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!!!!!!!