The Saturday Guardian gave me a good hint. There was an insert from Concern - and it suggested giving a Christmas present to someone on the planet who needs it, rather than some bit of tat for people who have everything (most of the people that I know in the West).

This solves my puzzle of previous years, where (if I don't want to play at Christmas because I am not a Christian) I am accused of being a party-pooper, killjoy, scrooge, skinflint, etc. Even the nicest people sulk if I won't play - even when I say it's because I earn the same money in December as in June, so why should I spend more?

So, if I have to spend money, and 'it's the thought that counts' - then I am going to take that bit of silly money and buy a couple of goats, a bag of maize and some pens and paper for the kids. Concern send you a card to let your friends know where the money for 'their' gift went. Best of both worlds, I think.

It seems like a good idea. Why not try it? If you were going to buy me something, why not do this instead?

If I am tempted or pressured into spending in the next few weeks, I'll just log on and buy another goat (£25 - who knew they were so cheap?)

And if you are one of those people who like flashing the cash at Xmas, why not spend £250 on a water pump for a village?

It was truly excellent to hear from Mr Jules - The Last Leopard from Wales - check out his site if you need an all-round entertainer - who gave me a 'heads up' on a fresh link for juggling information (a link I've added to my reference page now).

Hi Jules!

I was going to answer your message in the Guest Book, but I answered Nicole first, and then the guest book said I could only post once a day! I knew I should have done a combined greeting message.... hey ho

Check out Space Hijackers, the anarchitects. I was especially amused by their disclaimer.

HAPPY BUY NOTHING DAY!

First thing I realised was that I normally buy The Guardian on a Saturday, just for the week's summary (although few of us read it) and the small and convenient tv guide (far more important). I was going to wait until Sunday, and buy a different paper, but Julie likes her Guardian Guide, and is not a 'true believer' in Buy Nothing Day, so she is getting it this week.

It took a little longer to make a flask of coffee to take to work, with a sandwich and an apple.

I am not rigid about stuff like this - it's only trying to raise my own awareness. I do not consider myself a hypocrite if I find there is something I have to buy today. To some extent it is just sorting out shopping into essentials, convenience, nice to have, not strictly necessary and completely self-indulgent. Or some such.

People give up smoking more easily than they would give up shopping.....

I liked this page about Not Cricket's tea stall last year

One of my games in the library (similar to approaching the World Wide Web) is to find myself, my family and friends in the database.

It was easy finding my dad's "Dictionary of Puppetry" - it was out in The Stacks with the out-of-date (or valuable) books.
"Puppeteers wishing to better understand of the techniques of puppetry construction and production will find many questions answered here. Philpott covers the field from puppet performances of Mozart's opera Abduction from the Seraglio through a Polish production of Zwyrtala the Musician. Extremely readable; useful to all puppeteers."

Then I found my friend Mick Swain. He was on the last page of "Coincidence" by Brian Inglis (having corresponded with Mr Inglis), and also in the Social Inventions compilation - regarding 'using a diary as a logbook to steer yourself through life'.

I found Caroline Noh in a book about Moving Being (a Cardiff Arts Group).

Today I found myself, in a book about Bruce McLean the sculptor/artist, from when I was part of a Performance Art piece of his (with music by Michael Nyman) in the Riverside Studios in 1979. I won't elaborate here. It's still an amusing pastime.

Blogger seems to be acting a bit strangely. Unless it is just when looking at it from work (inside the library I am behind a Council Firewall).

I noticed that the links I put into the last post, about the Bucky Fuller Institute, go to a Page Not Found - and then when I refresh they go back to the home page. They don't do that when I access the site from home.

hmmmm.

So if these links don't work for you, let me know (perhaps through the Guest Book at the bottom of my Home Page, or email).

Thanks.

A bit weary today.

Some friends make Monday night a film night (at home). They have been watching Pasolini, and that sort of 60s/70s European films. I took them Les Enfants du Paradis (one of my top ten EVER films) and we got through it, all 3 hours and 8 minutes of it.

