Author: francis

I’m beyond tired and very fed up with life at the moment. I’m beginning to realise that freedom and stress are quite closely related. Stress makes you do the things you need to do to get things done. But there is nothing worse than the stress you get when someone else is in charge and you are running to their call.

I am listening to a lot of tapes from the business support team and most of these are recordings of the people who have succeeded in spades building the business. Mostly millionaires who have become free by applying the business pattern. The pattern works and leaves you free. What I can’t understand is why people are so scared of it, there’s nothing to it.

I have been dream building a bit recently. Just thinking about the things I really want to do with my life. Mostly playing with the kids and playing the guitar. One of the messages from the business is that if you want something enough you will do what you have to do to make it happen. Dreams are very powerful motivators, but of course the English find words like dream ever so slightly off key. I have decided that I’m going to the holiday in Florida next year, the ticket is mine, the only thing stopping me is myself.

Others have their dream house, boat, charity. Whatever floats your boat it will float if you want it hard enough.

If anyone reading this wants to dream big email me.

[email protected].

I love working with Unix again. Get a load of this:

for i in `grep -il ‘^#[ ].mine.’ sh`
do
    if grep -lqE ’^[ ].mine.|^mine.’ $i
   then echo $i 
   fi
done

This finds you a file with a line that isn’t a shell script comment but contains the string mine with a full stop at the end of it. If the mine string has a space or a tab in front of it or is at the beginning of a line then print the file name out. I’m using this to identify files that have the hard coded schema mine in them so that I can do a bulk update and put a system id in there:

cat «EOF | ex $i # $i is the file id’d earlier
%s/(mine)./1${DOMAIN_ID}./g
EOF

Just try doing this on an NT system.

Have fun children, there’s loads of other things to talk about but I’m too tired, spent all day at an out of bounds first aid course.

Many years ago I was involved in left wing politics and I remember having a lot of arguments on street corners with people who used to say that there couldn’t be a society where people shared things because greed was human nature. For some reason this came back to be a couple of days ago, probably because I had been reading some stuff about Buddha (The Marvelous Compainion), and I have recently been to the oral transmission of a prayer called The King of Aspiration Prayer (it has other titles too). A great part of this prayer is saying that one will not stop striving to liberate all sentient beings and all of the usual things a bodhisatva has taken an oath to do.

So what then is human nature? The self sacrificing of the christian saints – is this human nature? Having doctors cut you open to feed demons, like Buddha did, is this human nature?

Yes. There are an infinite number of sides to the coin of human nature, kindness and meanness are both there. You should choose kindness, which comes from the root of kin, where you treat everybody like they were your family. All meanness does is hurt you as much as you hurt others.

Personality types

Just did a survey looking at the different kinds of personality, based on Aristotle’s groupings:

Sanguine : Happy go lucky, fun loving

Phlegmatic : Easy going, takes things as they come

Melancholy : Introverted, detail person

Choleric : Control freak, gets things done.

Guess what? My scores weren’t biassed strongly toward any one but I came out sanguine. This was a surprise to me as I see myself as an introvert. Rosie pointed out that I am the one who is the troll for the Billy Goats Gruff under the bed while she reads the story, or the sea monster at the swimming pool.

Weird.

Illness

Had my first cold in nearly a year and have taken a couple of days off, will drive to Nottingham tonight to avoid getting up early. Still not 100% and I have a phone interview tomorrow. Ho hum.

Love to all.

Hello, this document is produced by using a my brand-new ViaVoice software; I hope that it makes sense and doesn’t come out complete rubbish.

Today has been a very difficult day: I’m extremely tired and went to some training on a new piece of software called Dimensions which is a source code control system from Merant ( the originators of PVCS). Though, to be honest, I’m completely bored with all this IT nonsense and would rather have been picking my teeth with a pickaxe or maybe cutting my toenails with a sledgehammer. I found the way that this had been implemented to be very interesting and the tool itself so be pretty useful but I’m so bored with software now I can barely bring myself to be even vaguely interested in it. This isn’t true, of course because I still enjoy writing software but I find that my dreams no longer contain it, at least they don’t contain the kind I’m writing for a living.

