Category: audio

Celsius 233.77… Bonfire of the Vanities*
A dowdy cloudy pleasant Devon day, birds tweetle twerping in the trees above, with anticipation of the spring, so i got on with the hugely satisfying task of burning ALL of my old Morning Pages
Thats about 7 or 8 years worth, written in long hand, with an ink pen, usually florid but scratchy purple ink…
I don’t do them every day, that’d be daft(!), i mean i have far too many healthy / time consuming morning practices, but still its usually about once or twice a week… burnt them all the way right up to todays squib. hurrah!!
i was thinking have i only completed 12 volumes? but still at heart being a geek boy i did the maths:
80 pages each book is 160 sides x 12… 1920 sides, 3 a day so thats 640 days worth… 1 day takes me about 20 mins, so 213.333 hours of writing = 8.88888 F***ing days!!
So if i started now and wrote for 8.88888 days non stop, well my ink splotted finger would ache…but THAT is how much deeply engrained almost etched effort i burnt, ha!
and gosh it sounds like a hugely fortuitous number, presume it would be popular in china?… also think i might well apply to join the KLF? they done burn stuff good!
Oh just to clarify Morning Pages aren’t anything exciting like sordid gossip strewn diaries, sadly not, they’re a practice from the Artists Way
just write any old crap, splurge, get it out, get it out the way, loosen up, Art is process… let it flow!
mine are usually a pastiche of Morissey and Alan Bennet, but, yeah, blander!…
‘Why does nobody love me, forlorn, forsooth, my tea cup rattleth, why do i love nobody, is that the postman delivering letters to next door?… but never to me’ … etc for 8.888 days
Aw in truth away from the absurd lurid-o-delic falsehood world of facebook:
better i burn them than leave them for the kids to do so one day… i did do a small serious ritual to the elements, let things go, eh, gotta be good x
………….
hmm not often you get footnotes in a facebook post! bonus
*fahrenheit 451 (obvs!)
** Savonarola! i’m thinking Apocalyptic Medici Florence … not Tom Wolfe… far too much of an intellectual snob, tho i did love Elctric Kool Aid Acid Test when a youthful hippy!

hey mr influencer… profound apols couldn’t resist creating this monstrosity… when alan partridge meets the kardashians x

them be all the notebooks i burnt, beautiful gaudiness… aw i don’t know how to change my profile pic x

oh and just from genuine curiosity, if anyone who does morning pages ever meanders past here… what do you do with your old volumes?
burning would seem to be the most poetic response?

what barks joy in my heart?…. let the chaos, revelry and clear out commence!… see you on t’other side

*** updated with some words… to ‘honour the process’ and all that malarkey ***

ding! end of round 1… facebook mucking about aside (and what else could the medium be for?) … blimey that was traumatic!!
i know i’m supposed to say cathartic, but little evidence of that just yet.
firstly massive a dust mite sneezing from this hayfever sufferer
still i managed to liberate 5 stuffed bin bags from my own wardrobe, then a further 2 from the airing cupboard, straight away pronto recycling them down the tip
in truth i didn’t even imagine i had 5 bags full worth of clobber? amazing what we can manage to squirrel away!
the secret for me was to deal with the stuff with most emotional baggage first, whilst i still had some brio,
after that all the rubbish you never really cared about and seldom wear was easy…
the main downside being that barely/nary a single sock survived the cull, so if you see me skipping thru the snow in just a pair of sandals, you’ll know why!

oh and in no particular order the worst 3 emotional items this cancerian nostalgia hoarder managed to chuck:

… 2 t-shirts, one purple, one green that i’d meandered along the camino in, more holes than fabric!
i pretty much refuse to wear clothes unless they’re battered beyond belief, and have better personality than practicality these had been around since the late 90’s, then gone travelling round asia… the camino, where you wring everything out by hand after each days amble, was sposed to be their swan song, cept, of course, i carried on wearing them

… the last of the beautiful coloured alpacca wool cardies from otavalo, moth eaten to a string vest, older than Finn, from the time when pam and i met in South America and loitered in a lurid hued nest of them

… my down feather trekking jacket, beautiful bottle green, a north face fake from kathmandu, in this i floated over the Thorung La pass (5400m!) the zip broke years ago, and then it developed a leak, everywhere i traipsed there was a cloud o’fevvers, used to infuriate dad, who’d follow me around the house brandishing a hoover, ha!

anyway all nowt but history now

happy chinese new year!…. tho obv i know utterly nothing about it, apparently tis pig, which is prosperity and enjoyment of the many pleasures of life, sounds guzzle grand to me x

May: Tea and cake sooon? Xx

yaaas! no idea how its been so long, hope to make landfall (in my hot air balloon) in btown saturday… if you about then?
or most welcome to swing by the coast way on your way home xxx

for that matter, why is a clanger trussed up in mexican wrestler bondage clobber? a perplexing world! xx

Mic: Hi BazComing to Australia anytime in the future 😀

Me: aww i wish! one day. haven’t been back since i was a skipping about 21 year old… we shall glug a few schooners, mongst the weirdly cosmic boulders of magnetic island? love to you and fambly xx

Mic: Mate, they do pints now as stardard or a pot which is 375mls, weather great, surrounded by mountains lakes , sea and Islands
You would be most welcome anytime, we have a rambling colonial wooden house just shy of a century old with heaps of space.
In Brisbane.
Keep,well and travel safe and best wishes to family
Cannot remember last time we met up , must be 15 years?
Managed to track down Rebecca last year, married with family, still in California, although I doubt she will ever forgive you forgive you for the demise of the Peanut butter 30 years ago

