Author: Tim

Back on the Blog

After a long absence I have found myself drawn back to this blog with a strong desire to get back into the groove of writing entries on a fairly regular basis. Much of the drive to do that has come from another area of writing activity that I have indulged in over the last few months, namely my entry into the world of poetry. This was all entirely unexpected but has now reached the point where I have written a good number of poems and set up a new website to give myself a place to publish them. If you are interested in looking at that site and reading my poems you can find it here: andapoet.blog.

I suppose that having set up my new poetry blog I started to think about other writing and I remember how much I used to enjoy rattling out little pieces for this blog even though I always knew that pretty much no-one ever read them. In addition, I have changed quite a lot over the last couple of years (something that I am sure I will write about here soon), and I am now much more comfortable with throwing my thoughts ‘out there’ without worrying about how that might be judged by anyone (or, probably more importantly, by myself).

So here I am, back on the blog. To help draw myself back in I have changed the design theme of the blog (it now matches my poetry site), simplified some of content being shown and begun to work my way back through past entries. I have been tidying them up, correcting obvious typographic errors etc. and in one or two cases removing them from view if I felt they didn’t fit anymore. I’ve done this tidying process back to the beginning of 2018 and intend to go further back over the next few weeks. I’m also going to add some comments to some of the posts to give a little update on what happened next where this feels relevant.

If you have stumbled on this blog for some reason then I hope you will find something here that you enjoy or find interesting. I’m planning on adding a page that links back to some of my favourite past entries and I am hoping that I might be able to add a new entry on a regular, perhaps near-daily, basis.

Finally, please don’t be shy – leave a comment on a post to let me know what you are thinking etc. I can see from the blog stats that random people do visit this site every now and again and it would be brilliant if sometimes a visitor stopped to actually say hello!

Life and Death


I think it is hard to beat an interesting tree – sometimes it is the shape that speaks to me, sometimes the colours and sometimes it’s the the signs of a hard life lived. So, you can perhaps imagine my excitement when I spotted this particular tree with its strong, thick trunk and its beautifully rounded and perfectly balanced shape all thickly enveloped by deep green leaves, so full of life… and yet, running upwards through its core, emerging to thrust like inverted lightning flashes from its top (and less visible in the photograph, a withered tendril reaching downwards on the left side), the sharp, angular, stripped-bare branches, absolutely dead to the world. This is a tree that is both dead at the core and alive at heart and I have never seen its like before.

The Secret to Success

A few weeks ago, while reading Theodore Zeldin’s great book ‘The Hidden Pleasures of Life’ I came across a quote which resonated with me at the time and has stuck with me ever since. It comes from a 1967 New York Daily News interview with Bob Dylan in which he was asked about the delay in him producing a new recording and media reports that he had been offered a huge sum of money to switch record labels. His response was:

“What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the mornin’ and gets to bed at night and in between he does what he wants to. What I want to do is make music.”

I’ve picked out the middle sentence in bold because that’s the part that I read in Zeldin’s book and the part that is relevant here.

It’s possible to read this sentence as a simple instruction to do whatever you want to do, perhaps being selfish in the process. But that’s not how I read the quote or all that I take from it. For me, there are three elements to the quote, three ‘secrets to success’ – things that could be considered as markers of a successful life. One might also see them as essential ingredients or instructions…

1) Get up in the morning
It sounds simple but there’s quite a lot in this. First, if you get up in the morning then that implies you have made it through another night; you have survived to live another day – that’s Success Number One. Secondly, if you ‘get up’ then you have gone into active mode; you are engaged with life, doing something (anything) – and that’s Success Number Two.

2) Get to bed at night
Similar to ‘Get up in the morning’ there are two parts to this. First, if you ‘get to bed’ then you’ve clearly got a bed of some sort and that implies a least some degree of safety and security which has to be a good thing – Success Number Three. Secondly, the phrase implies that you have made it through another day and, no matter how easy or difficult that has been, I would count that as Success Number 4.

3) Do what you want to do in between
I guess this is obvious – a day spent doing things that you don’t want to do could still be regarded as a success in some ways (see above) but I think it is self-evident that a day spent doing what you want to do, whether that is one thing, a calling such as ‘Dylan’s “make music'”, or a multitude of things big and small, is going to be a better (more successful) day than one where much of your time is given over to activity that is misaligned with your personal values and interests. That’s Success Number 5.