After work I went for a wander to PC World in Mansfield, (I have to say that I was very surprised there when ViaVoice managed to understand Mansfield and even capitalised it correctly). I was originally tempted by a book on JBOSS, which looked like it might be of some utility in my EJB project. However, I thought the ViaVoice stuff would be much more useful. In fact I’m enjoying myself immensely talking to my computer and watching everything appear. One of the most amusing things was when it scanned my existing base of documents for words it didn’t understand and it came up with all this swear words from my novels and whatnot, so of course I had to add them in, and record them for posterity so that it would know what they sounded like. This very amusing if a little sad.

I’ve just spent probably 40 minutes working training ViaVoice to understand my voice I was reading excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, some quotations from various sources, including some very cynical ones from George Bernard Shaw. The worrying thing was that when I was doing this one of the people in the next room to me was going in and out and probably heard me reading Alice in Wonderland very clearly into the microphone that came with my copy of ViaVoice which might mean that he or she thinks I’m complete fool. This is not unusual in my experience as in fact being a complete fool something I’m very good at. I no longer worry about these things, because I no longer worry about appearances except inasmuch as it may offend or upset people, or perhaps embarrass my family. I also think that perhaps smelling like a goat wouldn’t be very good idea simply because people wouldn’t talk to you.

Another interesting thing I found is that when I sigh a bit it prints h. I’m not sure about this because I sigh a lot, particularly when I’m tired.

Dharma

I spent at least some of last night reading Gampopa’s The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, which kept me awake until quite late. Had also trying to learn classical Tibetan which is a lot more difficult than it might first appear. The alphabet is phonetic and quite a few of the characters appear almost the same to Western eyes, just very subtly different. This is actually quite interesting; and for once I am doing something which feels reasonably intellectually challenging. I’m not sure how far this will go and I have ordered some books on to better and which may help me with this. I mention this in a previous blog so I’m sorry to be a bit boring about it.

I blew up the Tibetan alphabet and some of the exercises from my book on classical Tibetan in order to make them easy for me to see. I’m definitely beginning to need glasses for close work which is a bit annoying. Quite often now I find have to put my glasses on in order to be able to keep concentrating as my eyes start hurting. I’ve had a headache off and on for several days and think it’s got something to do with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough because I keep getting up at 6 am in order to do my meditation practice. Something has to give but it isn’t going to be the meditation practice so I probably need to start getting to bed a bit earlier.

Yesterday I listened to a very interesting CD: The Strangest Secret which is a recording that a man called Earl Nightingale made back in 1956. The interesting thing his I found an awful lot of parallels with what I’ve come to know of Dharma and Buddhist teachings. You are, in fact, a product of your own mind to a large extent, circumstances are a back drop. Basically if you carry on thinking like a failure you will be a failure, if you get into the habit of thinking like a success you’ll be a success. He recommends putting a goal on a card and reminding yourself of that goal every day when you wake up, and when you go to bed, even when you are doing most things. If you start thinking about your goal all the time and not thinking negatively or like someone who was already been defeated then when the opportunities come you will be able to see them and take advantage of them.

Winbiz

I am slowly making progress talking to people about the business, with any luck Rosie and I will be able to start making real progress in the next few weeks. We have managed to organise child care has for the meeting in Bradford, which means that we will both be able to get the full benefit from it. I have done a small PowerPoint presentation in order to explain things to myself as much as anything else. The standard way of doing the explanation is to use a white board because it is less alienating for the people who may not be technologically savvy.

GRTZ

And making some progress with this story, probably try and use the ViaVoice software to make creating it a bit simpler, although I have been struggling to create his document as am still learning how to use it. I sent the first chapter to Roger, we had a little chat about it but he was very busy, I think the main point he made, which I agree with, is that I explain things too much. For example, the corporation that owns our protagonist is called Big Corp and their burgers are called Big C burgers, which I go on to explain is what people used to call cancer. Instead, it is probably better to take the Douglas Adams’ route and leave things unexplained so that the reader can find them out later and let the writing work on many levels. Of course, I would be being extremely arrogant if I thought my writing was anywhere near as good as his.

I have described the story to a number of people who found it very funny so I reckon I need to abbreviate it more and explain less.

Goodbye, and love to all.

11:50 pm: so much for an early night!

Well, I got paid yesterday, so the bank will get off my back for a while. The consultancy I have CV’d want a phone interview mid Feb so we’ll see what happens there. I’ll have to tone down my apparent arrogance I suppose, but then I have done a lot in my career. I don’t want to leave the team where I am until end of March because it would really damage the work and professionally I can’t leave before then.

