Growing Up

When I was nine we were studying religious education at school. Our teacher, Mr. Roberts, explained to us that on the Sabbath, Jews aren't allowed to use electricity. I immediately asked Mr. Roberts how Jewish people coped with not being able to flush their toilets on the Sabbath. I was convinced, you see, that toilets were electric. After a brief word from Mr. Roberts about shouting out in class (sadly neither my first nor my last warning in my fourteen years of schooling), it was explained that toilets were not run off electricity. I accepted this with the red-faced shame of a nine-year-old who had made a fool of himself in class and didn't mention this story to this day. The reason why I bring it up now? Because aged, twenty-three, and with a full fourteen years of academic and social education between now and then, I still don't know how toilets work. I can understand that the flush and the ballcock (the nine-year-old in me seriously loves that name) all contribute to pouring water into the bowl, but after that I am lost. Really lost.

I am twenty-three. I am a fully emancipated adult. I can get married and have children, or one, or neither. I can see the (next) world thanks to the army. Yet I have no idea of how a toilet works. Now, I am not a technically-minded person, so there are large gaps in my knowledge when it comes to a variety of things (see text messages below), and generally this leaves me with a sense of wonder and enjoyment. However, not knowing how toilets work means in this respect I have not advanced further than my nine-year-old self.

I am firmly of the (un-unique) opinion, that 'growing up' is a process of learning how much you don't know. This means that the transition from adolescence to adulthood is one marked by a growing sense of fear at the world. Two of my best friends in the entire world are training to be doctors. It is impossible to feel fully confident in the ability of doctors when you have seen a trainee surgeon being sick on the back of a taxi driver's head. However, this blog is not called 'reasons to be really afraid', because that's NOT fun, and also there are many blogs of that type out there.

Instead, this naivety and fear of the world has a positive manifestation. You see, everytime we, as burgeoning adults, achieve something that makes us feel as if we belong in the world of the grown ups, we take a huge, disproportionate amount of pride. I will never forget the sense of immense enjoyment I gained from changing my car tyre on my own. Just today I emptied the bag on a hoover. It was easy. Yet I got a swell of enormous, ridiculous smugness as I did something that adults do everyday. Chris Rock, in a somewhat controversial bit of standup, makes a distinction between 'black people' and 'niggers', by saying that 'niggers', always expect credit for things that they're supposed to do.

Well, I am not about to wade into this debate with the subtlety of an ageing half-Italian lothario at a ladies' night, but what I will say is that this is very much the process of growing up, at least for me. You see, growing up as a process is a win-win situation, because you always feel as if you should get credit for things you are supposed, or indeed have to do. The pride that comes from fixing your own bike, eating five portions of vegetables a day, from talking to a bank clerk about overdrafts is irrational, yes. But it is real. And we, as a group approaching gingerly the crazy world of adulthood, get to experience it every day. The world of mortgages and children is (for most) a reality, but for us it is the deep end of a pool we are learning doggy paddle in. Whilst we swim slow widths of the shallows, we gain an immense sense of pride and enjoyment. And that, at least for now, is a reason to be cheerful.

Overlooked things

It often seems as if lists/compilations are a lazy means of producing content. However, since many of the things that I consider to be worthy of cheer are disparate and small, they would not warrant a place in a whole post of their own. Also, since I actually enjoy a random accumulation of information, this may perhaps be the perfect format for this post. However, rather than just create a generic list (100 greatest films, top 10 songs of all time etc.) I decided to attempt five lists, each of which covers something which is often overlooked, which doesn't deserve to be. Consider this therefore to be a chronicle of the underrated. Enjoy!

List One: Overlooked songs from the 1980s

i) Q Lazzarus - Goodbye horses
ii) Talking Heads - Once in a lifetime
iii) The Cure - Close to Me
iv) Kraftwerk - The Model
v) Cameo - Word Up

List Two: Shakespeare lines which should be used more in everday life

i) "She would serve after a long journey at sea." (Lysimachus, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
ii) "Men are April when they woo, December when they wed." (Rosalind "As you like it")
iii) "Your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs" (Iago "Othello")
iv) "You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face" (Albany "King Lear")
v) "Hang you whoreson, insolent noise-maker" (Antonio "The Tempest")

List Three: Great names in history

i) Edmund Crouchback, Count of Champagne and Brie (1245 - 1296)
ii) The Diet of Worms (1521)
iii) The Battle of Rain (1632)
iv) William Wildman Shute Barrington (1717 - 1793)
v) The Brown Dog Riots (1907)

