Death

These old Furlongs’ friend died. When you get to our age, your friends die.

This is the first one for 2023.

We got notified by mail.

Our friend simply toppled over whilst serving Sunday lunch at the kitchen table. And that was that!

She always had good taste.

We laughed a lot together with her. I will tell you the best story ever.

When she was younger she lived in a block of flats where the ground floor flats had a small piece of grass outside each flat. One day, she was out walking her dog. As she arrived home, her dog peed on her next door neighbour’s grass. The neighbour burst out of her door and exploded with rage. Our friend said, “Please don’t worry, this can be easily sorted. You go home and make a sign saying KEEP OFF THE GRASS, and I’ll go home and teach my dog to read.”

Our friend was always quick off the mark when it came to humour.

And Death.

No lingering, just DO it.

Good on you lovely friend. Go well.

That night again

This old Furlong has some God awful nights.

Last night was a ‘could not settle and ‘fighting the duvet’ one.

Could not settle involves removing a hair from the lip, adjusting for a cold ‘leak’ of air at back of neck, feeling another hair on eyelashes, a feather on the cheek, repairing the new leak of cold at back of neck, sneezing, suddenly feeling an itch on the shoulder that entails sitting up to scratch.

Settling again. Groundhog Day.

At last after finding hairs, finding air leaks and itches, sleep comes.

The night battle begins.

The duvet is puffy, heavy and annoying. It makes crunching noises as the feathers move around in it. It’s filled with the remains of what used to be living creatures come to life and cloying at me. It’s supposed to be warm, but it is HOT and noisy. The only time it looks good and luxurious is when the bed is made. It invites you to climb in on a cold winter night.

No more will I succumb to its lies.

It’s a trap.

Today I shall roll it up, securely bound with elastic straps so it cannot escape, and store it at the bottom of the linen cupboard.

On suicide

When I was in high school, at a Convent in Africa, I remember an event.

I remembered it because of the three girls who committed suicide in one place, The Priory, which is all over the UK news at the moment.

We had a really nice common room at our school, a huge rondaval, in which there were comfortable sofas and chairs. The centre was clear for activities and there was a really good Radiogram. We kept up with the news. I was a senior. One night we heard the news that Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. It seemed devastating news.

That night an event happened in the Convent, that unbeknown to us was happening all over the World. One of us tried to commit suicide.

I don’t know how it was discovered, maybe another girl ‘told’, but us seniors, were dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to the Infirmary. Our job was to walk, walk, walk and talk, talk, talk until the doctor arrived. And then again till the ambulance arrived which it eventually did. And our attempted suicide was whipped away.

We were allowed to sleep in in the morning.

I can’t remember if the girl ever came back to school, but I think she lived.

There was an epidemic of copycat suicides in young girls after the death of Marilyn Monroe.

Suicide is catchy.

Nowadays, people blasted with constant horrors of the new apocalypse culture shared via social media, will find suicide even more meaningful than the death of one actress who may or may not have committed suicide.

Suicide is catchy.

Or have we forgotten?

Nowadays, it seems that someone else must always take the blame.

On poets

At school we studied some poetry. The only poet I really liked was John Masefield. He was Poet Laureate. In my last post I shared CARGOES, which came to mind during the wind storm in the night. I don’t know why it came to mind. But I’ve been reading other Masefield poetry. To my ear, it’s great. It uplifts me. There’s something deep there, that is beautiful. It connects to my soul.

Today we still have a Poet Laureate. I thought to read some of his stuff.

Oh what a dreadful disappointment!

It shows to me how in one generation, the culture has changed from fortitude, striving, pride and dignity to victimhood, suffering and poor me. From the inspirational to minutiae. To the unfathomable.

We have lost our connection to greatness, to real nature, to overarching truth.

We have ‘mundane’ instead…

At least our Poet Laureate is not a rapper.

But nothing here inspires me…..

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/simon-armitage

Homework

BY SIMON ARMITAGE

It’s evening again, late.

I go out into the lane

and doodle a beard and mustache

on the face of the moon

with a red pen.

Over the next hill

an old teacher of mine

takes off her glasses

and wipes the lenses with a soft cloth.

She can’t believe

what she’s just seen.

Quinquiremes

Last night the wind blew.

It rattled at the doors, the windows, the post box, the dog flap, the exhaust fans.

Our dog Bass was severely disturbed. Our evening movie was spoiled by Bass trying to sit on me, on the back of my chair, and even digging down into my jacket. He was a pain in the arse.

I knew it would be worse at bedtime. And it was. As soon as we settled in bed, he was on mine. He failed to settle with me, scruffing, digging, scratching. But I was trying to sleep. I’m deaf, so I couldn’t hear the noises that afeared him. He always comes to ME when frightened. Eventually, about two, I managed to get him back to HIS bed. So, what do you do whilst waiting patiently for a bed of your own?

Well, you try to remember precious things……

CARGOES

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.”

John Masefield.

The Age of Hot Air

This is another complaint post.