After seeing Lama Jampa the other week I was brimming over with confidence and said to the maras (the demons that get in the way), bring it on, and they did! Still functioning OK and managing to work on the things I should be but it’s been hard hard hard. Working on learning classical Tibetan from An Introduction to Classical Tibetan by Stephen Hodge but left the book at home this week. It recommends A Tibetan-English Dictionary: With Sanskrit Synonyms by Sarat Chandra Das and Tibetan English Dictionary of Buddhist Terminology by Tsepak Rigzin which I have ordered from Amazon. This will take the usual 4-6 weeks. Really interesting read in The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols by Robert Beer as well.

I’ve got the first chapter of GRTZ written and you can read it here (right click and save as if you want to print it out). I don’t think it’s funny enough yet but set it to Roger for his opinion.

Have fun, children.

If I thought that I was tired last week this week is worse. I think it started because I was paddling all day on Saturday at Winsford Flash which made me tired and I haven’t managed to get my head back together. My Dharma practice has suffered. Despite being tired last week I had plenty of energy. This week has been a real uphill struggle.

Programming

I thought that the deep copy program was finally buried but it just won’t die! I’ve had it in the coffin, waiting for the cremation, and the damn thing keeps getting up and saying oh, by the way, have you thought of … Last time I buy proper lillies, let me tell you, it can make do with some brown daffodils. Because I was translating the strings using the dbms_xml package it meant that translating single quotes stopped working because it was done before the unescaping of the XML. Then I had a load of problems with PVCS getting the wrong version of the file, then in the middle of testing the server went for a walk up the Khyber Pass to see the faeries. I was fitting this in while going to 2 hours of back to back meetings. What a day! Mind you, yesterday the heating went nuts and we were trying to work in 26 degrees C, oh what fun we had!

By the way, if you want to know how to escape quotes in a string that you want to insert as part of a dynamic sql statement try replace(string, ’’’’, ’’’’’’ ) – trips off the tongue doesn’t it?

I can’t start properly on my next piece of work because deepcopy and other things related to it keep pulling me every which way.

Creative

The first part of Grunts (Bay Sick Training) is being written but it’s not funny enough. I need to put more description in as well. I can see the space station and the people and keep forgetting that the reader can’t. So it goes.

Jobs

Sent the CV into one of the big consultancies but I cocked it up because I put my email in wrong at the very beginning. The CV had some formatting problems where text from a table wasn’t spanning pages (don’t ask me) and I wanted to resubmit it. I couldn’t because it was using the invalid email as an ID and I didn’t have the password but it couldn’t send it to me because it was wrong. Try again tomorrow methinks. Their website insisted on me selecting where I had seen the ad, even when I hadn’t used that particular medium.

Diary

Got the Volvo back but the lens for the reverse light on the back has been knocked off. Lights weren’t working properly either. Allegedly repair place are ordering new lenses but I should have heard from them by now. Hmmm. This made me mega late for the paddle mentioned earlier.

Took the family out for a meal on Saturday. Went to the Orient@l in the Ellesmere Port McArthur Glen (kids’ first choice, Pizza Hut, was full). Very nice oriental buffet, as much as you can eat for about 8 quid plus drinks. I’m definitely becoming a fat bastard, need more exercise and less food.

Then went to Borders, which is open until 10, and had a total frenzy and spent over £100 on books for all the family. I have been reading a graphic novel set called The Authority and they had the next four bound together in a sexy hardback. Was going to be good and not buy it but Rosie said what the hell? So I did.

Got the first book in the Wheel of Time series: The Eye of the World. Well written and an interesting take on the swords and sorcery thing.

Weekdays have been the usual bollocks except I have been working on Grunts when I haven’t been lying awake reading in the middle of the night.

Went to the gym today. No coin for locker, back to car, coin in locker, no shorts, shorts in car but I’d lost interest by then.

Volvo’s engine doesn’t like damp at the moment. Need to get the replacement air pipe fitted. Suspect that this is making it misbehave. It’s fine once it’s hot. We’ll see.