I think it’s obvious that Success Number 5 is THE BIG ONE but I’d also argue that a single day of Success Number 5 would not really make for a successful life – that would only come when it is coupled with Successes Numbers 1-4 over and over again. I would just add here that what is good for one is surely also good for everyone else and so an interpretation of ‘do what you want to do’ that is generous to others and does not work against their own success will most likely lead to the greatest success in life overall. I certainly don’t take this phrase as an excuse for selfishness.

So, that’s the goal: get up in the morning – do what you want to do – go to bed at night; the secret to success in a nutshell.

The Curried Icelandic Name Game

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to visit Iceland. I’m not sure what the trigger for this was but I do know that I have always had a bit of a fascination with Scandinavian countries. When I was about 11 I had the idea that I would one day live and work in Sweden. It might have been something to do with a feeling that Sweden was a country that seemed very modern with lots of cool science and engineering although I think that perhaps it also had something to do with Agnetha Faltskog (forgive me, I was only 11 at the time). As far as Iceland is concerned, I’m pretty sure my interest was more to do with the volcanoes, lava fields and geysers. Then, perhaps 10-15 years ago, Plymouth Argyle signed an Icelandic player called Kari Arnason and at the same time I started reading the Detective Erlendur novels written by the Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason which are set in Rejkjavik, and at that point I became just a little obsessed with the child-naming convention that is used in Iceland.

For anyone who is new to Icelandic names, the convention is that a child takes on their father’s given name as their surname but with the suffix ‘sson’ or ‘sdottir’ (or a similar variant) depending on whether they are a son or a daughter. I think that’s such a neat and simple way of doing things, albeit rather patriarchal, but I guess there would be no reason why the mother’s name could not be used instead, thereby nicely sidestepping that problem. Following this approach, I would be called Tim Colinsson (or perhaps Colinason) which kind of works although it doesn’t have quite the same allure as a proper Icelandic name.

But this post isn’t meant to be a lecture on Icelandic naming and if you’re reading this piece and noted its title you are probably wondering exactly when and where the curry part is going to come in to things…

…which brings me on to my discovery.

I have no idea how I made this discovery and I admit that if anyone else had come up with it I would be a bit worried on their behalf… anyway, for some reason I stumbled on the idea of mashing together the names of curry dishes and their ingredients with the Icelandic child-naming convention. By curry names and ingredients I mean the words used in the kinds of dishes served in Indian restaurants and take-aways, things like: Korma, Dopiaza, Bhaji, Madras, Bhuna, Brinjal, Bhindi, Chana, Sag, Tandoori, Vindaloo, Biriyani etc.

So… it’s time to put all of the pieces together and play the Curried Icelandic Name Game. Here are the steps:

1. Select any single word from the curry names and ingredients list
2. Select a second single from the curry names and ingredients list
3. Add ‘sson’ or ‘sdottir’ to the end of this second word
4. Smash the two words you have from steps 1 and 3 together and there you have it – your first Curried Icelandic name
5. Choose another word from the curry names and ingredients list
6. Take your first word (from step 1) and add ‘sson’ or ‘sdottir’ to the end of it
7. Smash the two words you have from steps 5 and 6 together to create your next Curried Icelandic name
Then repeat the process from steps 5 onwards ad infinitum (or more likely until you get bored)

For example:

1. Brinjal
2. Bhaji
3. Bhajisson
4. => Brinjal Bhajisson
5. Korma
6. Brinjalsson
7. => Korma Brinjalsson
5. Biriyani
6. Kormasdottir
7. => Biriyani Kormasdottir
5. Chana
6. Biriyanisson
7. => Chana Biriyanisson
5. Bhaji
6. Chanasson
7. => Bhaji Chanasdottir
…

Go on, give it a try.

