Journal Entries
MVP's NaJoPoMo 20 November
Posted Nov 20, 2014
Today is T for trains.
I seem to have spent an unreasonably large part of my life travelling on trains. This is partly because I worked in central London but didn't live there. The railway line I know best runs from London to Brighton (or the other way round, depending on which direction you are going.) I've sometimes thought it would be an interesting project to write stories or poems for each of the places on the line. But which places would it include? London Victoria, Clapham Junction, East Croydon, Redhill, Gatwick Airport, Three Bridges, Balcombe, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill, Hassocks, Preston Park and Brighton. That leaves out a number of places on the way.
What memories stand out of places or incidents on the trip? Some, of course, are bad. There were times in the 1980s when the IRA would give a warning it had put a bomb on one of the London stations, and complete paralysis ensued. People had a choice of waiting for hours in a crowded station, with no definite prospect of getting home, or travelling to another station to see if there were trains running from there. With buses and Tubes crowded, I remember yomping across central London looking for a place where there might be trains.
You could never be sure about your fellow passengers, either. I remember changing trains at Clapham Junction, when a woman getting off the train I was about to board said "Don't get in there. There's a man with a broken bottle." Of course, the trains themselves changed. When I first started commuting, there were some compartments which ran across the train, with doors onto the platform and the track, but no connection with the rest of the train. When I travelled late in the evening, I used to avoid those compartments, along with those where smoking was permitted.
One of the pleasures of coming home on the train was that I would travel for miles between terraced houses, office blocks and factories, to come at last to countryside. I have seen deer in Balcombe Forest and the train crosses a viaduct over the River Ouse, from which there is a vista of fields and woods. When it was dark, I noticed the patterns the lights made - rectangles of light from house windows, strings of light along roads - moving as the train travelled, looking like dancing fireflies.
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Latest reply: Nov 20, 2014
MVP's NaJoPoMo 19th
Posted Nov 19, 2014
Today is S for Stirling
My son chose to go to Stirling University. This might have been to do with the fact that they offered a wide choice of modules in the first year; or that it was about as far from Mum and Dad as he could get. 
Stirling has a lovely campus, with its very own loch, but the student accommodation where my son stayed for the first year looked like a prison.
Stirling is regarded as the gateway to the Highlands. It is poised at the northern edge of the central Lowlands, which includes Glasgow and Edinburgh. As you travel north and west from the town you soon reach mountains. In this position, it's been much fought over. There is an old bridge over the Forth at the spot where William Wallace beat the English, and Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce scored another victory, is not far away. There is a monument to Wallace, which is visible from a long way away and a grand Mediaeval castle on a hill above the town.
My son said his Scottish friends insisted he watched Braveheart several times and then decided he could be regarded as an honorary Scot! In any case, he stayed: completing his first degree, then doing his PhD and finally getting a job at the University. We told him he'd have to take out Scottish citizenship if the country became independent.
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Latest reply: Nov 19, 2014
MVP's NaJoPoMo 18th
Posted Nov 18, 2014
So today is R for retirement.
I retired early from my job in the civil service, because I was tired of travelling up to London and back on the train, and of being at the bottom of a big organisation
. But my husband was still working. So I spent some of my time working for the Citizen's Advice Bureau, and following a series of courses - first French conversation, later Creative Writing.
Now my husband has retired too, more or less (he still does a day a week work)he faces the question of what to do with the rest of the time. In the summer, we went travelling to France and to the USA. In these grey winter days he's not doing much, except surfing the internet.
If you're going to deal with retirement, you obviously need a certain amount of money and reasonable health. But maybe you also need the flexibility to try new things. It seems to me that women cope better than men on the whole, probably because a lot of us have had career breaks, worked part time and done voluntary work. Those men who've always worked full time risk lurching into idleness and ill health. 
It's no use suggesting he joins the local golf club, or the Rotary Club -he'd hate that. I've suggested an Open University course or some voluntary work that he might like, such as working for the local preserved steam railway, but nothing seems to appeal.
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Latest reply: Nov 18, 2014
MVP's NaJoPoMo17th
Posted Nov 17, 2014
Today is Q for the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. As all hootooers know, the answer is 42! But you may also remember that Deep Thought told the philosphers they didn't understand the answer because they didn't understand the question. So he invented the computer more powerful than any other -
to find the question to the ulitmate answer.
I studied philosophy, along with English and I think most philosophers are better at framing their questions. I wondered how much philosophy I remembered after many years.
I do remember that many of the great philosophers are concerned with epistemology - the study of how we know anything about the world. Plato compared the nature of our knowledge of the world to the state of prisoners who were kept in a cave, while servants walked behind them carrying objects. All the prisoners could see was the shadows of the objects on the wall in front of them. Plato thought there was an Ideal world, where Ideas of objects existed in a pure form. This is difficult enough when the Ideas are of horses or tables, but causes even more problems when the Ideas concern abstracts like Justice or Goodness.
Much later, the French philosopher Descartes asked himself what he knew about the world with any certainty and came up with the famous conclusion Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. But he went from this conclusion to deciding that God exists too, which is less self-evident.
So how useful did I find my smattering of philosophy? I suppose its chief use is encouraging students to ask questions, instead of blindly accepting what they are told. So if you asked a philosopher "How important is philosophy?" he would probably reply "It depends what you mean by philosophy." I would like to corner a representative of UKIP and ask "What do you mean by independence?" 
But, as Deep Thought pointed out, philosophers can discuss questions for a very long time, without coming to any firm conclusion. Meanwhile, its probably not much use to ask the question about Life, the Universe and Everything. It's probably better to ask "What can I do today that is constructive, creative or useful? " 
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Latest reply: Nov 17, 2014
MVP's NaJoPoMo 16
Posted Nov 16, 2014
Today is P for poetry.
I'm not sure when my liking for poetry started. I still remember some poems from childhood, like AA Milne's poem about the king who wanted a little bit of butter on his bread. Finding rhymes was always fun. My mother had a cleaner who came in while she was teaching and sometimes, when I was ill, the cleaner looked after me too. She was a writer herself and I remember her getting me to think up rhyming descriptions for animals. Big pig and fat cat are obvious, but they were followed by spare mare, bony pony, pale whale.
When we did English at school, we learned to scan poetry and write
Shakespearean style sonnets. I can still do it today, though I've forgotten lots of more useful things. Why do I like poetry? Probably because it can express a whole range of emotions, from love to terror. Imagine, for example, the impact the poems by the First World War poets like Wilfrid Owen had on the people back home.
It's difficult to define poetry and to say what's good and what isn't. I would certainly say that English poetry doesn't need to rhyme; there are many great poems that don't. I don't think it's enough to stick a rhyme on the end of a line and say it's a poem. I tend to look for a striking use of language and verbal images, a sense of the music of words, and something interesting to say.
I still write my own poems and some of them are scattered around h2g2. The snag is that most poetry mags won't publish anything that has already been published, and being placed on an open website counts as published. 
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Latest reply: Nov 16, 2014
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