Dharma

A long week, I’m very tired. I went to see Lama Jampa this week, which only took about an hour and a half from where I’m staying but, of course, then I had to drive back. The meeting was very good; he is so wise and I am very lucky to be one of his students. One cannot discuss such meetings in a forum like this but I am carrying on making steady progress and I checked that my new understandings that I gained from his teachings were valid (they are), which is good.

Programming

Managed to finally put my deep copy program to bed.

I was tripped up by the database using one of the newer Oracle types, xmltype, because it doesn’t coerce to a varchar. It is effectively a CLOB with some XML operations tagged onto it. So I couldn’t risk retrieving it into our old friend the varchar, which is limited to 32k. So what to do? I hacked the output string so that there was a tag :xmltype: (I added :clob: as well), then after the first retrieve I pulled the type out and forced the contents of the xmltype where the tag was into my output CLOB after chopping it into bits.

Then I was tripped because I put all of my strings into CDATA tags, but the embedded XML had the closing tags for CDATA so it was still broken; but just in a different place. Oracle 9i has a package dbms_xml which has a method for escaping and unescaping embedded XML so now I have to use it on the xmltype column; for good measure testing uncovered that some other varchar strings have XML in them so I use it on everything that isn’t a number or a date.

Finally, the deep copy utility didn’t have one of the tables in it but this table had a cascade delete from another parent which is in the list so when it arrived at the other end it wouldn’t insert. GAH!

Fair play to Oracle, you can now use the replace function and the append operator on the CLOBS, as long as the thing you are appending is less than 2000 characters. I wish that they would lose this distinguishing between CLOBs and varchars and just have some kind of stream supertype, but hey, that would need some original thought.

Moi brane hrtz.

Creative

I’ve decided to start on a set of Sci Fi short stories, Grunts, which is about some expendable soldiers who live in a corporate bucket ship killing and breaking things for their masters. I’m going to try and make it amusing and post the chapters here as I write them, and use it as an opportunity to take the piss out of the corporate bollocks I’ve had to experience over the last 20 years, but of course some of them will die.

I need something lightweight to keep myself going in the evenings.

I have redone my novel and transferred it into Open Office.

Creche in West Kensington

OK OK lots of things have been going on here… I won a bottle of whisky in the charity raffle at work, which was amazing because I never win anything. Here I am feeling pretty good, my Karma is obviously working well. Then on the way home a truck decided that it wanted to be in the same lane as me. If I hadn’t been in such a heavy car (f-off big Volvo estate) I’d have been knocked into the outside lane and would probably be writing this from hospital. So OK, not good but karma still not too bad. The truck was from Czechoslovakia and I’d been cruising next to him for some miles and must have drifted into his blind spot. The driver was mortified; I hope he doesn’t lose his job. I didn’t manage to report it until the 2^nd of January because I couldn’t be arsed messing about over the winter break. Just a dent in one of the doors and the trim came off, but I’ve got a £250 excess which I may be able to recover. Apparently with foreign vehicles the government appoints an insurer and the process goes as normal with an agency that recovers the cash, so I may even keep my – as yet only to be wished for – no claims bonus.

Creative schtuff

Over the break I managed to re-read my novel and came to the conclusion that it was OK at the beginning but needs to be edited down to something a bit shorter and more coherent. The writing for the closing sections is a bit rushed and lacks élan. The clichés are OK, they help the narrative and that’s what they’re for so fine.

Next job is to redo it into a proper document, because I wrote it on the iMac the file names don’t have .doc extensions on them and my XP system doesn’t know what to do with the files so it’s all a bit weird. Just a boring mechanical job to reconstruct the it in a way a PC can understand. Yada yada yada.

J2EE

I’ve made no progress at all over the last few weeks with my J2EE project. I’m a bit bored with it to tell the truth, it just needs some concentrated effort for a few evenings to get it going, then I can look at the other things I need to do to get it into something coherent.

XMAS kite extravaganza

Here is a photograph of Jon flying a kite; there are more in the library here. We did this on the 25^th and 26^th. It was very good to see everyone and I had some excellent interesting conversations with Roger.

Events

On new year’s day things were marred a little when my neighbour knocked on the door in a panic with her two dogs saying that her house was on fire. It was! I sat her down and waited for the fire brigade. They put the fire out but the upper floors of the house (3 stories like mine) are not habitable until they have been professionally cleaned so they have been staying at our house pro tem. Not sure that we want this for more than a few days but they were in a real state and I will not turn away anyone in need.

