I never would have had the slightest interest in finance, investment and the stock market if wasn’t for a friend of mine called Jill. Jill is producing her own films and when I first met her about ten years ago she was working in teaching. In a few short leaps and with a lot of effort she transformed herself and her career, albeit nearly burning out in the process. I have a lot of admiration for her. She’s blazing a trail and I consider her a peer.

About three years ago Jill phoned me up and asked if I’d mind a financial advisor getting in touch with me. I’m immediately suspicious. I love wasting telephone canvassers’ time on the phone and resent any kind of hard sell. So I’m, “Like why?” And she tells me this guy is really good and has helped her out on a film project and if I go for a free no obligation consultation it will help her out although I don’t have to. So I say sure. Soft sell I can buy into.

Okay, well I go to see this guy James and he is a Ferrari driving wideboy with a certain amount of charm and a certain amount of slickness and an expensive suit covering both. He works in a big open plan office with a whole team of slickers all with phones glued to their ears or vacant looking clients sat at their desks.

I listen to James while he explains to me why most people don’t invest money. In fact, why most people don’t save money. “Do you know why most people don’t save money?” he asks. He doesn’t pause for my answer but provides it, “Habit. Habit. Pure and simple. That’s the secret of saving money. How big is your overdraft now? I’ll bet you’ve always had that overdraft haven’t you?” I nod in my best impression of a vacant looking client. “You always will. All of my clients have overdrafts but the difference is now they have the habit of saving too.” Ooo-kay…

Jameses’ mouth runs at the speed of his sports car while he gets me to think about how much cash I’d really like for my pipedreams–“Ooo, about a million to start with…”–and the various ways I can go about building capital to achieve all that. A lot of it is pure BS and I let it drift over me. Some of it makes sense. Then he comes to a key question, “What do you think you would invest in to make the best returns possible on your money?” Of course, he plays this in from left field to catch me off guard so I pause and blink.

Before I continue, let me share a bit of background. Chase the Lady is a card game based partly on strategy and partly on luck. I think it’s also called Hearts and the way it’s played is each person lays down cards, following suit if they can and acquiring tricks. Hearts are worth points so if you can’t follow suit and lay a heart, the person winning the trick ends up with those points. The queen of spades is worth points too, so you try to dump her on some unsuspecting player too, hence the name of the game. The object of the game is to end up with as few points as possible.

Now, here’s the trick. If you can win all the hearts and the queen of spades you can zero your own score or double everyone else’s. This immediately makes you the winner. However, it’s a highly risky strategy to play because if anyone else spots it, they will hold back on one of the cards you need and take some damage themselves while dropping you in deep doo-doo (cf. my garden). If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to play dumb and innocent right up to the last minute before going in for the kill and taking all those points to win.

So, here’s James and really he wants nothing more than to sell me some kind of index-linked front-loaded insurance policy and maybe take out an endowment on my house too. But I listen because he is right about several things including that I’m currently investing nothing, I can afford £20 a month (for starters) and I have big plans. I play kind of dumb and innocent and listen to him right up to this question, “What do you think you would invest in to make the best returns possible on your money?”

Pause. Blink.

My first answer is property. James says yes, okay and that’s alright and pooh-pooh’s my repayment mortgage (more fool him, I think). But what else? So I say I’d invest in growth businesses. And he asks how I would choose those (because unbeknownest to me at that point he’s got his tracker fund all ready and waiting). And that question stops me. And it hits me. What would be my best possible investment? If I could invest in any company, what would I chose as the surest possible high return on my investment? What business would I believe in more than any other?

There’s only one possible answer.

Given that I’d play the Chasing the Lady game to win outright and never mind that it is high risk to try that double-or-nothing strategy, I *know* who I believe in. Me. And that’s my answer. If I’m going to invest in any company, I’m going to invest in mine. I have more faith in my abilities, my own intelligence and my own creativity than nearly anyone else I know. And I know myself better than I’ll ever know someone else’s business. So at that point I my decision becomes clear: I’m going to invest in my own film making future.

