Too much information?

I got it because I wanted simple and tough; I just needed to make, and hopefully receive calls, and send the odd text. I didn't want or need something flat and slick-looking, that could accept millions of 'apps', would guide me home on a starless night from a ditch in Suffolk, would mark me out as homosexual in a crowded tube, would.... I just wanted a basic mobile. I could even drop 'tough' - I don't work on a building site, and I don't pothole. But if I were to drop it into a urinal, or let it slip from a tall building, it would be somehow comforting to know that the blight would still work.
The little Samsung that arrived almost fitted the bill - it will actually work in urine, and will happily accept 3 tons of pressure without complaint - useful if you are crushed by a truck, and need to call your doctor. But it also has some niggles in operation, and one kind-of crazy 'feature'. A very powerful torch that, until yesterday, I had filed under 'totally useless'. In fact a couple of times it proved to be worse than useless. The beam of light it projects is so strong that, you guessed it, it drains any battery life in about 30 seconds and it is possible for it to illuminate with very little pressure on the switch, while it languishes along with the fluff, in your pocket. Result? You grab the blight to make an urgent call that will decide whether you live in comfort in Holland Park, or in a shoebox in Cockfosters, and everything is dark and dead.
Yesterday? How shall I put this. I'm not a well man. I suffer, either for my sins, or without their influence. Yesterday it was London Bridge Hospital with shoulder-replacement pain. Anti-inflammatories and pain killers had made me a stranger to the white porcelain for several days and, care-of a blister pack of supa-lax that were probably meant for the cat, I had self administered what I imagined was a safe dose. Wrong.
The hospital had taken blood, and I had 2 hours to kill. Not enough time to get up-west to see a couple of pictures perhaps, or a nice graveyard in the City. Wandered instead into Borough Market, had a fairly ordinary Pork Bap (£4.00) and found a boy posing as Pip, who had great expectations that I would give him two quids for a plastic container of 'fresh' orange juice. I was, of course, a pushover. It being the very apex of the tourist season, I suppose these people can get away with this stuff?
Anyroadup, I'm drifting back to the vampire den for more leech application and the pain arrives, quite sharp, down south. Nurse Ratchet is about half a mile away - don't think I'll make it. Using the same muscles I employ when holding my stomach in on the beach, I try to stop vesuvius, but it is feeling hopeless. A cork? No, a loo. A disabled (I am!) loo. No light. Keep door open? Impossible. A torch....wait, I have one.
Thank you Samsung, the 'phone is so-so, but the torch is.....a must.

Secularity

Had an opportunity to road test secularity a few years ago when one of my sons died unexpectedly. Cremation, in a rather dull little chapel in West London seemed oddly apposite and I set aside what, in my dreamy state leading up to this dreadful day would have been my first choice, but the wrong one - the plaintive viola ode by Vaughn Williams, Flos Campi - in favour of, among a few others, You Are My Sunshine by (and this was important) the great Chattanoogan Norman Blake. To quote the hideous Cowell, it had the X Factor

Larry LaPrise

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important man, which almost went unnoticed the other day.

Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Cokey" died peacefully at the age of 93.

The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.

They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started....

It's only me..

At times I wish I were supremely insecure, so that I could turn my insecurity into a driving ambition to reach some imaginary 'top'.

But so comfortable am I in my skin, so smugly at ease with myself, that I am sentenced to this mediocrity that is my life.

Tooting, St George's

Of Charters I know nothing at all
Staring at this taupe coloured wall
Wondering if Sir Dickie is still feeling trickie
Upstairs after his nasty fall

Gandhi men and their wives pack the room
Designed for ten there are fifty, a tomb
But to me every week its the place that I seek
The crypt that became a womb

A Strategy

A strategy for not working. Empty the fluff not only from the sieve on the dryer door, but from the grills on the machine itself. A quarter of an hour can be made to pass this way.

Broken Families

The bonding of families, if it even exists any more, no longer takes place in the front parlour around the pianoforte - radio, and of course television have coalboxed that. Books still exist, and we are assured (mostly by publishers) that they always will, but they seem to be increasingly pushed out to the penumbra by online, talking books and, the most recent horror, the illuminated tablet, all designed to put a generation of opticians out of business.
No, the family is dead and the church, often cast in the role of surrogate, is dead and buried.