Category Archives: thoughts

amusements, current affairs, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

I’m beginning to think that quotations found are like London buses: they come in threes; last week there was a dearth of good quotes; this week we have a glut. Here are the best of this week’s crop.

Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
[Mary Tyler Moore]

Chance favours the prepared mind.
[Louis Pasteur]

I wish someone had explained those two to me when I was young. Equally the following, told me by my barber hairdresser also explains a lot.

My brain is going. It’s not my age; it’s my thinning hair. Where the hair falls out the vacant pores let in water, so when my head gets wet the water mixes with the electricity in the brain. Not good!
[Clive Dodd]

Mind you it would be good if more people understood the next …

What people should expect is 100% energy and 100% effort. What no government can guarantee is 100% success.
[Dr John (Lord) Reid; former Labour Cabinet Minister]

But then we could do with a lot of politicians understanding these next three …

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
[Shakespeare; Henry VI Part 2, IV:ii]

The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
[Benjamin Disraeli]

Man, unlike animals, has never learned that the sole purpose in life is to enjoy it.
[Samuel Butler]

books, photography, pleasures, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection …
Enlightened One
Enlightened One by martisimas on Flickr

Enlightened One
My staff pays the mortgage,
but the house is all mine …
For the world is my oyster
… but tuna’s just fine.
[Cool Hand Luke]

Any photographer who says he isn’t a voyeur is either stupid or a liar.
[Helmut Newton]

What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.
[unknown]

Love is space and time measured by the heart.
[Marcel Proust]

books, personal, pleasures, quotes, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Here I Am

1 Comment

Having last week quoted the opening couple of lines from Roger McGough’s poem Here I Am it seems opportune to post the whole poem as it isn’t very long.

Here I Am

Here I am
getting on for seventy
and never having gone to work in ladies’ underwear

Never run naked at night in the rain
Made love to a girl I’d just met on a plane

At that awkward age now between birth and death
I think of all the outrages unperpetrated
opportunities missed

The dragons unchased
The maidens unkissed
The wines still untasted
The oceans uncrossed
The fantasies wasted
The mad urges lost

Here I am
as old as Methuselah
was when he was my age
and never having stepped outside for a fight

Crossed on red, pissed on rosé (or white)
Pretty dull for a poet, I suppose, eh? Quite.

Now OK, one knows that here will likely be a degree of poetic licence and tongue in cheek, but it is interesting what one even might consider it important that one hasn’t done (or would have liked to have done) in a lifetime.

So what would be on my list of things I’ve never done, and feel I want to have done? Hmmm … well … OK …

  • Visit Japan, Iceland, Norway and Sweden
  • Discover that I’m entitled to a coat of arms
  • Had a lot more sexual partners (what a waste of the 60s & 70s not to have done!)
  • Had sex in a hot, sunny hayfield
  • Travelled on the Orient Express and the Trans-Siberian Express
  • Not been depressed
  • Known what it’s like to be female

Well there’s still time to tick off some of those; better get going!

You can also check out my list of 111 Bucket List Things To Do.

amusements, personal, sexuality, thoughts

Pearl Necklace

Artist Leah Piepgras has created that essential piece of jewellery to wear to your next job interview.

As Peipgras says on her website:

Pearl Necklace is a seemingly amorphous cast silver shape on a chain that is actually an accurate representation of semen. It is a visual marker of chaos turned perfection through an act of beauty and lust. Pearl Necklace is a physical reminder of a fleeting moment of pleasure.

Even assuming you would pay $420 for the privilege, how many would have the courage to wear this to work let alone to a job interview? (Not that it to my mind hugely obvious what it represents.) I certainly wouldn’t, but then I’m not into girlie jewellery – and I’ve never seen any equivalent to us chaps. What about it someone?

amusements, beliefs, environment, food+drink, quotes, thoughts

Food for Thought

I came across the following a few days ago. I had to think hard to grasp exactly what was being said, but having done so I think the message is powerful. It relates to false life, as propounded on my Zen Mischief website. Sentimentality is a manifestation of false life, through false emotions. True sentiment (“what one feels with regard to something; mental attitude; an opinion or view as to what is right or agreeable; a mental feeling, an emotion; those feelings which involve an intellectual element or are concerned with ideal objects” – OED) is part of a considered reaction to and engagement with real life in the raw. There is a rather large difference …

Sentimentality creates the CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] farm – the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into Styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed. Sentimentality allows us to care about the extinction of the preferred charismatic mega-fauna of our choice […] but that we see no connection between our purchases, our acts and the habitat destruction of the animals in question. Sentimentality enables us to care about the child Pakistani-flood victim on nightly TV enough to send some money – but not enough to try and reduce the number of climate-related natural disasters by giving up some of our privileges. Sentimentality enables the patriotic fervour that allows us to not know how many Iraqi or Afghani civilians die in the interest of our national “greater goods.” Sentimentality is the emotion that emerges from the condition of not knowing – and it is what you have left in a society that conceals at every level real knowledge. It too is both cause and effect – it permits great evil, and it facilitates lack of knowledge of the real.