Reading

I finished Donna Tart’s The Little Friend. Enjoyed it a lot but wanted to strangle the mother because she had allowed herself to become so stuck that she may as well have been dead and was no use to her remaining children at all, just an absence. I have a theory about people, that they stop growing mentally and get stuck in a tiny little obsessive world where they just don’t see the world around them any more. Like characters in Dickens, who are pictured as say, yellowing teeth, that’s all they are, some kind of sad obsessive cypher with no real life. Just my penneth of whatever mes amis.

Marriage

My nephew got married on the 27^th, I wasn’t invited because of space restrictions and also we haven’t made a particularly good job of keeping up recently, what with my own life being on some sort of perpetual fast forward, so didn’t have enough of a connection. My sister was invited and had some funny-catty things to say about some of the family members on our side (but not David and Jude, who are wonderful people), she loved the ones on their, particularly the women, who were all really kind sweet folk. On our side the best was how one of them always picks the low-fat yoghurt and always complains about the artificial sweetener. My sister waited for the sweetener monologue to start, and it did. See what I mean about getting stuck, mired in trivia and unable to see past the end of your nose and doing the same daft things over and over again? Why not read the label and eat a different one? Ah then, then, my dear, you wouldn’t have anything to complain about and you actually enjoy complaining, don’t you? Just my poor sister doesn’t want to hear it and isn’t afraid of saying so.

Wild speculation and a call to Dharma

It doesn’t matter what you’ve got it’s always tainted by something, Buddha pointed this out over two thousand years ago, but people never stop complaining about nothing, basically. Walking their comfortable ruts endlessly deeper and then they get reincarnated and do it all over again. Lift your head from the comfy stone you’ve been banging it against since the dawn of time and look up, look somewhere else. This is why I crave for enlightenment, the lightness of being, the flawless essence, it has to be better than being buried under the trammels of artificial sweetener monologues. This is why I do all of this meditation at 6 a.m. and other hard stuff, because I just don’t want the rubbish of every day life any more, it’s shite and it tastes horrible. You can come too, let’s all go. OK, I’ll send you a post card, but only if you look up for a little while.

Thing is, it was there all the time, but none of us can see it.

Dharma

At the end of December I went to four days teaching on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. We covered the last few sections and I finally understood one of the fundamental teachings on emptiness; you can’t say that things exist in ultimate reality (eternalism, from which comes god and the whole shooting match – but you do have compassion), neither can you say that they don’t exist (nihilism, where there is no cause and effect, so why be compassionate or do anything other than play with your genitals all day?). It lies in Buddha’s famous middle way, between these two extremes. What I hadn’t got was that saying things don’t exist makes them exist in a kind of negative way, you have to give them enough existence to say they aren’t there. I can see it in my mind better than I can put it with words, but then it is indescribable. This is also what the Japanese Zen teachings about the gateless gate and so on hint at. In fact I see a unity between the Zen teachings and the Tibetan ones; the Zen koans etc. are a different way of getting to the same underlying truth. Well, as Ade said, of course they are: they all come from the Buddha ultimately! If you aren’t a practitioner this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense so don’t worry about it.

I’ve decided to go to Lama Jampa’s Easter teachings in Switzerland. Need to hassle round about a hotel for the return leg because I can’t get to the airport in time, booked the flights without a problem, using up some of my air miles. Found a hotel but their computer system wasn’t working properly and they didn’t ring me back today. Bleedin’ typical.

Taxing

The tax man thinks I owe him money because the figures on my tax return indicate that I should have paid more tax in 2003. Also, I applied for the child credit, which they paid to me and now want to claw back but haven’t bothered writing to me to explain why. They wrote to me about the debt and then said they would explain in another letter but in fact just send a paying in slip, the cheeky persons! It may be that Adis payroll was cocked up so I underpaid my tax, what an interesting surprise, fancy that! Ah well, will check out the return and make sure that I haven’t transposed some digits or such like, and maybe write to Adis and ask them to clarify, assuming they are close enough to the land of clarification to at least see it without a telescope (bitter, moi?).

