The news this past week reminded me why I don’t read the news. I didn’t need to know exactly how Robin Williams had committed suicide. And Cliff? Oh, Cliff. Next they’ll be saying the Queen experiments on her corgis.
I usually subcontract the news out to my wife, who offers a sort of verbal clippings service.
Written for the Sounding Off section of a local magazine
I’m from the US. In the States we have something called ‘window screens’. This technology may be new to those born and bred in the UK, so please allow me to explain it:
A window screen is a fine mesh of cross-hatched metal threads stretched taught onto a frame like a paint canvas. The effect is similar to a flattened tea strainer. It allows you to see outside with a mostly unhindered view, whilst keeping flying pests, or tea for that matter, from coming inside. There can be a mildly distracting moire effect at first, but the eye soon adapts. How often do you look outside anyway?
I understand that fine old historic houses may have window casements which preclude easy fitment of such exotica, but not all houses were built before 1600, so the lack of this miraculous feat of engineering is somewhat perplexing to me.
It’s not just a mental health issue; it threatens to tear at the very fabric of our ‘big society’.
Imagine a group of specially invited guests sitting down to dinner. It’s a delightful, warm day, so windows have been opened to partake of the fresh air. Suddenly an uninvited guest buzzes inside. It’s threatening, loud, not a little alarming. The host opens more windows so that the creature may make an unhindered exit, but it refuses to take the hint. It circles round dinner companions who until that moment had been warming to each other’s company despite the yawning social gaps (the host has been bravely egalitarian), causing generalised anxiety then pandemonium when it is realised that one of the party may be allergic to bee stings. Is it, indeed, a bee? Nobody knows, as the little beast is maddeningly elusive, even to the trained eye. One of the guests slices angrily at the air with his fork, hoping to spear it, to no avail. The buzzing circles round and round, the consternation grows greater, and at last the host asks that the room be vacated and the door shut so that the problem may correct itself.
The party thus decamps to less salubrious surroundings, defeated, the conversation derailed for good, social relations marred, plans of peaceful dinners in the future a permanent question mark. Some time later the host quietly opens the door to see if the room has been cleared of the threat. All is calm at first. But wait, no! The fly – for that’s all it is – a tiny, perhaps even prepubescent fly has taken to the air, a one man battle-of-Britain as it were. All windows are checked to see that they are open to their widest possible aperture, but it is no use; the fly seems quite happy to make figure 8s in the air until the end of time.
Eventually the house is sold at a loss despite the bouyant market, the children are uprooted from their excellent school catchment area, local ties are cut, the hope of a lasting legacy in the village abandoned; even the beloved family pet has his previously placid existence shattered as he is forced to say goodbye to his pooch playgroup pals. All for the want of a humble window screen.
I was driving along, in a sunny mood and indulging in a bit of karaoke, when a car going the other way suddenly leaped off the road – this is not a fanciful description, to my eyes it literally did leap – and jumped into the woods. There followed a very loud sound which could only be a car smacking into a tree.
I turned around as soon as it was possible and pulled up to the scene of the accident, which was downhill around the bend which had served as a slingshot. There I saw the driver, a young woman, crawl onto the road then lie down.
A man was already there, on his phone. He motioned for me to back up to provide a safety cushion, which I did. After putting my hazards on I got out, walked over to the woman, and sat down on the kerb next to her.
She was mostly intact, though what I took to be her tibia was now poking out of the new hole in her jeans. She was lucid. She was also, as you would expect, in a lot of pain. She slapped the cold pavement again and again, having no other remedy for her anguish and frustration. She then gave me her hand to hold, which I gladly did as I really didn’t know what else to do.
The man who had called for an ambulance (business suit, paunch, not to be trifled with as he later hustled along what he took to be a rubbernecker) started directing traffic. Another man (construction? fuel delivery? he was wearing a bright vest) walked up to join the rescue party.
The woman asked me to retrieve her phone, which I miraculously found without too much digging around in her car, the inside of which appeared to be filled with the booty of a car boot sale. I sat down again and handed it to her. She was very concerned to call her boss at a nearby diner. The man with the safety vest approached us and became the switchboard operator, at one point putting the phone on speaker and holding it so she could talk to her brother between gasps and moans, in what was surely the worst call of his day.
She went back to slapping the pavement, shaking her head as if saying No to the whole situation, and shouting out in pain. I was chiefly there for hand-holding if and when she wanted it.
Presently a passing GP gave the tableau the stability and reassurance it required. She asked the woman the questions necessary to form a quick medical opinion, and instructed me to hold the woman’s head still. Her roadside manner was excellent.
The police arrived, but surprisingly to me at the time, kept their distance.
As I braced the woman’s head I could not help but reflect on how I had been in a situation very much like this only a few years ago, in the back seat of another wrecked car with another wracked body, struggling to be of assistance.
