, “I have a DNR out on him.” (DNR – Do not resuscitate!). “Is that so? Do you have that in writing, madam?” says Bill here. “Well, actually no,” says she a bit sheepishly. “In that case,” says Bill, “we’ll have to bring him round if we can.” Then just as we’ve got you straightened out and lying comfortable with the mechanical pace maker fitted, you open your eyes. I’m bending over you and you look me in the eye and say, “Hello, miss! Are you the first of the virgins?” and promptly sink into oblivion again. That was that. We spent the rest of the time and our journey to the hospital laughing our heads off. You woke up once and I asked if you were a Muslim and you said, “I don’t think so, miss. I reckon I’m a bit of all three.” I had no recollection of that either, but she was a bonny young woman, just old enough to be my youngest daughter.

Not to be vulgar or boorish or discourteous, it is worthwhile asking all those who, for want of imagination, originality or creativity, persist in sending me the same puerile comment day after day to please discontinue the practice. It is understandable to be asked once, even twice in succession, if I ‘ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright infringement?’ while another is not sure ‘why this weblog is loading slow’; yet another asks the same question about ‘plugins’ or of telling his companion about the blog and ‘getting his breakfast paid for’ (I imagine it’s a him because the female sex are generally more sensible). Then there is that category of correspondent who persists in quoting poets such as Robert Frost, Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson, even occasionally Milton. There are two observations to make about those repetitious comments. First, so many writers who repeatedly send the same message need a good editor; the same word is always misspelled and therefore comes from the same source; if not a repetitious misspelling, the grammar is faulty and the writer should go back to school. Perhaps those in this category have a perverse or infantile sense of humour and cannot help themselves. I’ll not call them crackpots; that would be politically incorrect. Instead, I’ll offer my sincere and heartfelt sympathy for their problem whatever that might be. In the second case, meaning those who quote the words of the poets, they would much oblige me by doing so with a purpose. The occasional quotation has a point, but most do not. They are without meaning. Therefore, to all those who inundate this blog site with trivial or meaningless messages I say, ‘Come now, children, that’s quite enough, thank you and let us have better behaviour. If you don’t like what you read it’s your right to say so, but do try not to be tedious.’

According to our downunder correspondent, the incumbent Prime Minister of that remarkable antipodean land was born in Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. Wales and, with her family, migrated to Adelaide, Australia, in 1966. Equally, according to the same reliable correspondent, Adelaide is a thriving, well-educated, well-spoken and socially well-developed community. Ms Gillard attended the University of Melbourne – also an articulate, highly-intellectual community – from which she graduated with a law degree and joined a law firm specializing in industrial law. She then entered the political arena and became the Country’s first woman Prime Minister. Somewhere along her journey to the highest political office in the land she acquired a distinctive Australian twang that comes from (quoted verbatum) ‘God knows where’. All attempts to discover where and how Ms Gillard came by this distinctive Australian inflection have ended in failure. Nevertheless, it is revealed that Ms Gillard from henceforth is to be known as Mus Julya Gillyad, Priom Minista of Orstraya and is here shown dancing to the Australia Day Waltz.

As seen through the devious eyes of our downunder observer, he writes, ‘Our Julya is held in the firm grip of an unnamed security osifer, for protection? Nay! Observe the man to the ‘rear’. His intent is to take the opportunity as it arises and was heard to shout “You hold her, mate, while I…” The lad hanging onto the fence is having a gay old time. I read his lips and, I believe, he called out, “I’d like some of that”. The hand on the left of the photograph with the extended digit…well…no comment.’ Our downunder informant ended his interpretation of the image with ‘This land of mine may be corrupt, but Sodom and Gomorrah!’ What explanation is given to this is left to the reader.

Acknowledgement is to ‘The Department of Defence of which this message and image remains the property of and is subject to the jurisdiction of section 70 of the Crimes Act 1914. If you have received this message in error, you are requested to contact the sender and delete the message.’

The moment anyone utters the phrase ‘It’s the God’s honest truth!’ my suspicions on the veracity of what the speaker is about to tell me is to be held in some doubt. In all good conscience, however, this sense of distrust does not apply to Newfoundlanders to whom this appeal to the deity is as honest a figure of speech as any to be found in the whole of North America, especially when the injunction is followed by ‘my son.’ It so happened that on a journey from St. John’s Newfoundland where I had been addressing a conference I fell into conversation with a Newfoundlander travelling with her son on the long journey by bus to the ferry. The conference being on airport operations I was travelling back to Ontario by bus and ferry and train, naturally. The conversation became personal, which is only to be expected because asking questions was at that time my business. I therefore asked her what her husband did for a living. ‘I’se haven’t the faintest idea,’ says she. ‘Tis the God’s honest truth, my son, from the day we bought a waterbed we began to drift apart.’ She considered the matter reflectively, then added, ‘If yer wants a close relationship, stick to a dory and forget waterbeds.’ It should be mentioned for those not familiar with the word that a dory is a sturdy Newfoundland fishing boat.

In conversation with a friend, an orthopedic surgeon of repute and Indian heritage with whom one enjoyed discussing any subject that took our fancy there arose the subject of conquest of Imperial India. ‘Imperial’, that is, because we spoke of the period of the British Raj when Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh and India (as it exists today) all formed the Indian sub-continent. The focus was on the invasions suffered by that fascinating land. First there is the myth of the Aryan invasion some claim drove the Dravidian-speaking people to the southern end of the continent and the claim of the Sri Lankans that their ancestors were the Aryans and the Tamils of Sri Lanka are not. Then Alexander the Great came to be followed by the Mongols and ending with the reign of the British Raj. Here I argued that the British takeover was rather more civilised than the others, for they acquired trading rights, established factories and only indulged in the occasional war to assert their authority. ‘True, very true,’ said my friend. ‘And you have to agree that when it was all over and the dust settled their behaviour was exceedingly civilised. We Brits at least had the courtesy to invite you to afternoon tea. What is more, tea became the British national beverage.’ My friend nodded wisely and repeated his first comment, ‘True, very true,’ he said, ‘but it was our tea!’