Running Early

Yesterday, frustrated by my inability to fit various activities into my life and by my tendency to struggle to do anything if it involves me making a decision, I came (back) to the thought that I function much better when I remove the decision-making process entirely from the equation. The specific example was fitting running into my schedule – I have a vague plan of running three times per week, two shorter runs on weekdays (most commonly Monday/Tuesday and Thursday/Friday) and then a longer run on (usually) Saturday morning. There I was, on Monday morning, knowing that I had to fit a run in over the next couple of days but not being able to decide when I would do this. Now, for me, having to make a decision like this is always problematic because, weirdly, if I am left to my own devices and am solely reliant on my own motivation to do things, the most likely outcome is that I will do nothing. Despite WANTING to do things I rarely FEEL like doing things. I have a huge amount of internal friction, or what I am now starting to think of as ‘personal viscosity‘, that resists action. All of which left me struggling to decide, struggling to plan and generally feeling frustrated with myself (as usual).

After a short period of wallowing in some kind of self-pity I was struck by the thought that it would really be a lot better if I didn’t leave myself having to decide about things and that it would be much better to decide now that I always do X at time Y. This is basically the idea of making a decision once rather than having to make similar decisions many times over. It’s not a new idea, I’ve been in this place and had this thought plenty of times in the past and, I am sure, will re-discover it again plenty of times in the future; because I know what I’m like and it would be unrealistic to think that suddenly I will make a plan, turn it into action and everything will be sweetness and light forever after.

After this re-revelation I decided that the best way for me to remove the decision-making process from my running deliberations would simply be to run everyday, if only for a mile, first thing in the morning unless there was some other specific event occurring that prevented this. The result was a ‘plan’ to run 1 mile on Mondays, ~3 miles on Tuesdays, 1 mile on Wednesdays, ~5 miles on Thursday and 1 mile on Fridays, always starting as close to 7am as possible (immediately after waking) and before I had done anything else, including eating. Then, on Saturdays, I would do a longer run (say 90-120 minutes) starting an hour after eating some breakfast which I would do first thing. My thinking was that if I didn’t have any decisions to make there would be one less barrier to me getting out and that I would have the satisfaction of always having achieved something at the start of the day. I would win a battle with myself before embarking on the war that stretched ahead of me each day. To help myself out I would have all of my running gear set up ready to put on in the morning so that again, another monster standing in the way of action would be pre-slain.

That was Monday, today is Tuesday.

It sort of worked. Actually, that’s unfair. It DID work, just not quite as smoothly as I would have liked (or imagined). I did get out for my run – a 3 mile route around local streets that I call ‘Mostly Mannamead’. It was a little slow and I was a little creaky (I’d not run for 4 days) but the run happened. What went less well is that it took me 15-20 minutes from the time I woke to overcome my viscosity and get moving and then I slipped into one of my cracks in time on my return to the house and took ages to get myself into the shower and onwards to breakfast, some writing and then into work. It’s clear that I really need to work on my transitions.

Tomorrow being Wednesday and just a 1 mile run day should be easier. I’ll set myself up in advance – running kit out etc – and I will TRY to reduce the time it takes for me to get out of the door. On my return I’ll probably go straight into breakfast mode before I have a shower. Oddly, I have no trouble eating immediately after I run (and anyway, 1 mile is hardly a run at all) and hopefully that will mean that I’ve cooled down and am ready to shower as soon as I have finished eating. Maybe, just maybe, I can get everything to fall into place – wake, run, breakfast, shower – and be able start writing (something else that I am trying to work into my schedule on a more regular and reliable basis) by 8am.

We’ll see…

Chipping Away… towards 1000 miles

Several months ago, back in the dim and distant days of late summer, when I was running lots and nothing like as busy with work as I have been this past 12 weeks, I signed myself up for a virtual challenge of completing 1000 miles in the year. This simply involved paying out £12.95 (I think) to a company who would send me a nice shiny medal once I sent in proof that I had completed 1000 miles of running during 2020. At the time it seemed pretty easy – I was well on track and completing the mileage from my (then) current position wasn’t that big a deal.

Then I got busy with work. Really busy.

