Westward Ho...

A very pleasant weekend in Devon, for the joyful task of watching Neil and Alexis tie the knot in Paignton's answer to the Palace of versailles (with more than a touch of the Fitzwilliam). A most enjoyable day, if (like all weddings) a lengthy one.

Devon is a simply spiffing county. In a not too different version of events, I could have been living there - my original plan when I decided to leave London last year was to move to Exeter, and this remained valid until the idea of Ely popped up out of the blue. Certainly Exter is a fine city, with lots of pretty things (and some ugly ones), and it is near plenty of simply gorgeous scenery. We were staying in the general vicinty of Newton Abbot, somewhere outside a village called Chudleigh (which is now fortunate enough to have a toy puppy named after it), and by and large it was a very realxing time.

Work, needless to say, is not relaxing, although at least I seem to be getting somewhere at the moment (mainly by the simple expedient of ignoring 98% of the work-mountain at any given time). It did amuse me greatly to hear that in the last partners meeting, one of the partners said of me that "I wouldn't be surprised if he handed his notice in tomorrow". You never know - one day it might actually occur to them to ask me why...

I am currently trying to get my courage together to launch into the Dark Tower series, since I now have all seven books. I made the mistake of checking how long it is, and came up with a figure of just under three and a half thousand pages. Hmmmm - might need a little while for that then...

I'm sure there are lots of other exciting things to say, but most of them are either forgotten or politically sensitive...

The Thoughts Of Chairman Whatsisface

This is only a brief capriccio on a theme which may blow into a full-blown discursuive rant at some point (it's safer here), but:

I'm only recently beginning to notice how many thoroughly and deliberately objectionable people there are on Mono these days. I think there are two reasons for this:

a) various sane people have, for various reasons, left, thus skewing the percentages, and:
b) everyone's getting older.

The second is the more compelling - the mean age of a fairly representative slice of Mono users is 29 years old, and by that age people are thinking differently to when they were 16. Tony Parsons says something in "man & Boy" about turning thirty, which is relevant - that thirty should be a good one, because you can look back on what you've achieved, while you still have some life in you.

I strongly suspect that there are a lot of spods who are reaching that sort of age and realising that, for all their intelligence, the list of achievements is very thin.
And, crucially, that the world out there really doesn't give a fuck about them.

Perhaps Mono's least endearing aspect is a turgid undercurrent of intellectual bullying, generally from people who can't really understand why the world hasn't accomodated them. The archetype of this style of behaviour, and a man who practised it as his life's work long before it came into vogue, is well known to you all, but it's becoming more widespread all the time.

There are two fair responses to defeat:
i) do something to reverse it
ii) accept it, and leave the game
(in many ways, my life over the last 18 months has been an application of this second response)
What is not a valid response is to use the defeat as a reason to attack everyone around you who you do not feel is sufficiently part of your approach.

However, in the end I come back to the same internalised response I feel when I get sniggered at by chavs - "Fight's over. You lost". And it's true of Mono's more intellectually thuggish element too - the world shakes you off as a horse shakes off fleas.

[None of this is to suggest, incidentally, that Mono is not also more full of simply wonderful people than a pomegranate is of pips]


Believe it or not, that was only a brief witter, and didn't mention the dread word "cliques" once (a subject on which I have Views, as those who know me know).

And so to bed...