The crazy old bastard's other side.

Ok This is a late night post on Burns night. I have been reciting the ploughman's lad's work today to the classes, mainly humorous verse but now it is time for my own choices. The following two poems are for my wife and are among the finest verse Burns ever crafted.

The first extols the virtue of having money in love - a tocher is an old Scot's word for a dowry - oh and my wife's maiden name was Tocher, and I know of no greater dowry than her.

A Lass Wi' A Tocher

Awa' wi' your witchcraft o' Beauty's alarms,
The slender bit Beauty you grasp in your arms,
O, gie me the lass that has acres o' charms,
O, gie me the lass wi' the weel-stockit farms.

Chorus-Then hey, for a lass wi' a tocher,
Then hey, for a lass wi' a tocher;
Then hey, for a lass wi' a tocher;
The nice yellow guineas for me.

Your Beauty's a flower in the morning that blows,
And withers the faster, the faster it grows:
But the rapturous charm o' the bonie green knowes,
Ilk spring they're new deckit wi' bonie white yowes.

Then hey, for a lass, &c.

And e'en when this Beauty your bosom hath blest
The brightest o' Beauty may cloy when possess'd;
But the sweet, yellow darlings wi' Geordie impress'd,
The langer ye hae them, the mair they're carest.

Robert Burns

This one however, is a Scot's love poem that talks of the pain of separation and I love it dearly,

Ae Fond Kiss, And Then We Sever

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met-or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweeli alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.

Robert Burns 1791

'Lang may yer lum reek'

SF


ps this did not post properly till Thursday !

Crazy old bastard returns!

Yes he is back.

Welcome to tonight's musing. But let's start with a joke.

Two whales, a male and female, are swimming just off the coast of Japan and the male whale sees a boat sailing. He recognises it as the boat that killed his mother and says to the female 'Let's get revenge on that boat, it is the one that killed my mum'

'Ok' the female says 'what shall we do?'

'Right' says the boy 'We swim under the boat and both skush air out of our blowholes and that will make the boat turn over'

so they swim under the boat and fire air out and the boat capsizes. Then they see the sailors swimming towards an island that's near by and the boy whale says 'lets go and eat the sailors to stop them escaping' and the girl whale replies...


'I didn't mind the blow job, but if you think I'm going to swallow seamen you're wrong!'

Crap joke!

Well the subject for tonight - tolerance.

I think I'm a semi tolerant person. Don't get me wrong I haven't always been. In fact as a youth I was a narrow minded religious bigot. Like most teenagers I believed the world to be black and white, but as you get older and grow up you begin to lighten up and realise that life is shades of grey.

So as I have scanned the blog world, under the tutolage of my master 'Tumchie Ben Munchoby' I have visited a blog of a former hero of mine.

When we were young we enjoyed the rock and roll soundings of CCM (contemporary Christian music) and one artist in particular. He (my hero) was a well read man who had studied philosophy in Switzerland at an artists retreat. So we visit his blog and discover that he is taking himself and his beliefs too seriously and at the age of nearly 50 he has gone the opposite way to us. Rather that becoming less sure of the nature of truth, as most of my friends have - we all kind of get the broad sweep but the detail is less clear (just like our eyesight) - he has become more sure of everything even the minutiae of life and theology the universe and everything. He has also become a religious bigot. It is only his small corner and interpretation of the religious that is right everyone else is wrong. What a prick.

Final thoughts

It is like M. Scott Peck says in 'The road less travelled' as a person becomes more actualised either their faith grows but becomes more nebulous or it dies. If however the start without a faith the one that develops with their actualisation is stronger. For those who have a faith, they often have to remain unactualised to preserve their faith.

I'm not sure where I am in this but want to be both actualised and faithful.

Here is hoping.
SF

As promised here he is

Yesterday I said I would try to bring you some of my friends poetry. Here it is. He gave me a big up when I first started my blogging, and I get to go away with him for a dirty weekend. - Our wives are going too so no sex!

DISTANCE

Images race away easily
Faces are figures
then blotches are buildings
are shapes then patterns
The blotches move around the patterns
deaf to the undercurrent of the engines drone
Prone to hyperbole
and a certain style

It’s been a while…. since I woke up to a smile

Clouds and lifetimes
drift by aimlessly
Stream of consciousness
begin then end
Bend and align to more selfish desires
Higher purposes
pull me further
and closer
I measure each mile

as it’s been a while…. since I woke up to a smile

Patterns reveal buildings
reveal blotches with features
then faces
The scent, sound and sight of her
provides instant remedy
Memories become dreams
Rest and sleep comfort


My eyes open
and her features portray
a certain absence of guile
My eyes close easier now

It’s been a while….since I woke up to a smile

from the Tumchie Muncher find him using the links at the side.

