Mister Hugh's World of Randomness

Sorry about the lack of postings in the last couple of months. Turns out that the long-awaited broadband that we signed up to a while ago has got so bad that basically I can't get any internet access at all. It's taken me the best part of a week and much frustration even to get this posted.

I might mention at this point that if you're thinking of using Bulldog Broadband at any point in the future, DON'T. We can't even phone them up to complain as rather cunningly they've made sure the phone line dosen't work either.

So there will continue to be an intermission (thankfully without the irritating cheesy music which usually accompanies such things) until we've signed up with a new ISP, which we're in the process of doing now. Until then, please bear with me. Sorry!

Unfortunately the mass pillow fight last saturday didn't turn out quite so massive after all...

Lots of people were away for the weekend, several more had been scared off by the idea that the police would not take kindly to the idea after all the recent terrorism, and there were lots of last-minute cancellations. It was really a case of bad timing, though poor organisation on my part didn't help.

In the end, only seven people turned up, and we didn't really think it was worth going ahead with that many. Four of us made the best of it and had a picnic and wandered around in parks etc. and actually had a thoroughly good time anyway. Indeed we did in fact have a small (but fairly intense) pillow fight in Piccadilly gardens after all, which served as a practice run. Suffice to say the police didn't mistake us for terrorists :-)

But i'm not going to abandon the idea of having a proper pillow fight later on, and next time i'll hopefully be a bit less madly busy and have time to organise it properly. Nor will I be in two minds about what the police will think (that particular worry suddenly seemed very ridiculous when we did the practice fight). So all in all I think the event will go better for having done this small dress rehersal first. In due course i'll announce the date of the next pillow fight, and I hope more people will be around for it this time...

hi,

So as you may have gathered, I went to Glade festival last weekend. Despite the fact i've been pretty ill for the last few days having partied a bit too hard, it was well worth it as the whole thing was mind-blowing (in several ways).

No photos can really sum up the experience, mainly because I was having too good a time to take many. Instead i've included a few random amusing shots that I did get when things were quieter, and which give a sample of what it was like.

I'm sure you can extrapolate the rest of what happened over the five days from these few pictures (who knows, you may even get close to the truth, or perhaps imagine something rather better than what really did happen. Either way, hopefully you'll have had fun).



Springy heels girl - apparently these things allow you to run at over 25 mph. I've got to get hold of some



Hmm, are you sure those are udders i'm holding?



I'm not at all sure what's going on - but i'm loving it (I think)!

hi all,

I've finally got my broadband connection up and running so I can now use the internet again, and now I have a dangerous feeling of power as everything is just so quick (8Mb instead of 56k like i'm used to).

It's actually verging on the harmful as i've realised that the thing which once stopped me from surfing randomly off into the uncharted reaches of the internet for hours was actually not my own self-discipline but mere impatience with waiting ages for download times. Now i'm not limited by that, the temptation to spend hours (for example) firing kittens out of cannons is almost impossible to overcome. It dosen't exactly help me get work done (and it's not great for the kittens either!). (By the way though, if you actually want to fire kittens out of cannons then try this link: The Kitten Cannon Game).

It's like that with so many of my supposed virtues, unfortunately. For example, I like to think of myself as an honest person, but in my darker moments I suspect that this is mainly because lying is so much harder work, at least if you want to avoid getting caught out, and requires far more imagination and better memory than telling the truth. I suppose what i'm saying is that sometimes my bad traits are limited more by lack of ability than by moral rectitude.

Hmm, I seem to have moved off the subject slightly. Anyway, the plus side of getting broadband is that it's now no longer a hassle to post photos, so you can expect to see some more being posted up soon. Look out for some tonight.

hi,

Sorry i've been a bit quiet again of late. I've been travelling all over the place in the last few weeks, and i'm in fact off to Glade festival tomorrow morning for a few days.

On my travels last week I took in London, arriving on wednesday to be greeted with the news we'd won the Olympics, and then was about to start celebrating my birthday on thursday when we heard about the bombings. Suffice to say I didn't really think it was appropriate to celebrate after that. Luckily everyone I know escaped unharmed, though several of my friends were understandably shaken by the whole thing. There's not really a lot I can think of to say about it that hasn't already been said by others, so perhaps it's best to leave it at that. My only hope is that the other major issues of the moment e.g. Africa and climate change don't get completely forgotten about in the aftermath of this tragedy.

On a lighter note, i've got loads of photos of the camping trips we've been on recently to Edale. The best of these, plus hopefully some good photos from Glade, will appear on this blog once I get back next week. There's an outside chance that our house broadband connection will be working properly by then - we can but hope.