And here I am. Okay, I had kind of already made the decision that I wanted to get on with film making after working in television. But the thing with Jameses’ questioning is that it firmed up my resolve.

So now I’m remortgaging my house and lucky me, I was right about investing in property and picked the right place in the right location. My equity has built up far more than I dreamed it would. Meanwhile, okay, actually getting things made is proving to be far slower than I’d hoped but I’m getting on with it. I did buy the front-loading insurance tracker thing from James because, well I wasn’t actually saving anything and what’s £20 a month (or £120 as it became). It’s still small potatoes and hasn’t seriously affected my overdraft and I have other investments now that back it up.

I certainly would never have had an interest in the Motley Fool if I hadn’t started doing any kind of financial planning. But the bottom line is, my main investment is still myself and I leverage what I can into my own future–though not absolutely everything. There’s still some comfort zone with other fallbacks for the future and I didn’t want to give up absolutely everything that makes living now enjoyable either. That was the other thing Jameses’ talk illuminated for me. He was so adamant about investing for the future that I realised very quickly his schemes could eat up all the money needed to have some kind of quality of life in the present.

Nevertheless, as far as investing in my own future goes I feel like I’m playing a hand of Chase the Lady to win. There is a certain amount of strategy, a certain amount of luck, a certain amount of playing dumb and a certain amount of shrewd calculation. Film making is an expensive, challenging, complicated yet rewarding mistress, as far as I’m concerned, and she’s rewarding in so very many many ways, not just financially. Careerwise, I can’t think of any other lady I’d rather chase. Careerwise, that is.

How many times have you been struck by lightning? Not many? Not any? But how many times have you had the power of lightning coursing through your body? Different thing. I think when we’re doing certain things that are natural to us, it’s akin to having the power of a blinding white lightning bolt crackling through us. It might be things that we really want to do or things we’re particularly good at.

It’s like standing in the middle of a summer storm and knowing that you are, for a few moments at least, running the show.

Most of the time and for most of our lives what we do is like playing with static electricity. There’s a bit of a charge, maybe the odd small shock. Maybe we can stick a balloon to the ceiling or some other minor miracle once in a while. Sometimes when it’s dark we can see sparks around us when we take off an item of woollen clothing. That’s more or less it. Day to day life is buzzing static.

Grasping the lightning is different. Grasping the lightning means feeling it flowing through you and around you, ready to arc out and change the universe in an earth shattering blast. Grasping the lightning means there may well be a clap of thunder as you unleash your own charged up power. It’s that profound.

Respect for your abilities from those around you charges you up. The common desire to get something done provides the atmosphere where the electricity can flow. Shared love for each other and the whole project energises the whole team allowing something to happen. And the thunderclap might not be audable in a real sense, but its aftershocks and resonancies can be perceived just as well.

Directing, I always feel the times when it works best. When it really is a profound moment of supercharged teamwork. When I have a dedicated motivated team around me, everyone carrying their assigned role to the best of their abilities, there can come a point where my work is done and I am the energizing energized observer. We are ready to create something that up until that point was a series of thoughts and ideas.

Once I’ve set everything up to get the results I need, it’s up to the technical crew to carry out the mechanical process of recording the scene according to my directions and the actors to inject their own energy. At that point, sometimes, often for less than a minute although it can feel like forever, I grasp the lightning. Electricity flows through us. White light. Pure thought flowing into action, flowing into existence.

White light. Creating a new reality.

…

I saw an excellent documentary at the weekend about people who chase storms, either because they’re meteorologists gathering data or film makers getting footage or just plain barmy. There was material shot from the space shuttle of lightning storms over the African continent. It was really beautiful with these blooms of white electric light exploding silently, first one, then another then another. Sometimes they were close together, sometimes they were hundreds of miles apart. Despite the massive distances involved they were clearly part of the same system.

