It later became clear that the humiliation era at school was the only time when I wasn’t happily accepted by those around me. In my local Scout group, I was a bit of a leader. Every Wednesday evening until 16, Neil and I turned up in our kit at the local hut where the 1st Bowers Gifford troop hung out. Learned knots and camping skills, played crab football, and took various proficiency tests. Could never get my beret straight.

We were often told by our Scout leaders that 1st Bowers Gifford was seen as the country bumpkin of all the Basildon troops. One mad evening we smashed up parts of the Scout hut with axes. We were overseen by one of the Scouters (a kind of upgraded helper). Everyone denied all knowledge, and it was attributed to a break-in. Another time we were chucked off a camp site for hurling our choppers into a piece of wood. At a country fair, so many of us piled onto the branch of an old tree that the thing snapped, to the disdain of surrounding adults.

We had certainly never come anywhere near to winning an Essex County Marathon. This was a weekend test where you got a map, a tent, some food and cooking equipment and were told to go to a series of compass points, keeping a log book of the trip and getting your arses to the final destination on time, with your kit clean and your woggle straight. About 200 teams from across the county took a crack at this. The winning team was adjudged to have both presented themselves very smartly and to have written the most vivid and accurate log of the journey.

Steven and Nicolas were my companions. Both a year younger and less motivated. We camped in a farmer’s field on the Saturday night and ate a Vesta meal. A horse pawed at the tent in the night.

We got up late on the Sunday. With two hours to go, we had run out of time to even get to the penultimate compass point. Looking at the map, I thought we might just reach the finish in time, going as the crow flies. A deeper scan indicated a church and a farm at the penultimate point, and so I wrote lyrical descriptions of these in the log book. Highlighting several types of bird in the farm fields along this stretch, and making careful note of various trees in blossom. We set off for the finish and got home with about 8 minutes to spare. Three days later we were told that we had won. Get in there! I still see it as creative cheating. We basked in the glory of this for years.

My Scout days could have taken a darker twist, at a camping weekend in Laindon, just outside Basildon. I must have been about 12, and had hurt my ankle mucking about in the woods. While the other lads played soccer, I went for a walk with a Scouter named Fred, who had lost all his hair and wore a wig. He had always been a friendly sort, and acted as a kind of social bridge between the scouts and the men in charge of us, whose titles I can never remember.

We ended up at a camp fire site, and sat down on some logs. Fred asked me if I was ticklish. He had asked before, and knew that I was. He upped the ante by offering sixpence to let him tickle me. It sounds positively grimy now, but at the time meant nothing to my innocent mind. Because Eric had taught the value of earning, I demanded ninepence. Fred tickled me gently around the waist, before moving his hand down into my shorts. My perception was very much that this was just another sensitive area, and that he wanted to have me shaking with laughter. Nobody had warned about such things. But when his fingers alighted on my penis, something innate told me to get away. I jumped up and said: “I want to stop this”. He replied: “Come on Kevin, I’ll give you the money,” but I was off and away, down the track and back towards the camp.

I later discovered that Fred had tried this on with most of the other lads, and I think that we protected him by never telling of his advances. I also pray that he never found a willing victim, but fear that persistence may have done the trick.

Another memory of Scouts was camping in Dorset, and having my head cut open in the sea at Weymouth by the blade of a surf board. Hospital stitches for me. We kayaked in a river, and my friend Ralf took a dump in the woods when caught short. Bear Grylls must have started off similarly.

The option at 16 was to move onto Venture Scouts, but I declined. It didn’t seem particularly trendy.

 

 

 

 

I’ve met Jay Glennie about half a dozen times, mainly on visits to Upton Park. He’s a mate of my very good friend Kevin Bull, who I’ve known for about 30 years. I had a nice chat over a cuppa with Kev a couple of afternoons ago. Amid the usual wide span of conversation, Kev told me that Jay has brought out two very special limited edition books. I had no idea.

In 2016, he collaborated with Darryl Webber, to release ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the landmark British film by Nicolas Roeg, starring David Bowie. 1,000 copies have been published. The book is extensively researched, containing exclusive interviews with the cast, crew and others involved in the production, plus hundreds of photographs.

In 2018, Jay followed up by commemorating the 50th anniversary of Roeg’s ‘Performance’ (Mick Jagger) with a similar collaborative book. I love Roeg.

Not only fascinating work, but seemingly lucrative. The books can go for over £600 each, if the buyer likes the limited edition number of the individual copy. The target market is the many thousands of people in my generation who have ended up in a comfortable financial position, and were film buffs, or for whom Jagger and Bowie were icons.