Pretty good going when you have to read sub-titles if you don't speak French well.

The problem was I took a couple of bottles of wine, and my French drinking companion was on antibiotics, so he wasn't drinking, and the others all seemed to be on beer, so I ploughed through them both! Oh dear.

Well, I knew I had a day off yesterday, to let in the chimney sweep, so it was OK. I even lit a fire for the first time this year.

Today I have a half-day (this is new) because I will be working 4 hours on Sunday, when the library will be open (experimentally).

And (for those of you elsewhere on the planet), it has started SERIOUSLY raining now.

Other people throw a Christmas/New Year party to help with the winter blues. It's just unfortunate that I find all that jollity and spending money we haven't yet earned on things we didn't really need contributes to my down mood. Hey ho.

Still. Battle on. I watched RAWs Maybe Logic again yesterday, and it rejuvenates my optimism. And today the Bucky Fuller Institute sent me my Crewmember of Spaceship Earth T-Shirt to go with my map. So it's not all glum, honest!

Just a plug for a great book.

I just finished Duende - a journey in search of Flamenco" by Jason Webster.


I leave you to find out what Duende is for you.

This is beautifully written (in passing) but is a record of an adventure among the 'low life' in Spain, in search of the passion that the English lack. Jason went and learned guitar, and had crazy adventures, and has recorded it so well.

My own adventures with the Gypsies in Spain is something I never wrote down yet. I didn't do the music, but somehow my mixture of fairground and circus made me acceptable for a while. I know I am kidding myself, as I may have just been popular because I had a bit of film money, and was farily open-handed with it (in search of a party). I would call it mutual exploitation and mutual respect, and leave it at that.

I'll stick a couple of photos up (the only tangible souvenir I have). Great times!

Meanwhile - congratulations to Jason for catching the ambiguity of the journey.

Great book, man.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KEILI!

He's getting his website together, and all you have to remember is keiliolsen.tk [or if you insist, www.keiliolsen.tk] or (come on now!) http://www.keiliolsen.tk

PS: yesterday I got the pop up casino, and then it settled down to the chosen tk banner. I have asked their Help Desk why, but, I don't really know.

I ended up pasting the banner into my front page....Now I have both. Ho hum.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO ANYONE WHO EMAILS ME:

My Norton Security has been (apparently) deleting emails - whether incoming or outgoing it seems hard to say. There is no clue. I am not alone. They reckon they fixed it on November 8th, but I have reinstalled twice, and run Live Update, and it still happens. I hope it really was Spam that got deleted, but if you have emailed me and had no response, then PLEASE send it again...

"A serious bug within Norton Internet Security 2003 is responsible for the unexplained deletion of emails for some users.

Symantec is aware of the problem with the latest version of its security suite and is working on a fix. It promises to deliver a patch through its LiveUpdate automatic updating facility this week. The company has downplayed the significance of the problem by saying it affects a small number of people."

So if you have sent me anything important in the last few days, and NOT had a reply, could you resend it? Thanks.

On a slight tangent - my life as a street performer, and circus worker, allied me to travellers and gypsies. I experienced the same ambiguous reaction of fascination and repulsion. "It must be an interesting way to live" was balanced by accusations of irresponsibility. And then again, people would accuse me of romanticising them - even when I told them my dad had pushed a puppet-show around the UK in the 30s. OK, then he was the romantic fantasist.....

Being a dropout upset my mother and her aspirations to an academic and respectable career for me. A few people would always respond to my busking with the 'get a proper job' attitude they had for 'beggars'. It always helped a bit to be white, well-spoken and intelligent (that used to throw them) but they would then just act suspicious as to what terrible thing I was running away from, that I would have 'given up my privilege'.