Sentiment – love, anger, attachment, affection – real emotions – these derive from knowledge, and they can’t be faked. And when you know things, the choices you make get more complex. The realities you live in get harder and greyer. Sometimes love means you have to kill something. Sometimes one love means that another loved thing get sacrificed. Sometimes you have to go against your feelings. But the only way that never happens is when you substitute sentimentality for real feeling.

We live in a world where sentimentality poses as real emotion, where we are often actively discouraged from understanding consequences, from developing real love for people and things, and from paying attention. It is easy to miss the distinction between the two entirely – because we have blurred so many things together.

[Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book Weblog]

beliefs, books, nudism, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

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This week’s weirdos …

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
[Bill Watterson]

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.
[Charles Schulz]

The human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendour and its beauty … Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness … Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person … The human body is not in itself shameful … Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
[Pope John Paul II]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]

Here I am
getting on for seventy
and never having gone to work in ladies underwear
[Roger McGough, Here I Am]
beliefs, nudism, thoughts

British Naturism

2 Comments

LadyGod1va has recently written about the opportunities which naturism currently has for expanding in the UK. You can read her complete post here and I would encourage you to do so as it is a well balanced and thoughtful analysis. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything she says – largely because I view the world through my eyes and not hers, and there likely are no completely right or completely wrong answers: horses for courses and all that. So here are my comments, observations and opinions on a number of LadyGod1va’s more salient points.

The problem I see in the UK is that there are far too many independent organisations supporting naturism through clubs, social gatherings, social networks, personal blogs, membership sites, holiday services and so on whilst there is a very small target audience who are openly able to enjoy the naturism life for various personal reasons or beliefs.

Can’t disagree with that. Naturism is still populated by small enclaves of people hiding in the bushes, mostly out of fear. This has to change if progress is to be made. Naturism needs a single, powerful, voice representing the spectrum of naturist beliefs. As LadyGod1va says …

The number of naturists in the UK probably grows or shrinks over the years in relation to the population numbers aged between 40-60 […] We are enjoying the highest numbers of naturists in the UK probably because the population aged between 40-60 is the highest for a long time due to the baby booms of the 60s […] I see it as now being the best harvest of suitable naturism candidates for the naturist organisations to increase their numbers.  However I don’t believe that it is being done successfully because there is just too much choice for what is still a limited number of naturists.

Yes there are a lot of choices, but I don’t see this as a problem if everyone worked together towards a common goal. What I see is the wrong choices for many of the target audiences, or indeed no choice at all. Take our situation (and we can’t be alone):

We are not really club people, so clubs don’t appeal. We don’t drive, which while it isn’t usually a problem and is very eco of us, does mean we have a challenge getting to anything which is remote (in space or time) from public transport. This means we would struggle to get to a remote club, even if we wanted to. And late night swims (and our nearest swim is a late evening event) are impractical because of public transport schedules. We are not people for spending holidays roasting in the sun, so beach holidays don’t greatly appeal. Which leaves us with … not a lot!

So what do we want. Probably what a lot of other not very active nudists want. To be able to go nude in our garden and our local park/beach and to be able to swim nude at our local swimming pool (even if that is only once a month).

Living as we do in a small terraced house in an ethnically diverse area of London, garden nudity is a problem. Our garden is overlooked by neighbours who (due to age, religion and culture) are unlikely to be sympathetic to nudity; and screening the sunny spots in the garden from their view is difficult as they are right by the house. Because of the same puritanical attitudes amongst the local populous (remember ethnic and religious diversity) our local swimming pool is highly unlikely to offer even clothes optional sessions; and certainly not if only odd-balls like us ask for them. Would they be more willing if we were backed by a strong national organisation? Well who knows, but it couldn’t be more difficult. The same applies to parks and beaches while the current ignorance of the law persists.

Which leaves us stuck unless or until there are some paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts in our brains (there must be other alternatives) as much as in anyone else’s. But those paradigm shifts can be hard when, despite the actuality of the law, there is complete ignorance amongst the populous of what is allowed and frequent disregard of the law by the powers that be. [Photographers are facing a similar challenge at present over the anti-terrorist laws but are slowly winning because photography is a non-contentious and popular hobby and thus they collectively have a strong voice.]