It doesn’t stop there. Jay is working on another book for the 40^th anniversary of the Deer Hunter. Talking on the phone to Robert de Niro, just as he talked to Mick Jagger, according to Kev.

You have to admire Jay’s vision. He always loved films, and apparently has thousands of DVDs. But he went the extra mile that most of us cannot envisage, by imagining an audience, working out a plan, and then getting to cash in by digging into something that rivets him. Impressive.

I first met Jay when he was a hairdresser. I could tell he did his own thing. He invented a board game. Listened to and followed his own ideas.

As Al Campbell would say: ‘Chapeau!’

 

 

 

It was cathartic to write about the trauma of teenage schooldays at Westcliff.  Hitting the ‘publish’ button was a ceremonial moment. Pulling the experiences and feelings up from my depths and transferring them into a space where the pain and shame is acknowledged and in the open. Through a magical, technological portal.

Perspective isn’t absent. I can understand that my feelings of humiliation may seem trivial to some. I get it that teenage testosterone and horseplay may appear as a universal gauntlet. I get that some people prefer to skip over past pain. And that shit happens, for sure.

But the fallout from those years was immense. Massively bad, but also colossally good. The negative was a further depletion of my trust in the world. Nobody mentored or steered me through crap where I knew nothing other than to grit my teeth. In 1979, some nine years after the school torment started, the inability to discuss my worries led me into an extremely ill-judged act, with repercussions that affected me for almost two more decades. Then again, in my early 40s.

For large periods across the rest of my life, I have struggled to fit into any group. The rejection of Steve and Tony was a classic example. As is the track record of mainly working alone. It is a rare gathering where nobody is vying for leadership, making me groan and seethe at the manipulative machinations. The Buddhist group that I spent time with in 2012-13 was an exception. A friendship group that begun at about the same time, nicknamed the ‘Catholic Club’, is another. My jury is still out on the Ubuntu group.

Banter still makes me deeply wary, unless it trips from the mouths of the kindest people. Because it overlaps too easily with put-downs. Can’t abide those. Frankly, unless you behave with kindness, you can fuck right off. Don’t want to waste time with you. I’m not sure if this is an unrealistic, fucked-up way to be. But I know the provenance.

I have cried on just a handful of times in the intervening years, and held in the rest of my grief. It takes a tidal wave to breach the barriers I have erected, due to what is now termed ‘toxic masculinity’. I wept copiously when our cat Henry died in 2014. He had given me unstinting love.

I could waste time wondering if karma was at work. Karma from not sticking up for Sharon Brown. From firing the air rifle at Neil, and dropping a brick on a frog at around the same time. There was a moment, aged 12, when I was helping to coach the cubs’ football team and told one of the players that he “made me ill”. A move straight from Eric’s coaching manual. Did all of this make it inevitable that I ran into shame and fear at some stage?

Or can it be programmed in the DNA? Thinking back to Blog 8, and the suggestion that our genetics can contain memories of ancestors’ lives. Part of my family were Huguenot, who fled from French persecution after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

It’s so much better to dwell on the benefits. They take up less space, but are not easily dismissed. I think you get bigger and the world gets better when you prioritise joy. I’m confident that I have been a good dad, having seen how not to behave. Our three know they can ask or tell me anything – and are learning to reciprocate with this blog!!

As for friendship, I learned how it doesn’t work. I’m so pleased to possess a kind, feminine side. I’m a great listener. A tender, empathic bastard, as well as unpredictably witty company. A bloke with an artistic mentality, not a competitive twat.

And I know how to endure. That has been so useful across this life. Jumping ahead, I don’t believe that I would have met Maureen, without the teenage turmoil. I would have stayed in Birmingham after university but for the fallout. And so no love from my darling wife, and no Lauren, Josie and Rory. Maureen also had her heart broken at school. We agree mutually that we are both “damaged goods”, unable to function ‘normally’

I did harbour seething resentment for many years, but grew out of that. The old mental habits kept churning for a while like the blades of a ceiling fan long after it is switched off.

It would have happened quicker but for a remark by one of the tormentors. He was 20 then, no longer excusable on the grounds of youthful exuberance or immaturity. “I could still make you cry again if I wanted to Kev,” he said, coolly.

Not “I’m so sorry mate for the shite I caused you.” A declaration of toxic malice. Spiritual warfare.