List Four: Songs from the Golden Age of Rap

i) Warren G - Regulate
ii) Grandmaster Flash - White Lines
iii) Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's delight
iv) Grandmaster Flash - The Message
v) Run DMC - Tricky

List Five: People who you need to Wikipedia right now

i) Eric Gill
ii) Gyles Brandreth
iii) William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck (5th Duke of Portland)
iv) Thomas Midgley Junior
v) H'Angus

Textual Intercourse

Sometimes we are blinded by the ubiquity of something to its actual greatness. This means that in our day-to-day life, you and I overlook many reasons to be cheerful. I have been able to appreciate this on a sort of meta level in writing on this theme. The TV show 'Room 101' involved celebrities listing items they hated which were then banished to the eponymous 'Room 101', or not, depending on the arbitration of the host. One of the initial questions on 'Room 101' usually concerned how easy it was for the celeb. to come up with things they hated. The response was normally that it was hard at first, but once you began to notice things that irked you, a deluge of minor annoyances suddenly became apparent in your daily existence. A smorgasbord of pique.

Well for me, the reverse is true (I was here intending to come up with some witty reversal of Room 101, but the stupid numbers are palindromic). In writing this, I have opened up my brainbox to a myriad of pleasant surprises, enjoyable realisations and delight. The subject of this post is one of those. It beeped and vibrated its way into my consciousness this very morning.

Text messaging.

Text messaging is very rarely referenced in our culture, aside from snotty pieces about how text speak is ruining our language. Do excuse my coarseness, but that is bullshit. In the 'olden days' before computers, people used to write in shorthand (often, in fact, these very same curmudgeonly journalists), and their brains weren't reduced to an irredeemable mush, and society hasn't caved in on itself. Also, text messaging has made instant communication avaliable to all, regardless of age, wealth etc. Mass-communication means people become more comfortable and ultimately more confident with language and rhetoric. And that's generally regarded as a good thing.

Also, let's not forget the brilliance of the process of sending and receiving a text. Firstly, whoever invented a means of enabling a twenty-six letter alphabet to be compacted onto nine keys is a bloody genius. What else can that guy do? How efficient must his day-to-day life be?! Secondly, never, ever forget when you press 'send', a text message becomes bits of electricity that wirelessly fly to space. Wirelessly. To space. When they get to space, they bounce off the satellite which is somehow exactly in the right place. They then somehow know where the intended recipient is, and put the information in their phone, even if it is hidden in your pocket or at the bottom of a really full bag. This takes less than five seconds. If you're underground, or somewhere without signal, don't fret, your message will just chillout somewhere in the ether until you're good and ready to receive it.

Now tell me text messaging is not brilliant.

Such is the brilliance of text messaging that it has pervaded totally our society. Now all horror/ thriller films have to write in a reason why the hero and heroin in peril can't text for help. "Oh shit Bobby-Joe, my battery just died." "Oh Peggy-Sue, I told ya ta charge it last night at the motel. Now let's just run around in those woods where all those people were murdered."

[As a fun side bit of cheerfulness, imagine all the films/plays/books that would have fundamentally different plots if they had access to text messages. "Jesus, gt out of the Grdn f Gthsmne, Judas n th Phrisees r comin 2 arrst u."]

Ultimately, text messages are most pleasing at a human level. By condensing conversation into 160 characters, it enables a soupcon, a vignette of information, at its most bullshit-free level to be sent. If you want to got to the cinema with a mate, you send "Fancy going to the cinema tonight mate?". It forces humans to connect with what words are, to deploy them strategically as a valuable commodity. It was said of Pitt the Younger that his rhetoric was the greatest of all time, because as a child he was forced to read aloud Greek or Latin works in English, translating as he spoke. Debating opponents claimed that he was always able to select the right word. This is a skill that also comes from text messaging, something that we should encourage. Rather than forshadowing the decline of our society, it just may be a signal of better things to come.

And that, my m8s, is why I think that text messaging is a rsn 2 b chrfl.

On dreams

There seems to exist a general consensus that when people say "I had the wierdest dream last night", this is the prelude to one of the most boring conversations you can have. I'm not convinced we've really thought that through. I reckon that 'dream stories are boring' is accepted simply because it's accepted. Because, if you look at the facts, they are pretty bloody amazing.

Now perhaps people are turned off by dream stories because they are imaginary. Do those same people not like literature, poetry or films? Because that sounds a little bit like autism, which is generally regarded as being somewhat of an affliction (especially when you realise that autistics can't count cards like Rainman). Dreams are some of the most beautifully abstract things that our mind produced. Dreams are like stories made up by the lovechild of Terry Gilliam and a pretentious French avant-garde director who has taken LSD and then tried to make a film that's quite 'out-there'. And all this for free is pumped into the old brain box every night. Sometimes more than once. All in the comfort of your own bed.

