Excess and Suitcases.

Dear Reader.

My parents were cleaning out the loft and they found this suitcase

and I really like it. I'm kind of into old stuff at the moment partly because generally I like things that might have a story because, frankly, I like stories and partly because I hope to some day have a house that's like Sherlock Holmes' study but this is beside my point. When I saw this suit case the first thing that came to mind was how tiny it looked to my modernised eyes. I kept asking my parents how could people actually go on holiday with these things they simply said that people would probably just wear the same clothes (or suits) over and and over. Which, with the rise of cars, lifts, suitcases with trundle wheels and generally never having to actually carry our own bloody suit cases, is an ability or habit, humanity as a whole has neglected.

I mean look this is it next to the bag that I took to greenbelt. This is shameful. Keeping in mind that I was sleeping in a tent for only four days and had to drag bloody thing through a muddy camp-site and I this wasn't my only my only bag, it really made me think about how much excess crap I take on my holidays. I actually tried packing this old suitcase and I found just by wearing my trousers twice I could survive for at least six days (at least!) and it didn't weigh that much.

Generally it got me thinking about excess crap there's all sorts of stuff people say things like you should throw away a piece of clothing if you've gone an entire year without wearing it, there was this, frankly cruel program where they take all the stuff out of the person's house and they're only allowed to keep the stuff they can remember it (psychopathic really now that I think about it. There was probably a prize).
There's this quote that I heard from William Morris apparently (thank you wiki quote) that says 

"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

which is pretty good advice if you're sorting out your stuff for uni but it just shows a need for people to just go round their house and say "is this useful or beautiful" and "if its not why the hell am I keeping it?" because that's the only point to an object.

But just out side of the whole bush craft stuff where you drop yourself in the Gobi  with nothing but a toothpick, two hats and a ukulele is the fact that we don't need to carry that much around with us any more. With I pads and I phones with pretty much everything you could ever want on them from your favourite novels to your laptop files we're kind of moving away from the time when you have lots and lots of gadgets and you just have one multi-tool piece of technology. There's this idea that "cavemen" were actually much more advanced than we think because every thing they needed to exist could be carried on their person, there's even some evidence that they could carry burning embers in special pouches so they could easily light their fires again and with all these new advances in technology we're kind of returning to just that. We do not need to carry so much stuff.

this is what the case looked like when it was filled.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Dear Reader.

you know when you come across an idea or a phrase  that just describes something so perfectly that you realise you've already had the idea in your head but you've just been waiting for a way to describe it.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a recurring stock character in (mostly indie) films and novels who has all or most of the following characteristics

1. Brightness (this can just mean that they are smarter or more strong willed than anyone else or like something that is bright they just seem to stand out from everything else in the universe)
2. Loveable weirdness (be that an unusual obsession, philosophy or simply a hipster taste in the arts)
3. An ability change the way the moody male protagonist sees the world.
4. They are very pretty, not necessarily in a kind of sexy (maybe even predictable) way, but always seeming like they are way out of the protagonist's league even though she inexplicably is still attracted to him.
5. Like a pixie, being free and wild, they inevitably leave the protagonist returning him to his perhaps even more depressed and moody state.

Famous examples I know of are the character Summer Finn in the film (500) Days of Summer played by Zooey Deschanel (who almost defines the general look and feel of this stock character) and the character Clarisse McClellan in the wonderful book Fahrenheit 451 who is famous (in my life at least) for being the first fictional character from a novel I may have actually fallen in love with.

and the whole thing raises a couple of questions the first is one I can't even start to understand which is "why is it always a girl?" Don't moody girls want to meet weird wonderful imaginative boys who brighten up their lives and change and challenge how they think? Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong or maybe its because in stories where the male characters are weird or unusual they are also the main character and a bit of an underdog which the female character eventually realises they should have been in love with all along (which is kind of the opposite of the male version).

The second cluster of questions I suppose is probably the questions asked by most of the men who go to see these films or read the books is do these women really exist or are they entirely idealised wish fulfilment fantasies? If they exist, where the hell are they? Because, like pixies, these Girls are almost mythological. Do people not see them simply because other men find them so attractive and appealing that none of them are single any more they just disappear as soon as they're created? (after a year of working in a creative writing course I can tell you this might indeed be true because there are a lot more writer arty types in a relationship than than not) but finally if women are constantly trying to emulate people they see in the media like super models and almost comically dressed celebrity idiots why aren't they emulating the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

And before you ask I am in no way saying women look like these characters or whatever. Its just women have always had this idealised version of the perfect man who listens and is funny and bakes cakes or whatever, which has all come from the media and similarly I think what a lot of men have been trained to want by the media is someone who's just unbelievably cool.

Coolness by the way is a standard that has fallen out of favour in recent years and its a real shame. Probably because it should never have been used to described the "cool kids" at school because they weren't. My friends are, and much like the pixie I fear for the day when they realise I'm not really one of them.