The woman’s boss turned up and took over hand-holding duty, her familiar face hopefully a welcome anchor in the sea of strangers.
The woman berated herself for “Being so stupid!”, was hushed by our chorus of “No! Don’t be silly.” She felt sick to her stomach and was worried she’d broken her arm as well. She wanted to get up. She started hyperventilating. She did nothing I couldn’t sympathise with, having been laid out on a few roads myself surrounded by people who seemed intent on helping me despite my best efforts.
When the ambulance arrived the paramedic told me to hold her neck much more firmly than I had been doing; a lesson I won’t forget if there’s ever a next time. When she came with the neck brace I was relieved at my station.
What do you do after such a close encounter with trauma? Depending on your life CV, you may well experience a little trauma of your own. The woman’s boss was also looking shell-shocked.
The police interview was accomplished with the minimum of fuss (“How fast was she going?” Not fast enough for me to want to add to her woes), though by the rolling of his eyes after his chat with the businessman I’d evidently just missed a clash with authority. Then I was on my way back up the road, the woman with any luck now on a trip to a morphine-induced stupor.
When I got home I wandered over to a neighbour, in need of normalcy. He was working on the glorified shed he’s bought to turn into a house. We climbed the scaffolding and talked about planning permission, water seepage fracturing roofing tiles, and eventually, the bloody things that happen. He’s seen much worse than I have: the aftermath of a motorcyclist smashing into a van (“He kept trying to get up onto his broken arms and broken legs”), a construction site story almost out of the movie Final Destination (the guy lived), a bus blowing up right before his eyes on 7/7 in London. So much for normalcy.
I’ve been giving Twitter a workout lately. About a month ago I tweeted thus:
The implementation was clumsy as I hadn’t yet figured out how to slide text onto a curve using Sketch, which is my chosen canvas since Photoshop ascended into the Creative Cloud. (Can’t say you’re Sketching, people would just get confused. And the clumsiness would remain. When it comes to image manipulation, I’m what you call an enthusiastic amateur.) But it was an enjoyable exercise, so the next day I dipped into the past again, simply doing a search of July 10 and throwing a few events in this time.
The first history tweet I actually felt æsthetically pleased with came on the 12th when I got to do a group portrait of the Stones with Caesar. Next Nixon made his debut – he’s very photogenic. The 14th was another multi-event, which was becoming the new standard even if the illustration was quite basic. On the 16th I got more ambitious; at this point I was hooked.
I don’t think anybody actually follows my Days except Twitterbots, but that’s not why I post them (else I’d widen my library of pop culture references). They wake up my brain. The only downside is that ambition is an insomniac’s dream; they take too long, eating into time when my brain should really be asleep. Today’s, for example
was accomplished in the peak REM hours early the morning of August 10th.
According to Wikipedia, which is good enough for me (as are some of the ‘Today in history’ sites, though I’m aware they’re not always strong on fact-checking), on this day word of the Declaration of Independence reached London. Also, “In 1793 The Musée du Louvre officially opened… In 1990 the Magellan space probe reached Venus… In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships set sail from Seville to circumnavigate the globe… And in 2003 came the highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom – 101.3 °F in Kent. It is the first time the United Kingdom has recorded a temperature over 100 °F.”
The temperature thing was a surprising fact, but I didn’t have room for it, so never mind that. Everything else got slotted in like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, which is surely one of the handier metaphors.
This one was particularly irksome as my grey matter kept getting impacted with ideas [mental note: Breaking Bad. Ignore.] The character limit had forced me into ‘Dec’ of Independence, so in came Dec, Ant’s buddy. The lightning bolt was a flashbulb moment which naturally needed to be incorporated. As for the louvres, homophones stopped by the other day, and I grab continuity where I can find it, so… you get the idea. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
I had to find a useable globe stand, as cleaning stuff up is a chore I can do without; my kingdom for a .png or .gif with a transparent background!
Almost all of the history images are scooped up without apology in image searches, though I try not to use other people’s personal photography [see apologia]. Been to the Louvre, so that one’s mine.
Images are only half the fun. The rest comes with snapping the various elements together, where possible, and writing captions. Words and pictures, pictures and words: that’s my life.
Perhaps I should thank Twitter for limiting me to 140 characters. Make that 117 – or 99 with intro. I am constantly reminded of the importance of 23, which is the number of characters a picture(s) is worth in this brave new world.
I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this up.* There’s the only-so-many-hours-in-the-night thing, which can be addressed by lowering the benchmark or redefining the mission. Over time it will become progressively more difficult for me anyway as history runs out. Ideally I will pass this sacred duty to the next generation, whose job it has always been to make new history.
* 3 months as it turns out. Now I just do them whenever I feel the calling.