Darwin

Currently reading a massive biography of Darwin by Desmond and Moore which found its way on to my bookshelf via Helen giving me a load of books she didn’t want in a carrier bag. It puts him in his historical context; I didn’t realise what a different world the 19^th century was. I thought turbulence and revolution was all Cromwell and so on, but there was a lot of row then as well, people dressing up as clerics and giving anti-christian sermons and all sorts. One man called himself the Devil’s chaplain, the Rev. Robert Taylor (yes he had taken holy orders and ended up in prison). Basically the toiling masses hated the Anglican church and the 50-odd year rule by the Tories but were led by a different branch of the establishment who managed to head them off (yeah, I know, I voted Labour to get rid of the self-serving Tory bastards as well, and now look at it; more taxes and only minor improvement – nothing changes does it?). As an ex-marxist I should have known about this but ole’ Charlie M, he tends to talk about France and Germany more than England, which I suspect was because he didn’t want to be deported back to Germany and executed for calling for the death of the Kaiser, which is fair enough I suppose.

Darwin had a great fear of being the Devil’s chaplain by proxy because of his ideas, he was trained as a clergyman because he didn’t want to follow his father into medicine but his life took a different path. In his late teens he formed an attachment to one of his cousins. I remember thinking to myself that in these times they’d have been screwing like rabbits (and no-one would care, either) but of course in those days they just wrote each other passionate letters. It’s very difficult to see what the world was like then, no contraception, virginity having some meaning, a kind of sweet innocence (which of course isn’t always sweet but you know what I mean).

The Cambridge proctors (part of the University, not real police) would arrest women walking on their own, label them street walkers, and throw them in prison without anyone being able to do anything about it – can you imagine that now? I can’t. I can’t see how they got away with it without being beaten up, there weren’t that many of them. Yet there was this delicious tide of anger, which has been translated into the modern tabloid nose thumbing and name calling, and we all follow the tedious authority of talentless, gibbering, witless nobodies like little lambs, ah bless us all. The church was so powerful as well, unbelievably so, I would probably have been imprisoned for professing my Buddhist beliefs, and I am precisely nobody important. So what happened to this world where things could change? Someone built a Sainsbury’s car park on it and we all went shopping for shite we don’t need in order to fill the howling vacuum of our nothing lives. Actually, I don’t think it’s that bad, we could be living in Iraq or the Horn of Africa, but then maybe there would be something to complain about.

Escape from working for someone else

At the weekend I went to a business seminar where I can see a way out. You need to persuade others that they can do it too, to build a team reaching out and change your buying habits. It’s hard because people tend to listen to others telling them that they can’t succeed, rather than the ones who have succeeded. If anyone’s interested contact me.

Envoi

Enough wool gathering. This has taken me 3 hours to write.

Blessings all, and a happy new year.

Having fun on christmas day. Very tired. Kids liked their presents, which was good. Nine of us for dinner, which is also good. Not seen Roger for ages and enjoying the crack immensely.

Saw my former colleagues for lunch on Tuesday. It’s funny how you miss people. I really like all of them and enjoyed working with them. It’s a shame that the company is run by people who lack vision, because the staff are all very good. Got talking to some other bods who have read the part of my blog where I describe being made redundant, apparently it’s very funny to read and if you put ineffectual unshaven geek into google my blog pops up top. Bizarre. Apparently the person concerned has started shaving. (I may have mentioned this before, sorry)

I finished The Little Friend. Very good book, although you do find yourself wanting to shake the mother, who has got herself stuck in a world where she’d be better off dead, and tell her to wake up and get on with it. It’s true to life though, I have seen people have some bad trauma and forget everyone and everything else but their own grief. Grief isn’t trivial, it’s burned be enough in my life, but you have to put it down after a while, or at least take notice of the living.

I’ve had a few drinks this time, when I haven’t for a while. Not feeling too may after effects as long as I remember to drink plenty of water.

Lama Jampa is teaching between now and new year, really looking forward to it…

Love to all

This blog comes to you from the car park of PC World in Mansfield. They have a Wifi hotspot and I’m a BT Openzone subscriber so off we go… (well nearly, the signal isn’t good enough, it’s OK in the shop).

Work

I’ve been buried under work recently unit testing my deepcopy utility and the surrounding code and not had much time to work on my other projects. I have joined a gym and was quite surprised at how a half hour can do your head in when you haven’t done any serious exercise for a while. It’s the Bannana gym in Hucknall and I really like it; the equipment is new and the induction was very good.