The last 12 weeks are by far my busiest period of the academic year and on top of lots of lectures, marking and general (virtual) interactions with students I’ve had the pleasure of ongoing work sorting out the timetable for February onwards – something which is usually done in the summer. So my running suffered a bit – not to the extent that I crashed out of it altogether – but enough that about 6 weeks ago I realised that if I wanted that 1000 mile medal I had better start putting on my running shoes and getting out a bit more often. Since then, I have been working on an average daily mileage of close to 3 miles and that has meant grabbing every opportunity to pound the streets that I can. No, what I mean is that it has meant me dragging myself out of the house a lot more than my naturally lazy-arsed instinct would want. But it has worked. I now find myself with 17 days to go needing to run about 2.6 miles per day and the final target is very much within reach. I think only a bad cold will scupper things now although it should be acknowledged that a bad cold is exactly what I usually get the moment that this particular term finishes (so it’s scheduled for Friday later this week…). I’ve also upped the ante by forking out for another rather nice wooden ‘medal’ which I will award myself for running at least a kilometre every day in the 24 days running up to Christmas Day itself. No pressure (well, only self-inflicted pressure I guess).

Today, I had a plan to work through to about now and then go out for a pleasant 4-5 miles but here I am writing this and putting it off. I look out of the window and it’s completely dark (at 4:50pm). I can feel that it’s cold – not freezing cold but cold enough to make the prospect of going outside not entirely pleasant. At least it is not currently raining, although there are some pretty dark clouds out there and there have been some heavy showers. So I sit here typing instead.

No, no, NO. IT WON’T DO… Stop writing, switch off the computer, get off the chair, get changed and get out there. There are miles to be run and they won’t run themselves. You just have to keep chipping away. Always.

Reading the Back Catalogue

Obviously I have not been writing entries on this blog recently. I had a little burst of writing activity in May 2020 but since then I’ve not added anything more despite constantly thinking that I’d like to get back into the habit of writing more regularly. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve been ignoring this blog completely. In fact, over the last month or two, I’ve been enjoying looking back through old entries to see the kinds of things that were on my mind and enjoying the occasional nuggets of wisdom or glimpses of humour that I have found. I think this may be a prelude to me getting stuck in to writing here again.

Much more surprising than the fact that I have been digging into my ‘back catalogue’ is the fact that someone else has too. I write ‘someone‘ but I don’t actually know for sure that it is one person, it could be multiple people, but my instinct is that it is one person. I base this view on the observation that the stats for this site are showing between one and three reads per day, always of random old entries (just as I have been dipping in but not, I hasten to add, to the same entries – that would be truly weird) and always from somewhere in the USA. I think I actually prefer the idea that these reads all come from one person as that suggests that there is at least one person who finds my writing sufficiently interesting to keep coming back for more, and on an almost daily basis too. It’s like they are coming to this site for a little piece of daily wisdom, entertainment or distraction. The picture below shows the weekly viewing stats over the last three or so months. You can see that the engagement starts about six weeks ago. The visitor (or visitors) never leave a comment and so apart from knowing that they are viewing from the USA I have absolutely no other information about them.

In some ways, I’m happy not to know any more details – that way I can just keep on imagining that there is one person out there enjoying my past writings. But quite a big part of me wants to know more and wants to have my suspicions confirmed or shattered. Mostly I’d just like to know a bit about them and whether they have actually enjoyed and even found useful anything that I have written.

So, go on… if you have read this entry and it’s you that I’m referring to, drop me a comment or a message. It’d be great to hear from you!

Notebook Thinking

I like to spend a little time each day pondering my thoughts by writing them out long-hand in a notebook. Sometimes an entry is all about one thing, how I am feeling, what I am going to do that day (usually I write earlier in the day rather than later) or something that is bothering me. Often the thoughts are more scattered and random, crashing about from one theme to another with no obvious structure.

I’m not sure when this habit started but, as can be seen from the picture below, it clearly become established about 5 years ago when I adopted a standard size and type of notebook (Moleskine pocket hardbound, usually squared, sometimes lined). I also have a standard type of pen (Mitsubishi USB185S, usually black, occasionally blue but only for a day or two if my black has run out and I have no replacement handy). I buy the pens in bulk and the notebooks a few weeks in advance – I have my next one ready and waiting. It would now trouble me quite a lot to use a different type of notebook or a different type of pen. I know that’s not a good thing… surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to bother me what colour I have.

I write in full sentences, recording my thoughts in an almost conversational style – just like this blog entry really. I think that this act of writing thoughts out by hand in pen on paper, slowly, is central to the enjoyment and value I get from the exercise. It stops me from racing ahead and forces me to stay with a line of thinking for longer than I probably would otherwise.