Maybe forgiveness can happen without the transgressor repenting or admitting to their wrongdoing. You can forgive them for being the thing they are just like you can forgive a crocodile for being a man-eater. Forgiving someone can just be letting go of the idea that they would have done anything different given the chance. And then getting away from them.

 

 

 

The mid-Essex lanes had a brooding feel today out on the bike.

This barn below, in Good Easter, has always fascinated me. For some reason, its dark, stark bulk makes me think of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, walking exhausted back from work across the indifferent Wessex countryside.

I have worked out a 24.5 mile solo route over the last couple of years, adding twists and turns and variations. There are some decent hills to work the legs and lungs, but the main attraction is the almost complete lack of traffic. Was passed by maybe 15 vehicles today.

I’ve always enjoyed my own company, and the rides are a good way to decompress mentally after staring too long at the PC. The landscape is probably over-familiar now, but some sights still cause me to pause.

The route goes from my home in Great Waltham to Pleshey, and then a circle taking in Good Easter, High Easter, Aythorpe Roding, High Roding and Bishops Green. I can ride the circle either way.

The autumn colours seem more glorious this year. The blog has been an unquantifiable help in counteracting the SAD. It loads each day with a meaning and purpose that have been missing in recent autumns.

I awake most days pondering the next subject. The easier stuff is relaxing. The more challenging topics are tackled in the same way as professional work. Be clear what you want to say; split the material into themes; use a timeline. The difference is the use of emotion and humour. It’s very satisfying to branch out this way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enough of the synchronicity. Time to get back to Westcliff.

Whatever your take on the recent US shenanigans involving Brett Kavanaugh and Professor Christine Blasey Ford, what struck me most was how the details of memories from decades ago are subject to natural deterioration. If my experience is anything to go by, the emotions and feelings can stay just as strong and valid, but a ‘who/what/when/where’ blurring happens. While my feelings about grammar school remain intact, my recollection of detail is no longer sharp regarding the events that took place nearly 50 years ago.

Retrospectively, I can see that I was a bit of a hick from the sticks. Open-hearted, very imaginative, generally of a trusting nature. Not without bravery on occasions. But I lived in a village, and my dad was a scrap metal merchant, with little aspiration to middle-class sophistication.

Year one was fine, before puberty set in and ‘Lord of the Flies’ mentality came into play. I had quickly soothed my biggest worry, that the 30-minute journeys to and from school were navigable without being assaulted in some way for being a ‘nerd’. I was a better than average sportsman, and the academic rigours were well within my competence. My first year school report was excellent, and never again attained.

My first year fears were deeply primal. Like our evolutionary ancestors who took those first cautious, perilous steps out of the trees, and tried to figure out how to not get devoured by giant-toothed beasts, my radar was forever scanning the potential source of any punch or kick from my peers, while a part of my brain figured out the behaviour that might avoid the corporal punishment still handed out by the school. Our technical drawing teacher, Mr Baker, would hurl a hard, wooden blackboard runner across the room if you talked out of turn. Scary, and incredibly dangerous.

I have no idea exactly when these more physical fears were supplanted by the more abstract concepts that Sharon Brown would already have encountered at St Margarets. Such as potential loss of social status, disapproval or disrespect from fellows, ideas about inadequacy and fretting over imagined futures.

All I can do is replay, with a few tidying edits, my notes made in the Isle of Man in 2002.

 

I’m never quite sure how it started, but guess it was the old thing where a group needs a target, or victim, to find its focus and establish its hierarchy. The tests go out to find the point of least resistance, which happened to be me. I was never looking to score social points, nor to control people. Least of all to upset them, tease them, or strip them of their self-esteem. I wouldn’t do that to a dog, let alone laugh about it. But it was just a bit of fun, right?

What started it? I’ve a sneaking feeling that it may have come to life in the chemistry laboratory. Some standard experiment that ended with a test tube fizzing and shooting some acidic substance onto my hair. Which caught fire and went out again in the blink of an eye, slightly burning my fringe. I don’t know that it made any difference to my appearance, but somebody laughed, and somebody else passed a comment. And I was seen to flush with embarrassment.

And then I may have twisted up my words in a French lesson, perhaps, causing a teacher’s comment, and another flush across my face. And I guess that was it, a weak point was out in the open, and the vultures dived in. Teasing gradually began to intensify, and because the process upset me, and left me feeling flustered and defenceless, it was highlighted by some genius that Kev was beginning to cry. Fuck knows I wasn’t, as that had been stamped out by Eric, but it acted as a rallying cry for the troops.