Poetic response to a friend

Having just read a friends blog... they are not all shite it inspired me to write a poem which shows sometimes there are things and ideas out there that are good and can lift your spirits. I really am fickle!

I n spi re

You in spire me
like in a church yard
cold and clear in the
fog of a winter morning

You insp ire me
making my anger rise
harsh and hot at the
close of a busy day

You inspire me
to try harder
to be the person I
know I should be

I hope to bring you the poem that caused this. I will need to wait for permission - intellectual property and such.

SF

Crisps and Beer

Ok I'm back and better than ever. All that angst about jobs and being a failure as gone, drowned by alcohol and getting busy with work. I have been visiting lots of blogs too. There is some dreadful shit out there.

Ok...

so I'm one to talk... but there are some really narrow minded uneducated 'fuck wits' in the blog world. I kind of knew it but when you see the breadth of moronic bigotry!

So back to my world and the question for tonight.

Are children less intelligent now that they were when we or our parents went through school?

The simple answer is YES.


I work with them all day and the know bugger all.

Everyday I am astonished by the things they don't know. Countries, Mythology, who Adam and Eve are, what the New Testament is...!!!

Don't get me wrong there are somethings they know that I don't but how useful are they really, they know things that do not help them understand the world or interpret things around them. Yeh they can text, and msn but they have nothing of value to say. They cannot reflect on the experience they have and make sense of it or see how it fits into the wider world. They don't even know who the Italian Prime Minister is, or that the capital of Turkey use to be Istanbul, or that it was called Constantinople, Byzantium before it.

Ok so I am an old fart, but there is so much that these kids don't know, even simple things like 'British Bulldog'. It might not be a game that every nation plays but for Scottish kids it was a given.

Well what is the answer? Comments please.

Am I just getting old?

Is it a sign where a good night in is a packet of crisps and a glass of beer!

SF

The Zen of Golf

I was talking to a friend tonight having a beer and chatting about our jobs. He like me is not totally happy with the way his life is going and we got to talking about the whole job thing. So I showed him my Blog - and explained the whole blog thing to him (he is just getting into the web thing) - and the topic of conversation turned to the job interview of the other day and the 40 something vibe. I told him what I thought I did wrong at the interview and we got to discussing this.

My theory/analysis is that I was so keen to get the job - yes this is a new theory coming up - that I played it safe. I decided that give the job was in a conservative establishment that I needed to tone down and play a safe and secure game. Because of that I came across as dull, someone who would not take a risk. Well not everyone is looking for a safe pair of hands, in fact most people want someone with go and drive, who will take things forward. That is me, but when you want something really badly sometimes you play safe, and that is what I think I probably did. So he says - and he wants a mention and his nickname, he picked it, is über meister - anyway he says "It is like golf, sometimes when you step up to the first tee you are tempted to play the safe shot with the four iron, but to make an impression you need to blast it with the driver. Sure you may shank it, but it is worth the risk to get what could be a brilliant shot".

So true my friend.

When I play golf - and I am shite - I am always willing to take the risk and lose the golf ball, that was my mistake, in the fear of how I may be perceived I forgot who I was.

Where now?

Well we will just have to wait and see.

I think I have left the Woody Allen place tonight and am moving back to the Tim Allen place, perhaps my resolution for this year should be - to be less reflective and learn how to truly not give a fuck.


I have come to a number of conclusion about Blogs - well about mine anyway

1. It is cheaper than therapy.
2. It is my chance to be Mork and report and a (possible non-existent) Orson- You.
3. It makes me believe I am important and worth listening to.
4. It makes you know that I am not important or worth listening to.
5. Writing it keeps me from my work and from my family.
6. It deprives me of sleep. It is 11.00pm now and I am still writing this shit.

Well the time has come to finish off my paid work before I go to sleep and so I will say good night.

The film quote is from 'The Shawshank Redemption' and you may have noticed that a happy and tranquil mood has come upon me which seems to make for a poorer blog entry. Lets hear it for angst!