Gotthilf Schubert wrote that "the dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter". Dreams, therefore, are relaxing and stimulating, and most other things that are both of those are illegal and/or expensive.

If that is why dreams themselves are brilliant, dream stories are perhaps better because of one crucial fact - they can be interpreted. According to Freud, "the reading of dreams consists in replacing the events of the dream...by other events". This vagueness befits much of Freud's work, but in the hands of a layman, such as myself, it means we can have some fun. The interpretation of dreams is infinitely more enjoyable with only a scant knowledge of psychology (which the vast majority have). It means next time some dull bloke tells you about his dream where he was running with the bulls in Pamplona, your mind can tell you it's because he secretly is into bestiality. Or secretly Spanish. Whichever you find to be more scandalous. The possibilities are endless.

Finally, aside from all the Oedipal theories, dreams can offer a genuinely brilliant insight into the mind of someone, without them even knowing. Someone far cleverer than me suggested that asking someone their dreams would be a brilliant first-date gambit, because not only are you able to enter their psyche, and work out whether you are emotionally and spiritually compatible, but also means that you are not simply talking about yourself all evening.

So dreams therefore are a beautiful piece of mind-psychedelia that comes free with the possession of a brain. Admittedly the more creative the mind, the more brilliant the dreams (imagine what Hunter S. Thompson must have dreamt each night), but in fact dreams are arguably the most interesting aspect of a person's personality. So by hearing the dream stories you can a) amuse yourself with incestual slander b) weigh-up a life partner c) be treated to a free bit of theatre that takes less than a minute.

Incidentally, despite all written above, if 'Lost' finishes with it all being a dream, I'll be bloody furious...

Square One

In the times before television, radio commentators at football matches would describe the pitch in terms of a grid, so as to give the listener a greater appreciation of where play was taking place. Square one was the back corner of the pitch, which is often where balls played back to the goalkeeper would go. Hence the phrase 'back to square one'.

I told that story for two reasons. One, it's a good story, and it's always nice to know the genesis of our idiomatic language. Two, this is post number one, and I wanted to start off by outlining what this 'blog' is all about.

"Reasons to be cheerful" is an old song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads. It's basically just a list of things to be cheerful about. Hopefully my posts will be more fleshed out than that, but the narrative will be the same. I hope that my blog will be an antidote to the more bitter blogs out there (of which more later), although I also promise at not point will it get too saccharine. I attempt to walk the line between bitter and saccharine like a latter-day goldilocks.

But perhaps I should start by saying 'congratulations'. For you are here. You see, reason number one is that you are reading this post. It's not an ego thing, since it's amazing that you can read anything at all. In fact, existence is Square One.

Sorry to get crude here, but every male ejaculation contains around twenty-five to thirty million sperms. Each of us is one of those. That's already pretty impressive, and it gets more so. For each of your parents, and each of their parents, the odds are thrity million to one. Now, I am of the firm opinion that big numbers in science are useless. If it's not 'the size of 100 football pitches', or 'the number of grains of sand on the planet' I'm lost. But needless to say lots of thirty-million to ones are incredibly slim odds. Not only that, but none of our direct ancestors were any of the following: killed in childhood, infertile or a virgin.

Aside from the cold hard maths of it, since you are able to access the internet, and peruse blogs, I can also assume you also have some level of leisure time and disposable income. Congratulations. You can also read English, which makes you a valuable commodity in this globalised world. You are (I am assuming) a human, and therefore, according to Aristotle, you are a political animal, capable of using rhetoric and reason to form opinions. In other words, you are in possession of a great mind. So congratulations indeed.

Given all this, you would have thought that everybody would be cheerful. But no. In the superb Arnie film, "End of Days", Father Kovak says, "Satan's greatest trick was convincing man that he didn't exist". Maybe so, but I would argue that the internet's greatest trick is convincing us it is nothing but porn. Not so. There is something far more in abundance out there. Look at the comments on any video on YouTube, or on any Facebook group, or any of the millions of writers in the blogosphere (which after much consideration, is technically a sphere, since it covers the earth, in much the same way as the stratosphere). All are filled with bile, and resentment, and a general outlook that the world is a bit shit. But I don't think that. I think there's plenty to be cheerful for. And if I say 'cheerful' rather than 'ecstatic' or 'driven wild with craziness about', it's because some of them are low-key. But, I think reason number one is pretty bloody good.

And if you disagree, well then fuck you, you ungrateful sod.