So now I was an embarrassed ‘crybaby’, and feeling so bewildered about this treatment that I didn’t know where to start in defending myself. Which probably opened residues of the way that I’d felt when my father had smacked me, defenceless and open to abuse. He gave me the working class physical version, and now I was getting the middle class equivalent, in words, from these kids who were just beginning to feel their testosterone surge without having a clue to the impact they could wield.

I don’t have a clue when my gauntlet started, nor when it petered out. But I do know that for two or three years when I needed to be flourishing and gaining self-esteem I was feeling crucified. I became so scared of attracting the wrong sort of attention that I went way into my shell, lest any blunder be punished.

The cruelty progressed to the stage that I would work out in advance of any activity where to sit, what to say and do, how to deflect attention from any potential cruelty. But it could never be avoided for long, as the lust for sport overcame my tormentors.

“Look – Kev’s crying! He’s crying, look everybody. Come and have a look, he’s a baba, poor little Kevsy-Wevsy. Don’t cry, Kevvy-Wevvy. Aaaah, poor Kevvy. Does oo want a hanky for your tears, poor Kevvy. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ….hee hee hee.”

One standout example was a time when I’d somehow trodden in dog crap on the way to school. I didn’t notice a thing, but a finer nose than mine caught on and instigated a search ending on my right shoe.

“Whoooooah boys, Kevvy-Wevvy’s got dogshit on his shoe. He must be the dogshit kid. We don’t want to sit near him – quick everybody, pull your desks away, get away from him.”

So the dogshit kid sat in the middle of the room, flushing with embarrassment, trying to smile, feeling like digging a hole and jumping in it for ever.

Just as bad, being unable to go home and tell your parents, because there were no bruises or scars, and I would too ashamed to admit that teasing could be so upsetting. When I did, Eric’s advice was nursery rhyme level. Sticks and stones could break my bones but names could never hurt. So on and on it went. “Let’s have some fun and upset Kev. What little gems can we dream up today? How about the theory that ginger-headed lads never get girlfriends, or that West Ham supporters are queer. Hey his mum’s called Phyllis – let’s change that to syphillis? Ha ha ha ha ha. Hey, I think he’s going to cry again. Are you crying, Kevvy-wevvy?”

There were other repercussions that span off from the fear of verbal bullying that I came to carry around. I began not to be able to see the blackboard so clearly at school, from about the age of 14. I either sat at the front to remedy this, or cribbed whatever needed copying from the lad next to me. What I should have done was to get some spectacles, but glasses were the preserve of boffins, and to have to become “four eyes” along with the other crap would have been too much to endure.

So instead I squinted ever harder at the board and indulged in what must have seemed like acts of madness to bus drivers, flagging down their bus and then waving it on, imperiously, when I saw that it was the wrong number bus for Bowers Gifford. Or sitting at home in front of the telly, never quite able to pick out the picture precisely for a period of years until I was at University, and could finally get myself some specs now that I was among real friends again.

I wish that there had been physical bullying, so that I could justifiably have let a fist fly. But using your fists after being called a crybaby? The only time that I let fly was when it was physically deserved, in one of the soccer games that we would play at lunchtimes, when one of the tormentors kept kneeing me in the thigh from behind. So I let him have an elbow in the ribs, and he never did it again.

I got up on scores and scores of mornings not wanting to go to school, but putting myself through it because I felt that nobody would listen or support me. I never understood what was happening. I suppose it was a bit like being smacked: you carry on loving the abuser and trying to please them. You don’t know what you’ve done to deserve the lack of love, and subconsciously blame yourself that the abusers have been forced into acting so dreadfully.

By the time of sixth form it had stopped. But the inability to cry out for help has plagued me for much of my later life, when I will simply sit on problems that seem irresolvable.

 

Who said or did precisely what? That really would be guesswork, and has been of decreasing interest as I’ve got older. You acquire perspective, and see much more clearly that life brings hard knocks. That others go through worse, that school is a terrible crucible. And that you were never an angel.

But the feelings stay. I picked Rory up from infant school one day, and could see that he was getting more and more upset as a couple of his ‘friends’ had been teasing him remorselessly about his relative inability to climb a fence or match their speed.

On the way home he said: “They broke my heart Dad”.

Tell me about it.

More perspective on this next time.

 

 

The synchronicity doesn’t let up.

In the early hours of the day in which Maureen and I watched the Hockney programme, this was my dream. Reproduced verbatim from Blog 30.