It struck me that this happens in the Earth’s atmosphere because of the ability of water particles to become charged. And thinking laterally, most of our body is made up of water. So I wonder if it’s likely that we’re going to experience storms like this too within and across our bodies, for no other reason than that we contain water and iron too (the central constituent of haemoglobin in our blood).

I was also reading something about magnetosphere powered spacecraft. The idea there is that a small craft is surrounded by a large magnetic field which is in turn pushed by the solar wind–the stream of ions and other charged particles racing out of the sun. Now, another piece of lateral thinking, and it’s reasonable to suppose that we each have some form of electro-magnetic field of our own if we have all these easily charged water particles and rapidly moving ferrous material (haemoglobin) in our bodies.

So I was thinking, one of my friends has been studying aura healing and even though it sounds a bit far-fetched, it does seem to have an effect. And it might actually be based on electromagnetic fields. And when one person’s aura (em field) moves through another it has an effect. And remembering that light itself is an electromagnetic effect, there’s no reason to suppose that the receptors in our eyes might not be able to adjust to pick up some of the aura em field if it’s in the right part of the spectrum (ie. one that could cause a change in eye receptor chemicals).

In other words, there might actually be some scientific basis of auras and how they work and this is outside of traditional studies of brain chemistry and transmission of nerve impulses and I was wondering if anyone in the world is studying this. I guess at some point I’ll look into it a bit deeper, but if anyone has any thoughts, please feel free to share.

I also suspect that astrology, if it really does have any effects, would work in the same way–through electromagnetic fields. The fields generated by astronomical bodies with an iron core fill up most of interplanetary space. So even though the planets themselves are very small, their effects can be huge. A follow on from this would be that we wouldn’t expect some bodies in our solar system such as Mars or the Moon to have much of an effect as their magnetospheres are extremely weak.

Okay, that’s enough thinking aloud for now. Like I say feel free to share any related thoughts, whether they’re on storms, auras, astrology or the solar system at large.

Last week I was travelling with my friend Lucy down in Cornwall (which incidentally is probably closer to the size of Long Island than the comparison I once did with Yorkshire). I was introduced to a couple who both work in television, funnily enough in the same studio complex where I’ve been working in London. However hundreds of people work there and I’ve never met either of them before.

So the woman’s name is Fiamma, the Italian word for ‘flame’ which I think is really beautiful but Lucy thought it was fairly pretentious to give anyone a name like that. So she dubbed her Frogmella. I thought this was ridiculous. Why pull someone you don’t know down just because of their name? Why do people do that? It really bugged me and I said so. So of course Lucy keeps calling her Frogmella in all our subsequent conversations because she now knows it will wind me up and she can have some fun pushing my buttons. I continue to point out how lame she is being and so it goes on. Yes, real life can be just like the internet. Hang on a second…

I digress.

What I was going to say was that Fiamma has been working on a documentary project about lifestyles and was asking some fairly deep questions. Like, “What do you think your life is about? Why are we here?” I said that I’m mainly here to enjoy the experience of living and becoming wiser. And I didn’t really say anything else at the time. Afterwards, though, I thought about it and realised that this answer was too simple. It is almost straight out of Richard Bach’s Illusions and it isn’t the whole truth, although for many years I found it a good enough answer, a good enough belief system to give in response to those sort of questions.

We are here to have fun and learn but often we aren’t doing either. I think the purpose is more to find what it is that we enjoy–to discover what gives us pleasure and seek similar experiences. It’s also about discovering in what ways we can grow. It’s about finding and noticing what experiences most open our minds to learning and joy.

So beyond the basics of eating, drinking, sleeping and procreating, I still think life is in many ways about having fun and gaining knowledge, however it is also more than that. It is often a quest for experience and often those experiences come on us unawares–the timeless ‘now’ moments that stretch into infinity when we are in their midst.

Funny how I can feel that I am in one of those ‘nows’ when it’s happening but only when they are relaxed nows, not creative nows which are so full of activity. Yet in both cases, I can remember those ‘now’ moments so clearly afterwards. Those are my moments of really being alive and the reason why I am here. To exist outside time. And there to touch the soul heart spirit of the universe.

Which reminds me of entering the Maori meeting house in New Zealand. I was told that the tradition is that in that place, time has no meaning. Inside the meeting house everyone exists outside the flow of time. Presumably that allows them to touch the soul heart spirit of the universe too.

‘What’s your biggest regret?’ I’d put that question to one side for much of my life because, although I was always pretty sure I had regrets, they were all linked in with other things and difficult to make distinct enough to point to as regrettable. But I was thinking about it walking home from the station yesterday afternoon and I realised I do have two major real regrets where I want to say sorry really badly. Those regrets have names too. Because they’re people. Gillian Darby and Kenton Harding.

…

Gillian Darby was the first girl I ever kissed. Kissed properly I mean, like with tongues and stuff. I was at a party and 17–yeah, late developer. Or maybe not. I don’t know. We were drinking vodka and Coke or maybe it was straight brandy or even whisky. Who knows. You know what it’s like when you’re a teenager–some evenings you can drink anything until the cows come home and still not have a hangover. I’m sitting in a big chair in someone’s parents’ living room and the music is pounding loud enough to rattle the pictures on the walls. Their carpet is rolled up on the staircase to avoid it getting damaged. I remember sliding down it earlier that evening using a hairdryer as a ray-gun and being warned not to be childish.

So I’m sat in the big chair and looking around in that unfocused intoxicated floating on sound state and Gillian came and sat on the arm of the chair and we started talking. She was in the year below me at school and was a friend of someone’s girlfriend. I knew her because she was at Girl Guides with my sister and also she’d gone out with another friend of mine but they’d split up. She had long dark hair right down to her waist and wasn’t fully a woman yet if you know what I mean. Okay, small breasts. There. I said it. Anyway, it’s not like I was a man. We were both kids and she was there sitting next to me and of course we had to shout right into each other’s ears just to make ourselves heard. And that’s kind of awkward so before I knew it, she was on my lap.

Having a girl sat on your lap wasn’t so unusual in those days. It used to happen to me all the time in pubs and at parties. Maybe that’s just a measure of how naïve I was. Anyway Gill is sitting on my lap and that’s good and we’re having one of those conversations where you can’t quite hear the other person distinctinctly but you really want to keep the conversation going so you’re being extra interested in how they’re communicating as much as the content. You’re following their body language really closely and looking into their eyes and, well, you know, you’ve been there. Around us other sweaty teenagers have turned the room into Make Out Central and the party is in full swing.

And there came a Moment, a place outside time, where I looked down at her and my arm is around her and she looked up at me and her arm is around me and we looked at each other and I thought, hey, I could kiss her. So I did. And it was good. It was way better than I was expecting. I think we came up for air about half an hour later and had another one of those looking in each other’s eyes Moments and a sip of whatever was in the glasses. And then we carried on. The hands went all over the place and we grinned big grins when we weren’t ‘snogging’ and her long plait came undone and it carried on like that for the rest of the night. It was great.

…

So why should I feel guilty about that? Well, I don’t. And it wasn’t anything to do with the Kenton character. That’s a completely different story. No. My regret that eats me up when I think about Gillian Darby is more what happened the next day. You see, I had this huge crush on a girl in my class who also happened to be a really good friend. She also happened to be the most popular girl in the school.

This other girl hadn’t been at the party and I felt like I still wanted to go out with her. So I gave Gillian the cold shoulder. The poor girl stood outside the sixth form common room crying her eyes out wondering why I wouldn’t speak to her and I rationalised it all by telling my ‘mates’ that she was too ‘uptight’ for me and really it was me who was too far up my own backside to even have the courtesy to go out of the room and speak to her.

I was scared. Scared of ending up having a long term relationship with Gillian–even though I had no idea what that meant at the time. Scared of not having a chance with the other girl. Scared of having to deal with a crying confused female and having to tell her that I didn’t want to see her. And I should have seen her. I should have gone out with her even. She was actually a nice person and we would probably have had a really great time.

Yeah yeah. I was young, dumb and full of come and what can you do? You can’t live your life over again and I’d probably screw up in all the same ways even if I did. But I want to apologise to Gillian Darby because she did nothing wrong and I behaved like a total ratfink a-hole. Hey, I got to be really good friends with the other girl, the most popular one in the school, and she’s still one of my best friends ever after twenty years, but that doesn’t make it alright.

So that’s regret number one: I behaved like a gutless dork and I never apologised. Gillian, I wish I had. I wish I could.

…

The second story is several years later when I was running a television station which involved quite a bit of community programming. I had a number of people used to come in and work alongside the full time staff. They researched, produced, directed and crewed on programmes and many of them were unpaid volunteers who I organised specialised training for.

The volunteers were all very talented individuals and all worked incredibly hard. I’d say they worked harder than anyone on contract because they had full-time jobs to do during the week days and sometimes at weekends as well as making television. So to recognise this I organised an awards evening. We got a local business to provide a venue at their sports club, someone spent several days cutting together programme highlights, I organised voting among the programme makers themselves and Kenton Harding volunteered to compere the whole evening.

Now, Kenton was a local club DJ and an estate agent who had also been assistant producer on our series of live music shows, finding local artistes with original (uncopyrighted) material who would appear for nothing and also organising venues for location filming on a similar zero budget basis. Plus we wanted catering facilities and parking and a whole string of other requirements which he and the other AP’s made sure got fulfilled. In addition, he presented fifty percent of those shows and he was extremely good at it. A natural.

Kenton also organised coverage of the local town carnival, including being front man for the procession and on a stage in the park and getting sponsorship for the TV station through T-shirts and give-aways–something the cable company who employed me should have done but they were less than useless. Their centralised marketing department was a hundred miles away and barely knew the towns where the cable ran let alone anything about television. The people appearing in the programmes were far more motivated to ensure people watched. Oh, and Kenton regularly stepped in to present sports shows at the last minute as well.

In short, Kenton was a godsend sorting out marketing, producing and presenting shows and just generally always being there to step in at the eleventh hour and save the day. He even sorted out most of the awards evening itself with a free PA and audio visual equipment. Now, I’m not saying he worked harder than anyone else. There were a lot of people there putting in the same 200 percent. I can name at least twelve off the top of my head. And I did. And that’s where I screwed up.

You see, I decided to add some extra discretionary awards of my own in addition to the ones voted by the programme makers for technical and production achievements. I had twelve made and I forgot about Kenton. Inwardly I just cringe thinking about this. He stood there dressed up in his dinner jacket and bow-tie doing a fantastic job, cracking jokes and keeping it all flowing while making the presentations. Then I asked for the microphone and handed out those twelve extra awards.

It was only afterwards when Paul Thompson, my head of advertising, came over to me and said, “Er, I think Kenton’s a bit disappointed he didn’t receive anything.” that I realised. The poor guy was crushed. I am surprised he ever came back. I mean, he put a brave face on it and smiled when I went back to the mic later to give a special thanks to our compere for the evening but it was just plain wrong. Ugh. I vowed to do something about it the next year but the station was taken over by the same useless cable company marketing department that didn’t provide carnival T-shirts to volunteers making programmes for their subscribers and in a fit of phone-obsessed profit frenzy, the TV station was shut down.

So that’s my other biggest regret. I never said thank you properly to someone who really really deserved it and I undermined some of their motivation and enthusiasm from that point onwards. If you ever see this, Kenton, please know that you did good. You were one of the best. Thank you.

I was going to write something about how I spent a day (once) trying to swat a really annoying fly when I was really up to my armpits in alligators. But the thing you always forget when you’re up to your armpits in alligators is that you’re supposed to be draining the frigging swamp. So let’s drain the swamp, the swamp that is ‘what the hell is this all for and is this my life?’

This past week some pretty amazing and lovely and righteous things have happened. People coming out of the woodwork like you wouldn’t believe, or maybe you would. Maybe you live in the woodwork and I’m being unduly harsh on you. Well don’t take it so personal.

One thing that happened was I had a chat with one of the people I work for and he gave me that question, “Where do you see yourself in three years’ time? Or even five years’ time?” I’ve told people about him saying this and they are all like “What?” and “How do you answer that?” but I’ll tell you a thing. Once upon a time I went to a meeting of a Junior Chamber of Commerce — this was about ten years ago and there was this girl I wanted to go out with, yeah yeah, lame, but I went — and they asked that same question: “Where do you see yourself in three years time?” And you know what? I had an answer! It totally floored them because they were all clueless geeks and they had no answers to anything.

My answer back then was, I was going to be running a new television station that I was going to set up with a studio complex including continuous radio broadcasting and TV programmes every night and drama and documentaries and sports coverage and music and whatever. I’d have a staff of full-time committed people and the best training the industry could provide and we’d put 20 local people a year through a first-class training scheme at pretty much zero cost so they could make programmes and go on to get jobs. Wow. The unbelievable thing is that three years later I was doing it and it was all there. People just couldn’t believe their buggy eyes.

So how does that relate to now? What in the name of all that’s holy am I going to be doing in three years time this time? Directing a feature film. I have to just remind myself of that occasionally and I’d better believe it, buddy boy, “because otherwise you’re sitting on a big fat debt which was incurred with only one repayment option — success”. Or small chunks of servicing forever and ever amen.

And that means writing a feature length script because no one is going to hand over the option to their precious first novel to me with no major track record, are they? Well, one person might. Maybe. And another might be writing a script that they’ll let me have first dibs on and, of course, I’ll ask. But otherwise, writing a feature length script is what’s needed or the swamp stays full and I get eaten by the alligators, and never mind the flies buzzing around on the internet and what have you.

Okay. So, ever done this before? Once. And it’s no picnic. The thing about writing is there is no secret and no mystery. You know what the secret of great writing is? You write. That’s it. Just write. Do it or it doesn’t get done. Okay, so you edit afterwards and all that. But first and foremost is to just write and write and write some more.

Well, I’m verbose so I figure yep, I’ll write. What I need is a subject I feel passionately enough about to sustain my interest for five to seven years, though, because that’s what we’re talking about for a feature film. Phew. Okay, so I’m thinking. If anyone sees me pulling the soapbox out on a regular basis for certain things, those are the trigger issues I need to be aware of to focus on.

Now the other things that have happened this week are more those out of the woodwork reappearances by people.

Like here’s one: I was walking through the Underground yesterday evening and someone called out, “Hey Keith!” and I looked up and it was Shauna from salsa classes three years ago and she was beautiful and tall and blonde with these wonderful blue eyes and great smile and she remembered my name. She remembered my name. Wow. So we talked for a bit and now she does jive and why don’t I go along? It’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And who knows? Maybe I will. But she remembered my name. Have you any idea how good that feels?

And then today I’m walking through the BBC studios in London and I look up and there’s Jon Tuck walking towards me and I haven’t seen him in like how long? A year? Something like that. Jon was one of those people we trained with those studios that I set up and he always wanted to be a TV cameraman but he was driving a forklift for some stupid warehouse and doing roofing and often doing other things that he just shouldn’t have been but who would give him a break coming from there with no experience? Well I would.

Jon is one of the nicest calmest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Just his presence can relax a whole crew and I remember he used to describe himself as ‘the housewife’s choice’ and, yes, he was. A really lovely guy. Plus, he had a natural aptitude for camerawork. He used to wander into basketball when we covered that and pick up the camera and manage to track the action in sharp focused close-up for nearly two hours, making it look easy (and still managing to have a beer at the same time) all with this good-natured quiet smile.