Me: ooh sounds like an idyllic life out there! we hitched up to cape trib, reef and rainforest, when i was 21, spent a few days in brisbane, but all a blur
my kids are alledgedly adults now, Finn probs almost the age we were when we met… you and your gangrene… so will deffo intend to get over soonish

ha! Rebecca the mountains and peanut butter! that made me guffaw out loud, wild, wild beautiful crazy days… as is now
i’m sitting here with a huge vat of peanut butter spooning it into my mouth absent mindedly… because i can
send her my love if you chat again
aww and mirroring back 2 snaps you took back then, know you’ve got them, but pretty much the only fragments from my travels
enjoy. om shanti xxx

Mic: Hi MR Baz
Good memories, although maybe time to visit and make some more, not been in contact with Rebecca for a year, maybe I should send her some organic, sun ripened, locally grown and picked peanut butter, although getting anything healthy stateside may be difficult.
Love the photos you post
Love ya work
Mick

‘why the long face?’ Basgallop, Exeter University. Your starter for 10… Test driving the funky scarf mum knitted…with a new friend, mongst the seasonal drab

watched Inception on netflix yestereve… excellent entertainment for a not going out january night had forgotten what a great film it is!

from its ‘man washes up on a beach’ opening, to the perfectly weighted ambivalence of the final shot… gripping

works well just as a straight action film… fight scenes as the world tumbles over!

possibly it’s fast pace sleight of hand conceals that its not quite as clever as it thinks it is (true of all of us too!)

but personally i love the mind and space bending psychological tricksiness… ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’

fairly noir in a Blade Runner kind of way, with many a nod to Citizen Kane – was watching a doco on Orson Wells but the night before

in retrospect, quite a cast too… had no idea Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Pete Postlethwaite were in it too

‘And why Not’ in my best Bazza Norman tones

oh and escher pics obvs

porridge with raspberries? yes? no? feel i have finally jumped the porridge shark
i know my McFarlane forbears would give me a drek look of despair… ‘ye cannae do that, porridge is for fixing the roads round here’
still they would have shrugged with approval of my choice of music… Dick Gaughan Porridge ftw
on the epic cycle it was essential ballast for a days pedalling, porridge the universal solvent, alkahest in alchemical terms…
best with banana and peanut butter, but literally bung in anything! tahini, seeds, honey, cinnamon…
my own preference would be for a yin yang bowl… savoury on one side, sweet to the other. yum
wrap up warm… icicles on the end of my conk on this mornings pedal

Wild Geese – Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

ah ben i was thinking about you when out on my bike this morning, so sad your gone
somewhat of an abrupt change of mood, but life is all sorts of emotions rolled up together… public but nestled away in a comment
hold your loved ones close, it can be harsh out there
i know they’ll be a moment at the next festie, skanking away down the front, to turn and somewhere in the crowd, half imagine your face…earnest yet amused
i’ll light a candle… travel well x

……………………………………………

‘then we would cook only porridge, of which i’ll share with youuuuu’
to end, a love song from his mighty bob-ness

Marie: aaahhhhhh a sexy ready break. I’m having oats and super bruised fruit. January gruel I’m comparison to yours :))

me: ah ready brek glow, always seemed somewhat radioactive! xx

laura: I have it with tahini and agave and blueberries and raspberries too! Every morning! Breakfast of champions 

me: tahini deffo, blueberries hugely acceptable, but tahini and blueberries? hmm vonnegut for your guts! x

tho so bewildering my mood today… the mere mention of blueberries has me maudlin along to lilac wine… probs teh jeff buckley rather than elkie brooks version, but can’t be sure with my tuneless-ness

Ross: Traditionally the Scots only had water, oats and salt in their porridge – for the simple reason that those were the only ingredients they had available. These days put what you like in your porridge I reckon. Am sure our ancestors would have done if they could

me: good point! i agree, but there is possibly a streak o’stern in calvinism? our ancestors tho would have guzzled avocados by the barrell load, of that i am sure
we do indeed live in a bubble, a realm of rare plenitude… worryingly, how long it will last i do not know.. xx

Ross: I’m actually quite partial to a bit of stern calvinism from time to time.. but yes maybe just don’t worry about it and we can enjoy the avocados and raspberries while they last 

wot emperor nero would scoff for breakfast… weirdly delish (i think?) seldom eat avos in this country on ethical grounds… but this one looked like it was going off… yeah yeah

seldom suggest anything imagining it to be absurd, all that does is plant the seed of possibility x

Tax Return Day… hopefully, if i don’t get distracted… under the cudgel of winter… these the porridge days… first task is to juice up a storm and chuck a Rainbow down my gullet
yum! first appearance of the year for nettles and cleavers in the mash up. such the vibrancy of colours, feel as tho i have pulverised all the chakras of a small flock of birds of paradise!
oh and on my bike ride, down on the beach i saw 2 jackdaws with white feathers in their wings… i digress … another selfie, and a traditional annual post, yup
yoga and meditation… cumbia, or possibly gregorian chanting on the headphones…. i’m so ready… a blizzard of old illegible receipts and a daunting wall of perplexing legalese
see ya on the other side

comment from lou:

I did mine yesterday

What should probably take 2 hours took 10.. intermingled with essential tea breaks, meandering, staring into space, a little snooze, more tea, 4 meals etc etcI called on lion for courage to get through..

Got there.. with renewed intentions to get someone else to do it next year 

me:

superstar! aw well done, tho how you managed on only 4 meals is astonishing, you must have been famished….

i have yet to start, thought i’d fix one small teensy bug in project code, which has dragged me to the brink of existential despair

who wrote this Rubbish! oh me!… anyway i’ve announced i’m doing it, so mote it be… i call upon the power of the duck billed platypus!

for ermmm it’s cuss awkward unlikely success… they’re taking over the world doncha know.. back to it… or getting ready to do it, almost the same thing xxx