Also coming up on saturday week is the mass pillow fight, which i've been posting about for a while now. Though i've kept the publicising for this to more-or-less word of mouth, I hope quite a few people will be joining us, though frankly even if its just a handful of us it ought to be pretty good. Whatever the turnout, photos of this will also appear soon.

I managed to get round to sorting out the site feed for this blog the other day (see below). It should work OK but if you find it dosen't then let me know.

hi all,

I've just realised what my biggest problem is. At the risk of seeming particularly self-obsessed, i'm going to tell you all about it. As an excuse I offer the possibility that at least some of the people who read this might have encountered the same problem.

"So, what is this problem?", I hear you cry (actually, I have a feeling that some of you might be crying "enough with the sermonising, we want silly stories and photos of people doing stupid things", but i'm going to pretend for today that you're not).

Well, the problem is basically that I never seem to get round to living for today, for the present moment. To paraphrase Yoda, my favourite source of wisdom "always I look away, my mind on the future; never my mind on where I am, what I am doing". He may be small and look like a garden gnome, but the guy knows.

There are many things I dream of, and hope for. This is not in itself a problem, indeed to have hopes is necessary for anyone to keep going, but not to the extent where they take over. But mine do, and the trouble is that many of my dreams are unrealistic, if not unobtainable. I know i'll never achieve most of them; but it's so tempting to live in them, to craft the perfect imaginary life for myself, that i'm sometimes in danger of missing out on what's happening here and now. When I allow myself to see it, i'm already living a dream really; i'm young(ish), free, i know a lot of wonderful people, i've found a job I love (and the fact that it's not paying the bills has not yet cut into my lifestyle), etc. Life should be more or less blissful. But so often the warm glow of these real treasures is outshone by the glitter of imaginary splendours that might lie ahead, and I set my eyes on the future and miss the present moment. Or I lose myself in nostalgia, looking back to the comfort of the unchanging past.

The truth is though that this moment, Now, is all we really have. The future can change in an instant; it is not ours. And likewise the past is only ours through memory, and to live in memories of yesterday is to turn your back on life. But the ever-moving Now, that is ours. And it contains more than we could ever dream of, and is more valuable than our most cherished memories, for it is real.

Yet I dream, for example, of one day making a success of writing, and maybe being comfortably well-off and respected (i'm just wise enough to prefer that to being rich and famous). So I sit here in my room, trying to tell stories of the long-ago and far-away, while the real glories of summer days roll past my window, unappreciated. And the worst thing is that I might some day get to where I wish to be, make it as a writer, and still be unsatisfied. 'Success' in the way that I hope for is a never-ending path; one can always be more successful in this sense. So I might find myself pursuing this moving destination endlessly and never once look around to see and enjoy where i've got to already.

Of course, having spotted this i'm determined not to do follow that path. But it'll be hard to avoid, sometimes. The world we live in today makes things harder; adverts fill us with dreams, with aspirations of riches, power, popularity, a perfect partner, perfect children, a perfect job, a perfect life... and celebrity culture tempts us to worship those who've already got there, though we know in our hearts that we wouldn't want to be like them, that they are just as unfulfilled and unhappy as the rest of us, if not more so.

I'm not saying that we should forget completely about past and future, of course. We should learn from the past, and we should have plans for the future (while leaving room for those plans to adapt to unexpected changes). But there should always be room to see and appreciate what we have right now.

And on that note, if you'll excuse me, I have to go. There's a summer going on right now outside my window, and I think i'd better go and enjoy it before it passes me by.

hi all,

Yesterday I was on the bus on the way to Aikido, and thinking to myself that nothing noteworthy had happened in the last day or so that I could write a post about.

Very shortly after this a bloke got on the bus who, shall we say, commanded one's attention straight away. He was noticable. It wasn't the long, dirty white beard, the communist t-shirt, or the mad look in his eyes (though obviously they left enough of an impression on me for me to remember them). No, it was more to do with the fact that he was maintaining a continuous monologue at a volume somewhere around shouting level. He was talking about capitalism and G8 and big business and so forth (and i'm fairly sure he was against all of them) At first I thought he was talking on a hands-free mobile, and just being a bit loud, but then I realised that he couldn't be having a conversation after all, or if he was the other person wasn't saying much. The fact that he didn't have an earpiece was also a bit of a clue.