The final comment of tonight is to recommend my other blog. It is the beginnings of a writers page. Unlike Tumchie, my muse is prose - mainly. So I will be posting some stories and short novels (or extracts) read them if you want and let me know what you think. The 'stuff' will be appearing at the beginning of next week and the range of literature will be wide. Everything from conception (sex) to death (murder and funerals) will be covered. Watch this space... well actually that space. The link is at the side - James B Wright is the blog - not my name but an old dead relative of my in-laws.

Drink

Well this is my response to not getting the job! What can you do except bite your lip, try to smile and get outrageously drunk!

In the words of Tammy Fay Baker (I saw her being interviewed after Jim had been taken away for fraud) 'When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade'. I know that others have said it too, but she finished it by saying 'a smile is a frown, turned upside down'.

I have no idea what this actually means or proves but... her old man had just been locked up and was claiming to see elephants whilst hiding under a table in his lawyers office.

This brings me to tonight's musing.

Why is it that as we get older our confidence seems to diminish rather than increase?

You would think that it would. We know ourselves better and have a more realistic view of what we can do, we should and generally have achieved more and for most of us we are more likely to be in a relationship that is positive and supports us.

Yet we are still capable of being levelled with one or two comments.

We should careless about what people think yet in some ways we seem to care more.

Perhaps it is just me... if it is don't tell me that will just make me feel worse.

Perhaps it is just where I am at just now...

It is the funny thing with jobs, and relationships too. For you to get them or make them work you have to invest of yourself. Yet that makes you vulnerable.

Lets take the job I didn't get. I had two ways of approaching the job interview. Either I could decide that I didn't care about the job and that would come over at the interview, or commit myself to really going for the job and hope that my commitment showed through. The first - in my field of work - would have fairly conclusively written me off of the job. But on the upside I would not care and would cope well with the rejection - partly because I had rejected them first. The second would have given me a better chance of getting the job - or in this case made fuck all difference - but then if I was rejected it would be a much more personal blow and would leave me 'hurt' like being ditched by a girlfriend.

You will recognise the dilemma.

There is another way of dealing with it and that involved changing who I am.

The problem is one that many of my friends have too. We are all fairly self reflective creative types, who don't like to overstate what we do. It is a party thing. We all know what it is like when you meet someone at a party who has an over inflated sense of themselves. They act like the have a "ten foot cock", well none of us like them, though some of us must be them, so we don't like to over sell ourself. So we don't we give measured and 'accurate' responses and they sweep in woo the crowd and take our jobs!

Or maybe we've just watched too many Woody Allen films!

SF

Old Fucker

Ok...

So I'm getting old.

I know it but does it have to be this fucking annoying?

So my life is ok, nice wife, lovely kids, good house, comfortable life, all good...but

Well like all people of my age, nearly 40, I am aware of the lack of achieved potential.

Don't get me wrong, I have achieved more than my teachers at school told me I would, but for me it is in a different area to the one I was heading for initially.
The truth is I though I would be 'making a difference' in a church, or outreach project like a new David Wilkerson, or Billy Graham type. But then life interrupts and changes your direction.

So what has this to do with age. Well its is the way you cope with change. Age does not help. I remember talking to a Church of Scotland minister about 15 years ago. He told me that the problem with the church was not the young or the old but the middle aged. "They are at a time of their life where everything is changing, work, family, society - so they want to control things and stop change and the only place they can do this is church. They resist any change or progress, they are the most conservative' Ok so I no longer go to church, but the rest he is right about. I have grown to fear and hate change, in part it is about control, but in part it is also about mortality. The truth is I have over the past 10 years become more worried about death and this has expressed itself in the fear of change. It is almost as if the changes will all add up to my demise. Ok so it is stupid and I need to get over it but...

That brings me to where I am tonight. Tomorrow at 10.10 I have an interview for a new job, and it is one that I want.

So here is my hope for this year... to grow up... I am hopeful

"I hope, I hope, I hope"

Name that movie

SF

Welcome

Ok this is the first posting on a new blog - my first blog... Well I hope that you enjoy reading the blog and feel free to make comment. There is no real shape to the blog - as yet - but at least it is a beginning.

Honourable mentions...

Well I would not have started this blog without the encouragement of one person. Superfluff.

You know who you are and where you are. I will be including a link to his blog soon, once I remember how to do it!

Ok so it is a slow start but at least it is a beginning.


Oh as for the name of the blog... for those who don't know it comes from a UK TV comedy called Father Ted, there are tons of links, and is the reply for Father Jack to the question 'And what would you say to a cup of tea father?' The reason for the choice is that I want to be Father Jack when I grow up.

SF