No good telling them that I loathed everything they stood for - that my intelligence was not going to be sold into being used to run an empire, or promote capitalism, etc.
Nowadays my alignment with 'aliens' and outsiders is seen as a reflection of my position on the spectrum of autism ' Asperger's Syndrome'. I used to think it was just to do with being Introverted and Intelligent - but there are fashions in diagnosis - and a stupid and prejudiced population will always seem scary to the likes of me. Just as I scare them. In England you are supposed to be modest (unlike in The States) so it seems arrogant to claim intelligence - but I can't help it. In Test The Nation I got a higher score than anyone in the studio, and a point higher than the best online participant. Whatever that means. But I know I am smart. A long way from the top of smart, of course - and socially maladapted, and so unable to end up in a university with a sheltered role as 'absent-minded professor' or 'spacy mathematician'.

Clever people feeling weird is not uncommon in a culture that still believes in god (for instance) - such pervasive stupidity scares me badly. And the apparent arrogance of such a statement alienates me from sympathy (that's why the Aspie diagnosis rings bells). Blunt talk and a lack of social skills (what I would mostly call hypocrisy - lying to oneself and others).

So anyway, I am reading a fascinating new book on 'Duende' (the spirit of flamenco) so my eyes turned to the gypsies again. Locally they are upsetting to the settled community of Cardiff, as ever. They are getting all muddled in with the British fear of 'refugees' and 'immigrants', of course.

Going to look for a book in the Social Studies section [In search of the true gypsy : from enlightenment to final solution] which had this synopsis:

"The reader of European history looking for information on gypsies will only find them in footnotes. It has only been recognized tardily and with reluctance that during World War II hundreds of thousands if itinerants met the same horrendous fate as Jews and other victims of Nazism. Gypsies appear to appeal to the imagination simply as social outcasts and scapegoats or, in a flattering but no more illuminating light, as romantic outsiders. The world is patently intrigued by them, yet at the same time regards them with anxiety as "undesirable aliens". Where does such ambivalence come from? What ideas are involved under the surface of these mixed feelings? In this study, contemporary notions about gypsies are traced back as far as possible to their roots, in an attempt to lay bare why stigmatization of gypsies, or rather groups labelled as such, has continued from the distant past. "

I researched and wrote an article on these themes, for a juggling magazine, and I recently found the first, long draft of that article, which had a lot of material which I ruthlessly pruned. I may put the original version up at some point (now the OCR is working).

"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth ever invented."

I am sad to say our library isn't well stocked in some of my favourite writers - but then again - they were (still are) fairly dangerous. I have thrown in a few quotes from Henry Miller because so few people realise what a joyous and liberating writer he can be - it's a shame that this library only has a bit of 'porn' churned out to be able to eat - and not even the books which defend and explain that phase of his life. His enthusiasm, mysticism, literary criticism, etc are mostly unrepresented. And my own collection got trashed - or rather hijacked - (along with the rest of my library) back in 1994. Hey ho.

For completely different reasons I love William Burroughs - and (again) he isn't well represented here. Try this interview with J.G.Ballard about Burroughs.

"I am just having a good time.

And, I think this is a very important part of life–that people learn how to play, and that they make life a game, rather than a struggle for goals,

don't you know."


--Henry Miller

Why then do we not give ourselves -- recklessly, abundantly, completely?
If we realized we were part of an endless process, that we had neither to lose or to gain, but only to live it out, would we behave as we do?

--Henry Miller

Always Merry and Bright

And if you have managed to get past thinking Mr Miller was just a pornographer (or whatever your misapprehension) why not support the memorial library people and all the artists they encourage. Look here...

"What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me".
--Henry Miller

It's not easy to keep your spirits up when you're out on the street (or living without credit), but it can be done.

My role model was Henry Miller, dropped out in Paris and determined to be a writer even if he starved, or had to lose face and scrounge his meals. He starts Tropic of Cancer (a record of that period of his life) with this jaunty, cheeky, nonchalant phrase:

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

My son emailed me the other day. He's another cash economy person - and reminded me that when he runs out of money he is just 'skint' (Back to Zero) whereas most of the 'richer' people around us owe thousands of pounds/dollars. Looked at the other way up we are thousands of pounds/dollars 'richer'.