ONCE, in the misty time of the past, this old Furlong wrote for magazines. It was a fun time of our lives. Mr Furlong often got involved, so he also met the folk who were the topics of my articles. The magazine sent a photographer out with me to take lovely glossy pics of my ‘victims’. Never of me. My victims were successful famous persons. And the theme was how they got there.

Most got successful using the old fashioned idea that the harder you work, the luckier you got. And, most importantly, that some sort of greater force was the reason for their luck. They were guided in some way.

In journalism, I was taught to write an article thusly….

1. Say what you are going to say.

2. Say what you said in a different/more detailed way.

3. Repeat what you said succinctly.

It works for speeches too.

This morning an article called “Five ways you are killing your Orchids” caught my eye. Well, my Orchids are not actually dying in droves, but they are doing absolutely nothing. I thought to read it.

The article was packed with hot air. To find the main points, I had to read through the whole damn thing. It consisted of thousands of words of waffle. Right at the very end, I found a check list of the five ways I am killing my Orchids. None of them applied to me.

The new video documentaries/films, especially about Famous People have changed. Now we have to watch a whole lot of ‘lived experiences’ from the cleaner the hairdresser, the friend, the bar tender, the sister, the cousin, the dog clipper, etc, on how they found the Famous Person was like. There is no actual script from a biographer. Its all hot air. A waste of time.

My favourite quote from Nelson Mandela is, “It’s all gong and no (or) very little dinner.”

Nowadays, that’s truer than it was then.

Watch out for gongs. They are everywhere.

Where are you from? What is your heritage?

The Furlongs ancestors are from the UK. Of course Furlong is not our real name.

We have always considered we were of Viking stock rather than Anglo Saxon.

Last night, we watched a history video on The Viking raids on this Island full of Anglo Saxons.

I’d presumed our original families had been caused by a few Vikings from Daneland landing in the North East with motives of lust and pillage. But it was not like that at all.

The Viking raids on this Island, Scotland and Ireland are better called a massive invasion, They were everywhere! It was only with great sacrifice by the Anglo Saxons, that England was unified to become “England ” for a short while before the next invasion.

And not too long later we got invaded again, by a different group – the Normans.

One section of our family has a Norman surname. That’s ok, Norman surname will do, until I found out his actual father had a Viking name, and when he died, his widow took a Norman name for herself and her son when she married again.

I discovered Cumbria had a king. King Constantine. He was ingahoots with the Vikings and the Anglo Saxon kings, and he ruled over Scotland too. The town where I live got pretty sick of the Scots raiding, pillaging and raping it. There are some here who still hold it against them.

And then to mention the slaves. Tons of them! The Vikings captured and sold them before the Barbary Pirates got the idea. It was profitable.

The slaves the Vikings sold were Anglo Saxon, or Pictish (from Scotland) The Anglo Saxon gene must have travelled far.

But when the Barbary Pirates stole our people, their heritage would have been Anglo Saxon AND Viking AND Norman.

As self proclaimed Viking heritage, I do not want to pay reparations.

We were a savage bunch!

10 foods you should never feed your dog – oh yeah?

I thought my current blogs were getting sardonic and grouchy. But I wrote this in May 2014.

I still think it’s a load of boloney.

Much science is….especially as reported by the press…..

I don’t think I’ve changed.

https://wp.me/p4Bmnr-4z

Cat and mouse

Having now slightly recovered from the Christmas and New Year period, we are now in ‘next year’ which arrived as expected.

The world is not the same as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. It seems to be falling apart. Mr Furlong had a heart attack about ten years ago. Ambulances took a while to get to us in the country, so I drove him to A+E at the local hospital and within a blink of an eye he was in an ambulance on the way to the ‘big’ hospital in the city near here – the same one that sent the whole of A+E home for lack of doctors the night I needed a drip.

So our NHS is a mess.

The news is a mess. It is possibly not true. Probably.

It seems to me, with access to all sorts of News Sites both written and video nowadays, that dissatisfaction, is intruding everywhere. 20 and even 10 years ago, there was less gut-stirring disagreement. Ideas that 9/11 was set up, leaked out on YouTube as people had their say and scientists of all kinds uploaded interesting opinions. ‘Conspiracy theories’ was the description.

Now, any opinion not in line with the new woke cultural mores , gets banned, censored, deleted. And the person who has expressed it, gets cancelled. Any ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ is muzzled. Who does that? Spiteful people do. They report you. They are watching you. But you are still there on all the alternative sites. And you have huge numbers of followers which indicates what people actually think.

And algorithms watch you too. On Night Cafe now, you cannot generate an image with words you used before. Words like child’s, child, children. Or names of anyone. Like Shakespeare, Confucius, Tony Blair or any other. The algorithms are watching. And it offers adverts to you too. Its SUCH a shame!

We are being watched, tracked, studied, manipulated, guided, brainwashed, controlled, modelled,and formed. We are the mice.

My prediction for 2023 is that political, social and institutional insanity will continue as before…only the cleverest mouse will leap off the spoon and take the chance it might get free.