Then, of course, he came and sat down next to me. You know that sinking feeling where you see someone you really don't want to spend the rest of your journey next to, and they start to choose a seat, and despite the fact that there's approximately a million other seats they could go to, you just know it's going to be the one next to you? Well, I got that feeling, and I was right to.

Except of course that I shouldn't have worried really. My initial reaction was one of extreme embarrasment, for some reason. I can only assume that, since this guy was clearly simply unable to feel embarrasment, the huge cloud of potential embarrassment created by all the onlookers was repelled from him and settled around me instead. But after a few seconds, I realised that the embarrassment had no right staying with me as none of this was my doing, and so presumably it either moved on to the rest of the passengers or dispersed harmlessly.

Anyway, I then started thinking, as i'm wont to do on such occasions. What was it that was so remarkable about this guy? He was obviously passionate about his subject (as proved by his renditions of "Do they know it's G8 time at all" which he needlessly explained was based on a certain charity song but with adapted lyrics - the new lyrics were best described as 'interesting'). He had something to say, and he was saying it (see my last post!). The only real difference between him and me was that he seemed to lack the internal censor which stops the everyday person expressing all their thoughts to the outside world. Being myself a person who has in the past had too strong a censor, to the extent that I was always quite shy, I found this hard to imagine. That was until I realised that i'm doing exactly the same as he was, except in written form. Blog or book, both are essentially a way to release your thoughts on an unsuspecting public, just as this guy was doing.

I suppose one way to look at it is that, to the guy himself, his monologue was obviously just his version of conversation. When he had something else to say, for example when buying his bus ticket, he would do so in a perfectly normal way, as if breaking off a conversation momentarily. The only differences were that he clearly did not need anyone to respond to him, and that he was not influenced by the reaction of his audience. Most of us, when conversing, naturally and unconsciously monitor the reaction of other people, and modify what we're going to say accordingly. Sometimes this stops us saying what we want or need to say. This guy said exactly what he wished, and didn't notice or care that the people he was talking to were mostly reacting by looking the other way as if to express that the guy was nothing to do with them.

I could go on, but i'm in danger of turning this blog into a monologue (or should that be mono-blog), when I actually do need the response and reaction of people occasionally, to avoid going insane.

Recently I seem to have had quite a few people say to me that they consider themselves "not creative". This is probably something to do with the fact that i'm self-obsessed enough to start talking about myself and my experiences as a writer with nearly everyone I meet. The most common thing people say to me in response is that they could never imagine themselves doing what i've done; often they explain this with the aforementioned opinion that they're just not creative at all.

I think this is a real shame. Personally I really believe that everyone is creative; it's part of what makes humans who they are. No single person i've ever met has been quite like any other, and a large part of this comes from the fact that every single one has different ideas about the world. All that one needs to be creative is to have something to express, and a means to express it. Everyone, because of their unique perspective, has something original to say if they can find the words, or other medium.

I think there are two main things which hold people back:

• A lack of belief in the value of their own creations. As I said at the start, many people seem to automatically assume that they can't be creative and that compared to other, more talented people, their contributions would be worthless. Now i'm of the opinion (like Edison) that so-called talent arises more or less entirely from having enough interest or fascination for a subject that you can dedicate your thoughts to it. Basically, I think anyone can create something worthwhile if they care enough about it and allow themselves to believe that they can do it.

• Getting stuck in a rut. Most jobs these days seem to be pretty stressful and demand increasing amounts of people's time. But more than that, jobs nowadays seem to demand more mental expediture, to require people to think hard, but in certain fairly narrowly-defined ways, for extended periods. People are forced to be too rational, too considered, and not spontaneous. People are not encouraged to develop their ability to express subconcious as well as concious ideas, something which I find both challenging and absolutely central to creative writing, and which is probably equally essential to any other form of creative process. Nor is the overload of bureaucratic detail which comes with most jobs conducive to keeping a wider perspective on life; it's very easy to lose your sense of the wider scheme of things when you're forced to concentrate on minute details all the time.

Now none of what i've just said is at all original (ironically), but I felt like saying it anyway. By the way, those of you who actually read all this stuff might have noticed a strain of seriousness creeping in to this blog in recent weeks. If you would prefer me to keep things lighter and sillier, you could always drop me a comment. Alternatively, if you actually prefer my somewhat pretentious semi-philosophical ramblings, send a comment to that effect. Basically what i'm saying is that the style of this blog is subject to the democratic process, or would be if anyone actually used their votes. In the absence of any guidance, i'll just write whatever comes into my head at the time. Given the nature of some of my thoughts, even i'm quite scared by this prospect.