An Elephant of One's Own

For all those who are still literally shaking with laughter at the childish tantrums of the self-defined losers in the recent US elections, well, OK, I can raise a smile too, but it's a bit of a squiggly one. Obviously, living in Ecuador I'm only slightly less removed from the ripples of consequences than if I lived on Neptune (I refuse to entertain the possibility that either Trump or Clinton could pinpoint Ecuador on a map, though I'm willing to concede that Clinton would at least home in on the right latitude: she's a Wellesley girl, after all, and the name is a bit of a giveaway); there's bound to be some sort of butterfly effect, but not knowing what that will be prevents me from going all vaporous over it. Whether the OPEC per-barrel goes up (allowing the university where I work to buy some toilet paper) or down (forcing me to scavenge in bins behind Chinese restaurants) I guess really depends on which pussies yer man grabs and in which order, and I don'...

Oh, don't look at me like that. This is a blog for heaven's sake: a place where, according to hallowed tradition, people talk shite. And I firmly believe, as the old BT slogan had it (more or less), "It's Good to Talk Shite". Why is it good to talk shite? Well, EM Forster more or less nailed it: how can I know what I think until I see what I say? This is especially true for those of us who, possibly due to some degree of undiagnosed autism, tend to think more pre-verbally than verbally. My mind is not the final pages of Ulysses: my interior monologue hardly ever gets as far as precise words with syllables in them: mostly, it's the music of the words and the pictures that shine through them. And let me tell you, if you happen to be a moribund old git with mild social phobia, pulmonary emphysema, a baggy face and hardly any teeth whom nobody except a masochist would pass the time of day with, this blogging lark is practically the only chance you ge...

This isn't quite where I'm going, but I'll say it anyway, as this is a blog post not an essay: one of the most seductive features of mythical Golden Ages is that in them, everyone seems to know who they are and where they belong. My mythical Golden Age (a 60s English childhood fading off at the edges into a very selectively drawn Edwardian or even Victorian pastoral) is certainly like that. In that kinder, mellower Hovis past, if you were dumb you knew you were dumb, and were correspondingly humble and didn't say or do much, other than doffing your cap occasionally. If you were smart, you went to Jura, spat blood and wrote books. What you didn't get is... I was going to say something catty about Business School graduates, but I'd better be careful. Ahem. What you didn't get is people like me. People who generally feel they don't get it, whether because of never having got to grips with Higher Mathematics or for whatever other reason, but who are unable ...