Fat Boy Slim and the Blue Horizon

I can't help myself. It isn't something of which I'm proud. The carrots come later.

My "set top box" receives UK TV stations, perhaps entirely illegally, here in the Irish Republic where I live. When I say receive, what I mean is an unreliab inter pte signa that ca star quit str ng but brea up badl . You get the idea. Quite frustrating at times.

Strangely (or probably not at all strangely) the only stations unaffected by this fractured reception are the selling channels of the QVC and BidTV type. Sometimes that is all that there is to watch that has any coherence, and I've become ever so slightly addicted to them. I have never bought anything from these channels and should news reach you that I have, then you have my permission to track me down and fell me with a single shot from a whale gun (great value at £99.99 and it is on Easy Pay too. UK P&P £14.80...a purely arbitrary sum as I'm sure you know).

What transfixes me is the entirely spurious sincerity of the presenters. When I used to watch "Middle Class Big Brother"...er...I mean "The Apprentice", I was initially amazed at the salaries claimed by many of the contestants, some of whom weren't possessed of towering intellects. What they did possess was that killer instinct; that ability to sell whatever it was to whoever would buy it and regardless of the morals involved. What we should recognise as "cunning". Making sales was all and it is scarily Faustian in many ways. I do not doubt that this is a skill, but I do question a society that places such a premium on it (especially when nurses, social workers and others doing infinitely more worthwhile jobs attract such paultry rewards).

An old girlfriend and I reconnected, in a generally chaste way (there were undertones of our past relationship but she was by then the mother of three grown up children) after a hiatus lasting nearly thirty years. In the last ten years she has risen to a very well paid position (and boy wasn't that an important detail!) in a "cosmetics party" organisation. She had started as a simple "party host" but had, by sheer hard graft, climbed the pyramidal structure (make no mistake - this is pyramid selling) and ended up doing very well thank you. The words "six figure salary" were ones oft repeated. I know what you're thinking, but you'll have to trust me when I say that my eyes have stayed resolutely blue.

She had changed, as I'm sure I have, in the years in between our earlier liason and now. What I noticed about her most was an impatience and a need to live in the present. She took decisions quickly, didn't consult and, if it was wrong, moved on with barely a backward glance and little evidence, outwardly anyway, of regret. She seemed to be slightly embarassed by the "lowly status" of her policeman husband and keen that I should know that she was the main wage earner in their house. In some ways elements of this were admirable and she had certainly reaped the material rewards for her approach, but most things in her life were obviously measured against a scale where aquisition equalled worth. You can read about my reflections on measuring worth in a previous blog of mine which I entitled rather unimaginatively "For What Its Worth".

Where does the carrot come in to all of this? Well, as some of you might know, the carrot is not naturally orange. Left to it's own devices it would rather be purple, but the Dutch, in a fit of patriotism, bred the now more familiarly coloured root vegetable of today. Marketing, plain and simple. It had to become something different, in a permanent way, to succeed. How many of us have seen a purple carrot at "Alec Rose - Greengrocer"?

It is sometimes hard to hold on to who one truly is. Many forces lay siege to us and any of us might be tempted to trade ourselves, or a part of ourselves, in pursuit of success, however we measure that. The mistake is, I believe, in using an external scale - the bigger my car/house/salary, the more value I will be seen to have as a person. The folks on QVC, Alan Sugar's apprentices and my ex-girlfriend are not necessarily inherently bad people. Probably they're not. What they have achieved could be seen as some kind of victory in fact. They are well paid and enjoy the trappings of monetary success.

What worries me is what I percieve as their lack of personal insight. How the degree of comfort that they have in manipulating the rest of us for, essentially, there own ends is so complete. Targets, targets, targets. Do they believe that, when the time comes that it is no longer required that they maintain it, the persona can be dropped like a mask, revealing the true, original them? Alas, I fear that this is not the reality. When one acts a part for a sufficiently long period, one becomes that person.

So carrots - revel in your purpleness, just in the way that a very flaw-filled me intends not to trade my imperfect centre for something (probably monetarily based) that others might judge me well by. When I reach my final rest it is important for me that I reflect, not necessarily on a life well lived, but at least one that did no harm.My acquistions will mean nothing - only the methods I employed to obtain them will be of note. On the other hand - £25.60 for a 3 litre, non-stick, tabletop, electric skillet that will revolutionise all of my cooking requirements...and it's got an indicator light...

"Sell, Sell, Sell" by Alan Price from his brilliant soundtrack for the Lindsay Anderson film "O Lucky Man!", the sequel to "If".

Some weeks ago, as a result of reading the unfailingly interesting Jante Weight-Reed's "My Life As An Artist" blog on here, I was inpsired to follow her advice. I created my little "painting corner" on one end of my dining table and then I allowed myself to select a subject to paint and use it merely as a "jumping off point". She had insisted that this was good and liberating. She was right, and to shake free of verisimilitude as my goal made it all much more fun.

I'm presenting one of my better efforts here because I've received a couple of enquiries about how it is all going and to continually sidestep the matter could seem like false modesty.

This was my jumping off point:

...and this is where I jumped to:

I jumped and floated. I did not fall. Thank you Janet!

As most of those in my embarrassingly small (but delightful, and hand picked(?) - each one of you!) readership may already have devined, I have a military background. It was well over twenty years ago that I left it all behind; it was the Royal Navy and I was glad to get out, but I do nevertheless have some small part of me formed by that experience.

Tonight, at the end of a day of breadmaking, sundried (well, OK, oven dried) tomato making and enduring an ESB (think LEB or whomever your electricity provider "of choice" is) power cut of several hours, I allowed myself a wallow in some musical nostalgia that took me back to my basic naval training.

On my hard drive I have a file under the "music" tab containing several downloads listed as "unknown album". I decided to tidy this up, so imagine my delight at one of the "unknown" tracks being something from my very earliest navy days! I won't pretend that I was 100% content in the navy. As a nurse I spent the vast majority of my time in Naval Hospitals (a vanished, class ridden and inverse snobbery driven society) but was only truly happy at sea, where I felt myself to be part of a special and supposedly ephemeral brotherhood (I remain in touch with my shipmates; hospital colleagues much less so).

Anyway, back to my musical memory. I was sixteen, brought up on a small island and suddenly what might as well have been a million miles from home (not a bad thing as it happens, but that is a story for another day). On Saturday afternoons, just before I joined up, I used to listen to a programme on Radio One (yes, THAT Radio One) that captured my imagination. Paul McCartney had acrimoniously split from The Fab Four and was furiously trying to establish an independent musical credibility. This was to go spectacularly wonky later, but for now, he had a direct connection to the zeitgeist. On this programme he demo-ed the somewhat edgy (and later banned by the Beeb) song "Hi Hi Hi" in which he codified his enjoyment of cannabis and the song featured here which, according to wikipedia has equally, but less controversially, establishment mocking lyrics. Oh, how cutting edge it all was back then.

Later, somewhat isolated by my artistic sensiblities and with the homesickness of a sixteen year-old who has suddenly realised that he isn't as grown up as he thought he was, that same song came on the radio.

It was a Saturday afternoon in November, and those of us too shy or tired to negotiate the delights of early seventies Torpoint Town sporting a crewcut and dressed in full uniform - this was a time when the mullet was de riguer (even Macca had one) and servicemen were despised by some - had just been marched back from the barracks cinema where the compulsory entertainment for those not "going ashore" had taken place (a worn print of "Gunfight at the OK Corral" as it happens). I flopped on to my metal sprung bed, turned my Grundig Radio Boy on and this little piece of sanity, of civilisation, of who I really was, squeaked out of the speaker: