Songs, wrongs and Horse Chestnut trees....

Now the Beard, as some of you may or may not be aware, possibly even at the same time for those of you enamoured by the ideas of Ingsoc, is surprisingly or not a fan of Christmas... not necessarily for the reasons for which one is supposed to be a fan, but for sinister and cynical reasons possibly better explored than analysed...

For a start, the Beard is a great fan of hypocrisy... so much so that I practice it as often as possible, and one day hope to become as good at it as most of my fellow humans... for as we must all admit, hypocrisy is possibly the natural state of our species, the great Homo Narrans... in fact, our favoured species name, Homo Sapiens sapiens is in itself a form of hypocrisy... but I digress...

The fact is that Christmas is possibly the best time to study hypocrisy, both in others and in oneself... The fact that the festival is a commercial exercise masquerading as a religious celebration is good enough for the Beard.. but then Christmas exceeeds all expectations and reveals itself to be a commercial exercise masquerading as a Christian celebration that is itself a festival stolen from another religion and thinly disguised in the hope that their omniscient God somehow won't notice... Christmas, by promoting greed and the decoration of trees actually transgresses so many of Jehovah/Yahweh's laws as to be untrue... and it's true about the decorating trees bit... honest, guv.. it's in the Bible, in Isaiah if I remember correctly... but I digress...

Apart from the hypicrisy, which admittedly is fun, the Beard loves Christmas for one more thing... the music... now, most of you out there either love the tacky disposable music or loath it... however, to the Beard Christmas music highlights one of his pet dislikes... people claiming to like songs without actually understanding the lyrics.. take for instance that now perennial favourite "Fairytale of New York..." many people claim this to be their favourite Christmas song, which I have no problem with... but then a lot of them then carry on and say that this song about the decay of an already dysfunctional relationship filled with hate and resentment in a police cell among drunks is, somehow, the song which somehow embodies the perfect Christmas.... which it possibly may, who knows.. however, the Beard suspects that, as with Alan partridge and Sunday Bloody Sunday,, that most folks have heard the title, the (admittedly quite jolly) tune, and have concluded that this is a song of joy...

Greg Lake also gets a lot of airplay... his epic I believe in Father Christmas is again one of those songs that on the surface seems to be in praise of Christmas... that opening... "They said there'd be snow at Christmas; they said there'd be peace on Earth..." But then comes the disappointment, in the third line that no one seems to have heard.. "Instead it just kept on raining..." Yes, that's right... asong about how the wonderful Christmas is a cop-out, a meaningless hypocritical load of old drivel... "The Christmas we get we deserve," apparently....

And it's not just Christmas songs either... The Beard had the strange experience once of picking up a cd apparently containing the best love songs in the world... itself a strange enough experience... and to be honest, some of the tracks on there definitely deserved to be there.... the one by Barry White in particular... but also included were some strange ones... "A whiter shade of pale," for example, and "Hotel California..." "24 Hours from Tulsa" can possibly be forgiven, as it is a man telling his partner that he's now in love with someone else and is dumping her.... but "Where the wild roses grow" by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue??? A song about rape and violent murder??? One of the best love songs ever??? Methinks someone should be looking at the private life of the compiler of this cd....

But it grows late, and as Christmas is supposed to be a time of inspiration and hope, the Beard will leave you with a story from his past...

Years ago, when the Beard seemed not so left of centre as he now apparently does, this hirsute personage was less hirsute, and studied hard t a college in the East Midlands... The principal of this college (as opposed to the principle...) was a man seen only on the first day of each school year, when he would regail the new 14 year old starters with a tale of his own schooldays.... it would seem that on this man's first day at a certain educational establishment, he had the luck and joy to be selected to play cricket.. which to some would seem a bonus, to others not so much... At one end of the pitch was a rather tall horse chestnut tree... and our one-day-to-be-principal dreamed of being able to hit the ball over said plant... for five years he tried, and tried, and tried, but never succeeded... ever.... Now, apparently the moral of this story is supposed to be, no matter how difficult the task, no matter what lack of success, don't stop trying your hardest... the pursuit of the dream is more important than the attaining... unfortunately, what the Beard and his fellows took to be the pont was this... no matter how hard you try, you'll never achieve your dreams... so why bother trying... ambiguity is a wonderful thing....

So, in the hope that you are inspired one way or the other by that small second hand anecdote, the Beard will wish you all a goodnight... and until there is peace on Earth and Goodwill to all, amd until all our Christamses be merry and bright, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!

talking, stalking and walking... well, one of them at least....