There are many more naturists amongst the general public who just do not have any reason to join any club or organisation because their form of naturism doesn’t require it. [… A] greater number of females are opting not to have children until later into their 30s, these females are quite confident and go topless and some obviously go nude but mostly when on holidays, so why are they not more visible in the naturist circles? I would suggest the following to be the main issues;
1. Because being seen topless in the local park by anyone they know is likely to cause them embarrassment […]
3. Lack of role models, someone has to make a start and others could follow.

Possibly true until there is a critical mass and “everyone is doing it”.

That makes two key target audiences: the 40-60s and young couples and singles. Actually there is a third target audience (although maybe a more difficult one to win over): the late teens and students, who have surprising power and that all important rebellious streak – just as long as you can make it “the in thing”. Get the young enthused and signed up and there’s a future.

2. The UK naturist movement still have a seedy association with sexual activities and perverts of one kind or another.

I’m not so sure about the seedy sexual activities, though maybe LadyGod1va is right. But certainly the perverts wrongly associated with naturism is definitely a worry.

4. Lack of understanding of the law

It isn’t just a lack of understanding but also attempts to erroneously enforce the law – see comments above.

5. Personal or religious beliefs

I don’t buy this as a reason for nudity on holiday but not at home, except as a variant of number 1 above.

My fear is that with pressure from the USA, the religious righteous, influences from the Eastern countries, the UK naturism could suffer.

This, together with the legal position (see above) is to my mind the biggest stumbling block. And it is a battle which I believe is only going to be won by a strong, united and vocal national organisation. British Naturism (BN) is the obvious candidate to take on this role (as LadyGod1va points out) but it is still considered by many to be nothing more than a marginal player with a dubious past. In my judgement BN now has the will, and the willingness, to take on this challenge, but it doesn’t (yet) have the critical mass and the muscle to be powerful enough. That will only change if one of two things happens: either everyone gets behind BN and takes it in the direction we want it to go, or all us naturists become individually and collectively vocal (regardless of what BN does) in the way that the photographic community are kicking back against erroneous attempts to curtail what they can do in public. Both are paradigm shifts; and paradigm shifts are hard to enable. And no, I don’t have any magic answers; I wish I did.

There needs to be 100s of people like me, girls and boys who don’t need to go around demonstrating about lack of freedom etc. but just do it […] If we are to encourage these people to try and do what they believe in without fear or reprisal, we need more than just clubs, web sites, social networks etc. […]

They need the support of a credible organisation that has the respect of the country’s legal and political and ethical organisations […] There needs to be more than just middle to old aged people making noises about
naturism. There needs to be something more than what we have now. It is only through increasing the numbers that greater freedom will come.

Yes, although see comments on the photographic community above who are largely acting independently of (although supported by) their various national organisations.

However you look at it we need to act …

If you support these views also, then you can help to tackle these problems […] the best way to do so is to become a member of BN and let your friends know that you are a member (whenever possible), this will give you confidence that you are a member of an organisation that is focused on pure naturism and fights all that is unacceptable in naturism […] if you are a member and you run into trouble, you have someone to seek support and guidance from […] if you hold BN membership, you are more likely to be advised correctly and there would be someone who knows the law well enough to keep you out of trouble and media if necessary.

Yes absolutely. We allowed our BN membership to lapse many years ago, when BN lost its way and was riven by internecine wars. But we have recently rejoined because it was clear that in the current environment not only do we need BN but the movement now needs our support, and BN, having reinvented itself, are now up for the challenge.

You can find more about BN at www.british-naturism.org.uk where you’ll find information on the benefits of membership and a membership form. What are you waiting for?

current affairs, history, thoughts

Elf 'n' Shafty Mad

Dunster in Somerset is a picturesque and historic village whose castle and cobbled streets attract thousands of tourists every year.

Image: Drury Art
But guess what, children? Yes, that’s right, the local councils have now decreed that the cobbles have to go, all in the name of the gods Elf and Shafty. They allege that several people have already been whisked away by ambulance this year having fallen on the cobbles. So they are proposing to replace the cobbles with “smooth surfaced roads”.

It isn’t just me that thinks this is a load of old cobbles either. The news item at Small World has several vox pop defending the cobbles and pointing out that they are a key part of Dunster’s history and most people manage pretty well on the cobbles.