“My dream last night involved an apprenticeship to a gay, very tall, very old artist, who looked quite like Gandalf. He had painted for decades, and encouraged me to use oils. Eventually I came up with an effulgently glowing green tree, framed by a sky of dried white paints, obviously applied in layers.”

Coincidence? Or pre-cognitive dream?

In some of the Yorkshire work Hockney eulogises the white hawthorn, which was available to paint only for the brief 4-day window in which it flourishes. Couldn’t find out if he was ever tall. Maureen’s impression is that he may have been.

So……a dream telling me what I would watch in the near future……and, maybe, simultaneously catapulting me back to a spring 2014 walk with the observer of layers, Al Campbell.

Al met me at Canary Wharf and suggested that we stroll to Limehouse. Neither of us knew that the Grapes pub, where we stopped to check the food prices, belonged to the actor who played Gandalf. I had no idea that two archetypal magicians – the 12 feet tall Jesus and Buddha – with their pal Gandhi would stop here in my novel. They offer a homeless man a gold bar biscuit wrapped in ‘shiny paper’. Effulgence?

All I can say is that everything feels the exact opposite of something Lauren said as a child. She was attempting something, struggling with it, and concluded that “it doesn’t want me to do it”.

Whatever ‘it’ might be, my intuition is that ‘it’ has my back. As long as the blog is prioritised, and the writing is truthful.

Just a fragment remains of last night’s dream. The old England and West Ham skipper Bobby Moore was struggling for survival in a crowd. Unrecognised, in danger of being squeezed into insignificance, maybe even death. Imagine somebody scrambling to get off the Titanic, with not enough lifeboats.

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know much about art but I know what I like. And I cannot watch any television without it being in some way fascinating. Otherwise, what’s the point?

At about ten last night we debated whether to go to bed or find something else to watch. Maureen noticed that she had recorded a programme about David Hockney designing a new stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey. Within 5 minutes we knew we were on a winner. Everything in it was rivetting.

Hockney’s 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London will live with me forever. The transformation of already beautiful Yorkshire countryside into glowingly colourful vistas was an act of magic, in my humble opinion. Joy shining out of each work, literally lighting up each room. All based upon the colours that he had trained himself to see, and of course underpinned by three decades spent in the constant California sun.

Maybe he has outdone himself with the Westminster Abbey window. The hundreds of hours of precise craftsmanship were often beyond my technical understanding, but the end result will stand for hundreds of years. Deservedly. It brought tears to my eyes as it was unveiled. Awesome and magnificent.

Hockney isn’t too bothered about talking, given his gift of expression in the visual dimensions. But his words are weighted with wisdom, inevitably perhaps. You don’t have to be an artist to appreciate that his thinking has been finely honed by decades of observations and practice. Entirely his own man, with humour to match.

Best of all, he gets up each day, aged 82, with excitement at what is still to be created. Which is how I have come to feel with these blogs. Lord knows I ain’t no Hockney, but the glorious feeling of giving of my best has returned.

 

 

 

I don’t go looking for these things. Honest guv.

Much of ‘Out of Essex’ was based around a self-sustaining, self-contained community in Southchurch Park, Southend. A mini-breakaway society. In Chapter 3, Satan sets the scene as he sits on a train, contemplating the role of Essex as “a fertile breeding ground for all manner of collectivist, Utopian, socialistic and morally-improving experiments”.

The text adds: “Names including New Harmony, the Village Society, and the Redemption Society were among communities that flourished briefly during a period spanning the late 19th century to the eve of World War Two. The Salvation Army’s founder William Booth had created a “land and industrial colony” at Hadleigh, near Leigh-on-Sea, to reform “broken men of bad habits”. And a teetotal retreat on Osea Island had been established by the Charrington brewing family.”

Maureen and I drove out to Bradwell today, because I fancied a gander at St Peters Chapel, built in 645 AD. The 19^th oldest building in Britain, and still used. Well worth a look, at a wind-blown site out on the Dengie peninsula, where the sound of duelling banjos has the potential to trend.

 

Maureen said the building gave her “the feel of sanctuary”. I loved its remoteness.

And what about the altar. It made me think of the monolith in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’.

Inside, there it was. The description of a quiet Christian community based just 300 yards away. Othona, which began as an experiment back in 1946, when the nearest water source was a standpipe two fields away.

Now with accommodation consisting of two separate buildings and five yurts. Simple rules. You stay, you help out. Everyone walks over to the chapel twice a day, after breakfast and evening washing up. It even has a small football space. On me ‘ead, Pete.