Richard Feynman is "Kinda' Nutty"

Dear Reader.

This is Richard Feynman who I believe should be in the top ten coolest scientists and I can give you at least three reasons why he should.

1. He played bongos. Alot. 

This video is of him playing bongos with some guy who lived near his house (not a physicist) and people who followed him and admired him would ask this guy "well what does he talk about?" and he'd say "well we talk about stuff, sometimes we talk about bongos."

2. He cracked safes in his free time. In fact, while working for the American government he managed to guess the 9 digit code for the safe containing all the research for the Manhattan Project, in two goes. He tried what he thought were the two most obvious numbers 1. the first nine numbers Pi (3.14159265) 2. the speed of light (299 792 458 m / s).
Not done with that he turned up to work the next morning placed the Manhattan Project file on his boss's desk and said "you need to change you're password". That is pretty bad ass. I imagine him just swaggering out of there, with maybe, just, this playing in the background.

3. He has a brilliant way with words. He always seems to explain things so well but more importantly he never used a metaphore that's a "good lie" (one that sort of works).

A good metaphor

Why a you should never use a bad metaphor 

Kate Tempest.

Dear Reader

Okay... I am really supprised I haven't posted this poet. I had to check a couple of times just to be sure. This is Kate Tempest. The name you should always say when people ask is rap have any technical or literary complexity?

Eden is a tent at Greenbelt (no really the venue was called that)

Dear Reader.

I think it sounded a little weird when I said that my idea of heaven involved drinking tea in a tent. Keep in mind that this was the tent.

Greenbelt. What I learned.

Dear Reader.

I am back from the Cheltenham greenbelt festival (art, faith and justice) and after spending four days in a muddy rainy field going to seminars, music gigs, comedy gigs (I saw robin Ince live three times. Be still my rationalist heart) and poetry readings what have I discovered?

1. Water proof cagoules (good word) have a maximum capacity at which they will somehow overflow and your limbs and back will be completely soaked with guttering water.

2. I discovered this lovely singer. Grace Petrie. Which you should look up. She does do non-political songs as well.

3. if you fart and sneeze at the same time you will actually implode and cease to exist.

4. if when a cat is yawning and arching its back you press on its spine it will bust.

5. cats always land on their feet unless you butter their back.

those last three weren't from experience but I have it on good authority, from a comedian called Mike Wazniak, who wears a space man suit no less, that it's all compleately true. 

Yeah you say you don't believe it but you'll all be trying it with your cats at home.

6. Robin Ince is just quite frankly a lovely human being as well a brilliant comedian.

7a. My idea of Heaven does not feature "foie gras to the sound of trumpets", it must involve drinking tea, in a tent, to the sound of sitar players.

7b. Christian Indie Sitar players (Hindi Indie) actually exist!

Yeshu Raja (Jesus King)

8. Finally I discovered that describing yourself as a Christian tells someone very little about who you are. This week I have seen anything from hippie Christians to punk Christians, to Goth Christians to Hipster Christians, to Geek Christians and Bookie Christians to feminist, socialist, lesbian or gay Christians. There are Christians all over the world with different languages and traditions. Not to mention the seemingly countless denominations within our own country all with their own focus on morality and ways of worshipping god and similar to any group in fact any crowd of people if you talk to enough of them there are bound to be some you disagree with and sometimes wish would just go away (that's not religion that's just people).

In fact often I feel that those are the only type of Christians greenbelt never attracts, the people who have such a ridged idea of Christianity that they could never stand being around all the kinds of Christians I just mentioned.

If you have a picture of a Christian in you're head it could possibly be as stereotypical as when people think all gay people act, look and talk like Graham Norton or Mr. Humphrey's in "are you being served" and in the similar way being Christian doesn't take up every element of our entire existence, (often religion is one of the lights by which we see the world not just our world itself). We should never be a Christian "full stop" because if nothing else Christians should never get stuck in their own beliefs and should always be questioning where they stand on  the questions of life and always live in doubt.

I will now calm down.

Street Chess

Dear Reader.

I was in the square outside the Huddersfield library today, waiting for my parents to return from doing boring shopping and I was sitting on a bench and there was one of those plastic giant garden chess sets and suddenly this group of big gruff skin headed tattooed "working class, salt of the earth" types of men walked into the square and almost silently laid the pieces out to play and two of them played and the rest watched and ate their lunch.

And at no point did these men start talking or joking around these two giant men moved silently moved the pieces around the board and the other men watched and it was very strange because it began to take on the feeling of some of street performance. Infact it did draw a bit of a crowd of people eating their lunch, living under the ruling that staring at anything is more interesting that staring at nothing but something about the whole experience kind of made me feel better about humanity for some reason. Maybe its because chess just represents the appreciation of the human brain rather than its muscles or its bravado.

If nothing else the sheer fact that even though the chess set is left there every day for anyone to play with, none of the pieces have been stolen which I think shows something.