What I want to know is, why are (fairly flat) cobbles at Dunster not OK when other places appear not to have a problem? In all the time I’ve spent in Rye I have never seen anyone fall or be majorly incommoded by the cobbles – and Rye’s cobbles are made of very round, and often widely spaced stones; they aren’t nice and flat and certainly not suitable for “fuck me” shoes.

Pathetic is about the kindest thing I can say about this.

sexuality, thoughts

Talking about Sex

I recently happened across About.com:Sexuality and specifically an item written by their lead expert Cory Silverberg in which he encourages us all to talk more openly about sexuality. I’m going to reproduce here (for everyone’s convenience) the core of what he says:

One of the most difficult hurdles to get over when it comes to talking about sex (whether it’s talking with a partner, with a family member, with your therapist, etc.) is integrating it into your daily life. Sex talk is usually so loaded. Either it’s a scary thing about sexual difficulties, or you’re anxiously awaiting big time rejection, or there’s a blood test involved. Talking about sex is rarely casual fun. […]

This […] sex tip hopes to take you one step closer to this goal, by giving you the task of asking someone a question about sex this week.

These shouldn’t be skill testing questions, and they shouldn’t be asked in a mean spirit (designed to embarrass or coerce someone into talking about sex). They are questions designed to let people talk about sex, and also to get you more comfortable breaking the unspoken rule that you aren’t supposed to talk about sex.

Ask your best friend, or grandmother, or someone you just met. Be respectful, and consider the fact that for some people a question about sex could be traumatic, or trigger unexpected reactions related to bad sexual experiences. Choose wisely, but at the same time, try to take some risks in who you ask, and what you ask them.

If you’re stumped on what to ask, here are some of my favourite questions to ask random people:
Where did you first learn about sex?
When you grew up, what were the names you learned for your sexual body parts?
What was the worst sex you ever had? Did you ever have it again?
In theory, would you ever have sex with me? (Note: use this one with caution, and only if you want to know the answer.)

That last question is a bit of a joke, and goes against the spirit of this […] tip, but it can have fascinating results.

The point of this exercise is definitely not to create stressful conversations, the point is just the opposite. As long as you’re pretty sure this is a welcome question, try to ask the question in the same way you might ask about the last movie someone saw, or where they got that great shawl they are wearing.

Now talking more openly about sexuality is a sentiment with which I have to agree. As I have written before (eg. back in February) I believe that more openness about things sexual and medical would be good for all of us in terms of both mental and physical health.

However I am aware that in asking us to discuss sexuality “head on” in this way Silverberg is setting us a huge challenge (for me hardly less than anyone else) given that explicit discussion of sexuality is still a huge taboo for most people.

I wonder how many of my friends are equal to the challenge?  Who’s going to come out of the closet first? 🙂

amusements, current affairs, medical, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

A rich vein of quotes this week. Here are some of the best …

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
[Sir Barnett Cocks]

It is a primitive form of thought that things either exist or do not exist.
[Sir Arthur Eddington]

We [doctors] do things, because other doctors do so and we don’t want to be different, so we do so; or because we were taught so [by teachers, fellows and residents]; or because we were forced [by teachers, administrators, regulators, guideline developers] to do so, and think that we must do so; or because the patient wants so, and we think we should do so; or because of more incentives [unnecessary tests (especially by procedure oriented physicians) and visits], we think we should do so; or because of the fear [by the legal system, audits] we feel that we should do so [so called covering oneself]; or because we need some time [to let nature take its course], so we do so; finally and more commonly, that we have to do something [justification] and we fail to apply common sense, so we do so.
[MS Parmar, “We do things because”, British Medical Journal Rapid Response, 2004, March 1 quoted in Imogen Evans, Hazel Thornton & Iain Chalmers, Testing Treatments: Better Research for Better Healthcare]

A wise man makes his own decisions; an ignorant man follows public opinion.
[Chinese proverb]

I am proud that our country remains the scourge of the oppressed. Freedom is once again on the march, as the good people of America join together to wave it goodbye.
GEORGE W BUSH
[Craig Brown; The Lost Diaries]

Born to American-Indian parents, he spent his formative years in abject poverty in Ireland, nibbling on crusts in a tepee in the exclusive slum area of Limerick. Though there were no books in the family home, he occupied his childhood reading the tepee’s assembly instructions over and over again, and in this way gained an unsurpassed command of the English language, as evidenced by his early Tepee Trilogy: Lay the Fabric Flat (1968), With the Long Side Facing Up (1972) and Now Set the Pole in an Upright Position (1975).
[Craig Brown; dust-jacket of The Lost Diaries]

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
[Jules Feiffer]

Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.
[Lori Gottlieb]