Sometimes I just end up with a page or two of writing that doesn’t say anything very much and it seems a bit pointless and forced. Other times I can stay in my groove for quite a long time (maybe an hour if I am well situated with a decent coffee nearby and, perhaps, not where I ought to be doing what I ought to be doing…). On those occasions I can really unlock blocks and constraints in my mind and my life, settling myself down, sifting my thoughts into order, resolving problems and geeing myself up for action. It’s wonderful when that happens.

To my knowledge, no-one has ever read anything I have written in these notebooks. If they have, they have certainly never admitted it. That’s probably just as well – I don’t generally write about deeply personal stuff involving other people although I do quite like to grumble. But I do write about what I am thinking and feeling, the frustrations I have with myself, especially in relation to my ongoing battles with procrastination and my tendency to be always be looking forward to some future time when life is how I want it to be rather than getting on with it now (I’ve ALWAYS been like that) and I am not sure that anyone else should have to suffer by entering that world.

The All Of It (Jeannette Haien)

At the start of the year I decided that interspersed within other books, I would aim to read one book by an author from each letter of the alphabet in sequence chosen from James Mustich’s wonderful volume 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. In particular, I wanted as much as possible to try to use this mini-project as a spur to read (or listen to in audiobook form) works that I wouldn’t otherwise consider. So far this year I have already worked my way through Edward Abbey’s ‘Desert Solitaire’, Natalie Babbitt’s ‘Tuck Everlasting’, J.L. Carr’s ‘A Month in the Country’, Alain De Botton’s ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’, Loren Eiseley’s ‘The Immense Journey’, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ amongst 22 other books mostly not in Mustich’s big list. Last night, I finished my ‘H’ book, Jeanette Haien’s ‘The All Of It’.

‘The All Of It’ is a short novel (just over 140 pages) and was Haien’s first, written in her 60s after she had had a successful career as a concert pianist. The novel is set in the wild part of northwestern Ireland and revolves around the ‘confession’ by a 60ish year old woman Enda to the local Catholic Priest Father Declan after the passing of 63 year old Kevin. I won’t say any more about Kevin in case you read the book. Interspersed with Enda’s ‘confession’, when she tells Father Declan the ‘all of it’, is description of his attempt to catch a salmon on the final day of the fishing season, a day or two after their conversation. I can’t really say any more about the plot because that would give everything away. It’s a simple story, nicely told and really it is a story about being fearless and taking the plunge, of which there are at least four taken in the story – Enda and Kevin’s plunge in their childhood, Enda’s plunge in telling Father Declan the story, Father Declan’s plunge in having one last cast with a fly (a trout fly even!) and then Father Declan’s final plunge, arguably the most significant plunge of all.

I bought my copy of ‘The All Of It’ secondhand from an eBay seller. It absolutely stank of what I can only describe as musty, old lady, perfume – not exactly the best thing at a time when you have heightened awareness of the contents of the air that you put near your face and you have a habit of flicking quickly through the pages of a book to look for chapter breaks and to gauge how far you have to go. Several times I blasted my face with old, I mean REALLY old, perfume and who knows what else. But I am still alive so far and, oddly, the musty old perfume smell made me feel just a little more connected to Enda than I might otherwise have been.

I’m an absolute sucker for a story that holds wisdom within it and, although simple, ‘The All Of It’ certainly does hold wisdom, oodles of it. Sometimes in life you just have to step over the threshold, or start to talk, or cast your line,…

… or listen to your heart.

Symmetree

I love trees. I love the way that they seem to produce all of their substance out of nothing; the way that they can hang around for ages while the world changes around them; they way that they are all so different whilst still obviously being trees; the way that they change on all kinds of timescales.

I like taking photographs of trees, particularly ones with a high degree of symmetry where the shape of one side of the tree is the same as the shape of the other side and where the trunk is nice a straight and down the middle. I don’t only like symmetrical trees but I do think I like those ones the best.

A couple of days ago I was up on Roborough Common (on the south-western edge of Dartmoor). It was my first time properly outside of Plymouth for at least 8 weeks. It was a beautiful sunny and still evening – aren’t they all at the moment? We parked up the car, set out for a stroll and there it was, was one of my favourite symmetrical trees; one that is always hard to walk past without taking a photograph. And so, of course, I did, resulting in a picture that I am particularly proud of.

This isn’t just a symmetrical tree; it’s a Symmetree…