It doesn't show when we are out on the street and people are living in luxury, it only shows when the income fails - and credit living people find that they not only owe more than they can pay, but the interest ticks up every day (I thought of it as like having a taxi parked outside your house with the meter running...and the driver sitting there with his feet up reading the paper).

I remember Tony Allen had a line like that - which I can only paraphrase "I heard one day that Robert Maxwell owed three billion pounds. I had nothing. Then I realised that that made me three billion pounds RICHER than Robert Maxwell - that really put a spring in my step."

I am not making this up. I found the following here:

"Members who are overextended already and are just making their minimum payments from month to month will have a hard time paying another bill. Believe it or not, some consumers think obtaining more credit is the equivalent to increasing their income. Rather than correcting the problem, the additional credit increases their borrowing costs and only delays the inevitable."

Ain't that a chilling phrase......

Go Bob - he's starting his European tour, but I am not going to catch him this time, I don't think....but I can't wait till I see him again. He does love songs like no one else (except the Blues) - with all the real bitter twists and ups and downs - not just the simple 'lerv' songs of pop. I am a lot happier than I was this time last year (for those who follow the story), so I sing along with these lyrics with glee now (air drumming) but last year it all felt too true....

I'm your man, I'm tryin' to recover the sweet love that we knew
You understand that my heart can't go on beatin' without you
Well your loveliness has wounded me
I'm reelin' from the blow
I wish I knew what it was that keeps me lovin' you so
I'm breathin' hard, standin' at the gate
Ah, but I don't know how much longer I can wait.

Skies are gray
I'm lookin' for anything that will bring a happy glow
Night or day, it doesn't matter where I go anymore, I just go
If I ever saw you comin' I don't know what I might do
I'd like to think I could control myself but it isn't true
That's how it is when things disintegrate
And I don't know how much longer I can wait.

I'm doomed to love you
I've been rollin' through stormy weather
I'm thinkin' of you
And all the places we could roam together.

Got a real puzzle as streaming video isn't working on here, and I can't work out why. So I stick Bob on for a while (live tracks from an obscure CD I got in Belgium) - he ain't popular in my house, but I love those words, you see (and the bands he gets behind him) - so I rave in the back room on my own...hey ho

Well I don't dare close my eyes and I don't dare wink
Maybe in the next life I'll be able to hear myself think
Feel like talking to somebody but I just don't know who
Well, I'm tryin' to get closer but I'm still a million miles from you

The last thing you said before you hit the street
"Gonna find me a janitor to sweep me off my feet"
I said, "That's all right mama.... you..... you do what you gotta do"
Well, I'm tryin' to get closer; I'm still a million miles from you

Had a lovely moment yesterday. We went to a Superstore to get wild bird seed, and stuff, for our sparrows (we have a cluster of sparrows living in the holly tree in the garden) - who we like to feed in the winter months.

Julie mentioned seeing a Robin in the garden, so I said we should try to encourage it, and as they are a bit carnivorous I was looking at the special birdmix which had insects in it, also a little Robin nesting box, etc.

Over Julie's shoulder I saw a flurry of wings. Now sometimes you get birds in the garden sections of big stores....but this was a Robin! It landed a few feet from us, and nibbled at a little pile of seeds some staff member must have put out. Then it flew a little closer, and sang to us. All this in a noisy, crowded Sunday shopping superstore under fluorescent lights! I was so sorry I didn't have my camera...

It was such a great synchronous moment that we HAD to buy all the robin stuff, of course. Best salesperson in the building.

It's been a year for Robins. One cheekily approached me when Judith and I were looking around a castle in Somerset with Bill and Thomas - and Julie and I saw another by the path when we went to West Wales.

And after I put out the seeds and fat balls I saw a blue tit. More garden news as time passes.