I have never really seen myself as a flowery person, though I do like flowers in the garden and I bought some for the pots today. Partly its to do with the colourblindedness and staying away from blandness. And in truth I think I have a jumper in all the pastel colours available in the primulas I bought today and colourful jumper wearing is the same idea (although I see The Guardian today rejects pastels for sherbet - which of course really only reveals the paucity of the English language when it comes to description), though this picture is also me in my favourite t-shirt which seems to get in lots of the few pictures there are of me (not many at all - and some definitely not for public consumption) and I guess that comes from whoever takes ownership of cameras. I have always been a camera person. The one I have at the moment belongs to work and is too heavy and clumsy to slip into a pocket. What I plan to get is a "Flip" which can take still and movies too - for I thought blogging movement is the next way to go with it, so watch this space for sherbet porn (not). But today I have a gripe. Milan Kundera likes to compare and contrast and in an essay entitled, The Torn Curtain, he says, 
"When Picasso painted his first cubist picture, he was twenty-six: all over the world several other painters followed him. If a sixty-year-old had rushed to imitate him by doing cubism at the time, he would have seemed... grotesque. For a young person's freedom and an old person's freedom are separate continents." To be honest this troubles me and I rebel against it, rail against it and even curse against it (fuck it - sometimes that is the only dignified response). OK I can see the point that someone my age shouldn't be following trends but when I look back at music, for example, I hear people being lauded for stuff I was doing better when I was their age and that was thirty years back in 1972 or thereabouts. In some sense they are only regurgitating what my generation pioneered. Thus, if I sit and write a song, which I did recently, it will be in a style I have played for a long time and any comparison with someone like Fleet Foxes (as suggested by a student recently - oh gawd, can't stnd them) is only to say, I was doing stuff long before them and surely there is something a bit undignified in a new band doing a sub Mamas and Papas or whatever. The young surely need to look that way, forward, and to consider why they are impersonators when they should be pissing on the corpse of the past as they plough their own way forward. And then to cap it, yay as a friend of mine would say, yesterday I heard Roger Daltry of The Who being interviewed and the inevitable question about that immortal line, "I hope I die before I get old..." came up. Daltry's answer was well rehearsed but the same as mine, we both do hope we die before we get old! For age is a state of mind and if the body gives up when I am a young and spirited eighty-eight-year-old then fuck yay, all the better I say. I have used this clip before but like it for three reasons - 1) "exercise that mind"; 2) I play guitar just like this; 3) I am not troubled by the religious sentiment of the song, I just like the sentiment and 4) there is no four in "three reasons", do you think I am senile... if you could see me now or hear me even we would be laughing! May you stay forever young for that is exactly how I feel right now - yay!Then again, rarely do I post two clips but this is another Bob Dylan song and while the intro is a bit ropey, do stick with it, for its the lovely JB and Mama... ignore the picture, I was so much older then, I am younger than that now - though the nipples do seem to be in the wrong place - yay!