Boating

Paddled at Holme Pierpoint recently and really enjoyed it. I’ve still not got the bottle to play in the really big stuff after my experiences of swimming but I’m sure that I can master that. For once things look easier from the bank, I watched some guys playing in it and it seems that you keep the kayak in the pillow of white water. I was going to paddle today but I’ve managed to hurt the knuckle on my left hand and the old ankles and knees are hurting so wisdom dictates a night in playing with my laptop. Fridays are long days at the moment so have to be careful and make sure I have the energy to get home.

Schtuff

Went to the Mansfield McArthur Glen; not that different from the one in Ellesmere port, except it’s a quarter of the size. Trying to get hold of some elbow protectors because my left elbow has become sensitive and I don’t want a chronic injury. I fell on it over a year ago ice skating and keep having problems with it, particularly when I try to lever myself up and put weight on it. Time to go see the doc methinks.

Look like a dosser at the moment, in bad need of a haircut. Maybe I should buy some raffia and make it into a feature…

Annoying

One of the kids at the canoe club didn’t get to paddle ‘cos he didn’t leave a ‘phone number for us to ring back on and his dad wants to write to the committee and formally complain. I am a volunteer, I don’t get paid, we were distracted before we could look up his phone number and his father rang back in the evening when we were out until 10 pm. These things happen, that’s life, no-one wanted to upset anyone. If he wants to complain he can go elsewhere; I have spent considerable amounts of my own time and money getting the coaching qualifications and love sharing the sport with other people but I’m not a public convenience. I also got this kid through his 3* award (on I think the 3^rd attempt, 1^st with me) and don’t remember getting a thank you. Not pleased at all. Yeah, I know that Buddhists are supposed to take such things as part of their spiritual training, but I never said I was perfect. I believe that the going rate for a Level 3 coach is about £250 a day…

Reading

I’ve realised that I very seldom talk about what I’ve been reading, even though I read constantly. So, for the record I’ve recently re-read Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy and the Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I think Pullman owes a great debt to Le Guin but didn’t realise it until I started writing about it just now. My sister doesn’t like Pullman’s ending, the crossed lovers remembering each other in the garden, but I think it’s OK (don’t worry I haven’t spoilt it for you, this is a minor part of the story). Both trilogies are masterpieces in their own right, well written and difficult to put down. I’m trying to read Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend but it begins with the death of a child and I’m having trouble getting past the beginning. I have recently been reading The Guardian a lot because my B&B’s tellies don’t have teletext so I buy a paper for the TV listings. There are a lot of features about Guantanamo bay and Israel which make me very sad. I don’t get angry about these things any more. I dedicate my dharma practice to these suffering people (amongst others – friends and relatives) but I don’t take sides.

My spiritual studies have been on Gampopa’s The Jewel Ornament of Liberation (which you should read with a qualified lama helping you – it’s a very deep book) and Karma Thinley Rinpoche’s The History of the Sixteen Karmapas of Tibet. Both books are worth reading if you are following the path, a non-practitioner won’t get most of it. The dharma teachings are self-revealing and if you aren’t ready they won’t register with you; but they aren’t for dabbling if they do. You could get yourself very confused and upset without proper guidance.

For a fun light read I recommend the Erwin Colfer Artemis Fowl series. Again very well written.

Meditation

Trying to meditate every day, which involves getting up at 6 am. I manage to get half an hour in, doing a thousand mantras. So I’m making progress on my target. This probably seems totally nuts to non-practitioners but it works for me and has cured me of my depression. I think this alone makes it worthwhile. I can feel myself becoming more open than I used to be; I even look people in the eye these days instead of hiding from them.

The road

Being on the road is crap. I’m missing Jon’s Cub scout christmas thing, where he’s reciting some stuff at the church service and Deb is performing at a concert next week.

The Soham Murder Trial

I’ve been half following this and part of me wants to believe Huntley’s tale that it was all an accident, but if it was he’s far too dangerous and stupid to be let out without constant supervision. I pray that the girls didn’t suffer and I pray for everyone involved in it. I feel very sorry for the girls’ parents having to live through what their children suffered over and over again, not helped by the media frenzy. I would like Huntley to be found guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility because then he’ll be permanently in a secure unit, which is the best place for him.