Old and new. Upstream and downstream. Looping the loop.

Philip K Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later advances the theory that we are all living in 50 AD, where Jesus Christ has just died on the cross. This saves us, allowing us to have eternal lives if we choose to follow him. Satan is trying to get us to forget this with an illusion of time.

Must go, time for dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

John Madden, again. He told me recently of an old dream, in which his long-gone father appeared, and talked in some detail about his regiment in WW2. The next day John wandered into a bric-a-brac shop and his eye was caught by a book about said regiment.

Coincidence or synchronicity?

And I still can’t get over the pterodactyl turning up again last weekend, symbolically, only six or so miles from Bowers Gifford. Mirroring the fears that have run deep-veined through my years, upstream and downstream.

On our mini-voyage up and down the Stour, a fortnight ago, we visited Wiston church, a beautifully preserved Norman building. This mural was on the wall, a thousand-year old manifestation of deepest Christian fears.

 

 

During a Buddhist weekend course back in 2013, a fellow attendee reckoned that she could see a brownish monk hovering behind me protectively. There were no brown monks on the course, nor any psychedelic drugs distributed. That I know of. In the picture with my underpants outside the trousers, in Blog 17, who should be looking over my shoulder?

A guy called Grant Morrison began writing animated sci-fi fantasies back in the 90s. In his first major work, the main character gets beaten up and has limbs broken. In real life, the same happened to Morrison. In his second major work, the hero meets and has a passionate relationship with a beautiful redhead. Guess what happened to the author shortly afterwards?

Could life itself be a lucid dream? Where we have varying, and unpredictable levels of control over events, depending on the level of will mobilised? In the disco, was Si Gaze unknowingly predicting a future where humans have the ability to de-materialise?  “I could go right through that”.

Did Roy Keane and Alex Ferguson mastermind 9/11?

By the bed at present are books by Philip K Dick and Carl Jung. The masters of synchronicity. My dream last night involved an apprenticeship to a gay, very tall, very old artist, who looked quite like Gandalf. He had painted for decades, and encouraged me to use oils. Eventually I came up with an effulgently glowing green tree, framed by a sky of dried white paints, obviously applied in layers. Creative layers.

I’m not even looking for these things. But remembered, as I sat with the first morning coffee, that Gandalf was played in Lord of the Rings by the gay Ian McKellen, who owns the Grapes pub by the Thames in Limehouse. In ‘Out of Essex’, this is where the world’s greatest master of time and magic, Jesus, stops to comfort a homeless man.

I had no idea at the time that McKellen owned the pub. And was only able to write that scene because I had walked past the pub in 2014 with Al Campbell, the observer of layers.

Future and past. Upstream and downstream. Where is the causality?

Or am I just some cunt blogging?

 

 

 

 

 

 

An almost uncontainable gush of thoughts arrived soon after awaking this morning. I will try and organise them, starting with an observation and a joke.

Al Campbell made the point two days ago that this blog has layers. I know what he means, but not sure that I can – or want to – try and specify how they slot or weave together. There is very little control or design on my part.

Here’s the joke, from perhaps 45 years ago. John Madden says he thinks of this when listening to people attempting to complicate something simple.

A woman goes to the doctors. When asked about her complaint, she explains that her vagina makes a whistling sound every time that she opens her legs. This is causing problems in so many aspects of her life. The doctor asks her to demonstrate. The sound is rather beautiful, combining something like the sounds of very hi-tech machinery, a kettle coming to boil on a gas stove, and the relaxed sound of a labourer’s tune as he walks to his place of work on a sunny day.

The doctor has no clue, and so records the sound, in order to consult with an expert. At a leading gynaecological unit, a consultant listens repeatedly for five minutes. “To be honest, I have never encountered this phenomenon before,” she says. “If you had not told me the background, I would have assumed that this was a computer-generated sound, assembled by a specialist in the nuances of ambient music.”

Frustrated, the doctor then plays the sound to a friend who teaches a range of sciences at a local school. “It reminds me of childhood, and my auntie’s kettle at teatime,” comes the reply.

Really quite downcast now, the doctor walks home, perplexed at the lack of any answer. A bloke who has just finished work on a building site is removing his hard hat, and notices the doctor’s countenance. “You allright?” he enquires.

The doctor decides that a layman’s view might somehow help, and so plays the recording to the guy. “Do you have any idea what on earth this sound could be?” He cocks his head in concentration. “I dunno……..some cunt whistling?”