Now, as some of you may or may not know, the Beard has often been a fan of what is occasionally and erroneously called soft fruit... let me tell you, gooseberries can be hard as nails... especially some of the inner city ones... but I digress.... Raspberries, of course, have always been the hirsue one's favourites, especially several of the glen varieties such as moy... but that's probably far too much information for tis time of an evening... suffice it to say that the Beard has spent many a happy hour (as opposed to Happy Hour) on his knees with Beard Junior in a field of pick your own style.... indeed the Beard once displayed his own sign in his garden of a time... "Pick your own Strawberries," it said... "And keep your hands off mine..."

But yet again I digress... soft fruit is delicious, except possibly that strange cousin of the apple, the strawberry, which I admit I have never really seen the appeal of... which is possibly (or possibly not) why, when it came time for the Beard to bow to social pressure (not for the first time in his hairy life) and get himself a so-called smartphone, a Blackberry was the obvious choice... As has become obvious in the past, the Beard is probably not the best person to trust with modern technology... so it remains to be seen whether or not this delicate piece of equipment actually survives... but so far the Beard has totally failed to break it... and he's had it for more than 24 hours now....

Communication is very important... a wise man once said that the only thing standing between humanity and destruction was our ability to communicate with each other.. in which case I feel that maybe we should at the very least be inching surreptitiously towardsthe life boats... but that's by the by... While it must be admitted that communication is by and large a good thing, easing the cogs and greasing the spokes, or whatever the metaphor is, it must be admitted that sometimes it is our worst enemy...

Partially, of course, this is to do with how amazingly bad at it we seem to be... now the Beard and Mrs Beard operate a "tell everything and be totally honest" system... at least, I'm told that we do... and it seems to work very well... because honesty is definitely the best policy... but communication it seems is the enemy, as much as the ally... we hesitate to tell people things, even when we know it is for their own good... which of us would actually say to a friend, "look, we're worried about your lifestyle, please give it up"? How many of us would even be able to articulate why?? No, we'd all be scared of hurting or annoying said person... the Beard well remembers a certain porter of his aquaintance falling over a statue because someone didn't want to say it was behind him... which shows, albeit on a small scale, just how damaging a lack of communication can be...

Now imagine this magnified multiple times, and we have the problem that the world faces now... so many people, so many languages, so few decent interpreters... for the other problem of course, is definitely that of getting lost in translation... its hard enough for a German to be understood by a French speaker... now imagine people from less related lands and languages.. to be honest, the Beard is surprised we manage at all, especially when you add into the mix the fact that all our leaders are attempting to lie through their teeth about what they really want.... for some reason, and despite all evidence to the contrary, they seriously seem to believe that honesty is not after all the best policy... which is sad, in at least one sense of the dictionary definition...

Dictionaries, of course, must take some of the blame... whilst the Beard won't go quite so far as that character in Alice who insisted that words meant exactly what he wanted them to mean, accepting instead that some form of consistencty must exist, this hirsute and bristly personage asserts here and now that the standardisation of the language (any language, but English is the one I have most in mind...) equals its stagnation... centuries ago, we spelled words as they sounded to us... to be honest, a lot of reading was guess work... Then along came the good dictionary writer, telling us all that the only way to use the language was his way... and for some reason we believed him to the extent that eventually we came to somehow accept the flawed premise that dilaectal usage was somehow wrong, when in fact it is from dialects, slang, colloquialism and cant that new words come... and that's how a language develops... if any of you really think that it doesn't matter, here's a question.. Latin was codified and rigidly structured by outside influences many centuries ago.... how many people speak it as a first language now?? Sobering thought, huh...

Sober, it must be said, is the Beard's usual state, despite what many of you out there may or may not think... indeed I can recall being drunk a mere three times in my life, and avoiding the rather obvious and annoying joke, I can say hat yes, I am rather proud of the fact.. not that any of this has anything whatsoever to do with the subject in hand, but it does make for an interesting (or not) aside... however, to get back on topic, as web forumites would have it, the Vikings among others at one point had a healthy respect and a certain fear of writing and writers... the act of being able to draw a sound (which is all writing is) was seen as special and magical... conversely, however, to write a story down was seen as somehow trapping it, preventing it growing and almost killing it... and to a certain extent the Beard agrees...but as a writer himself, only to a certain extent... although the passing of stories by word of mouth, and the altering and growth of these stories has always taken this hirsute one as being a good thing, promoting as it does social interaction and communication... and while the Beard sets not much store in the former, the latter is, as I have said, close to his heart.... it remains to be seen whether we can actually use it properly...

So until we all can communicate without implying or infering anything other than what is meant, and until we can all have a mind to speak, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!