So what’s he doing now? I knew last time I saw him he’d been pushing a crane around on a studio floor but was he doing any camera operating? Yes! He’s doing camerawork on the current series of Later With Jools Holland which is like THE live music programme on the BBC. In fact, it’s the best studio programme to work on there is, as far as I’m concerned. And I am so pleased for him, and proud of him too, even though his talent has got bugger all to do with me, that first break helped him get there. And well, what can you say?

Ha!

Now I have to find all my old soapboxes and see which ones evoke a fiery pit of passion and somehow link that into a people focused thing that becomes drama. Well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they? Yes. I just need to keep another online friend’s observation somewhere in mind too, though. She pointed out that formulas have a place in creative writing. Up ’til then I’d been afraid of them so everything I wrote ended up surreal. Now I know I need to get dirty in human drama and human emotion.

Three years time? I want to be playing in the mud at the bottom of the swamp and making people come to life out of the clay.

Small dreams, y’know.

Odd phrase. One of my mates, one Richard Pierce no less, said it when we were teenagers and asserted it could be used as a chat up line.

Rich suggested using it like this: “Hello, darlin’. Would you like to come outside and smoke my Volvo?” Pleasing, yet I couldn’t figure out what he meant then and I still can’t now. Is it a euphemism? Or did he intend burning the engine out on a family car marketed for its safety features? Why not ‘smoke’ a Porsche? Far more exciting, no?

This all came back to mind this afternoon as I was following a big black Toyota Celica back from town and noticed these cars have a huge gaping exhaust pipe, twice the girth of the average exhaust. Naturally I connected the feeble old pick-up line about Volvos with the gaping orifice/shiny appendage combo on view ahead of me. I imagined someone taking the ‘smoke my Volvo’ line to mean that they put their lips around the exhaust and smoke the whole car like a pipe.

Welcome to my world.

I’ve been thinking about my skiing trip and wondering if there’s anything about skiing that compares with the experience of getting to know someone. I’m talking about when two strangers get to know each other, one male and one female, and neither of them wants to take it too fast and both want to know they can turn or put the brakes on whenever they want.

This year I’m at the stage where I can ski a few blue runs at my intermediate novice stage. That’s two up from the nursery slopes so I’m not a complete beginner any more. Someone in the group above me said something about not being a passenger on the skis and how you have to control them, ride them.

Life and love and friendship can be like that too, although I always enjoy that freefall feeling of being a passenger – letting the emotions just take me and whoever I’m with, the same way you can let the slope and the skis just take you. The danger is, until you get in the ‘group above’ there’s no control over the speed; it all just happens and if you’re not careful you can hit a tree or go over the emotional edge.

I try never to ski out of control but sometimes it’s real fun to feel the wind on your face as you learn to shift your weight to turn. If you go down the same run a few times, you can get to know whereabouts you can go fast because there’s a flat bit ahead that’s going to help you ease off. If it gets really steep, there’s always the option of walking down.

Can that relate to relationships? To a friendship you don’t want going so fast that you loose sight of each other and/or it becomes more frightening than enjoyable? There are definitely routes we’ve all been down before and we know where we can safely become a passenger to our emotions. There are also unique bumps and curves (and how pleasing they are!) with every individual and those can take time to discover and learn about.

Once again, I have no answers and I’m just thinking aloud. I’m a blue level skier and I feel a bit like a blue level friend, especially where no one’s totally running the show; feelings just run high and low and you don’t know where until those months or years of knowledge and trust are built up. Where the snow is nice and it’s a good gradient, it’s the best thing ever. When it gets unexpectedly icy or there’s a blizzard you weren’t expecting, or even when the light goes flat, only experience can make a real difference.

An internet buddy of mine, Palmer, posted “Things I’ve learned to plagiarize” on a discussion board elsewhere and they are all so excellent. Two of them in particular seem kind of appropriate so I want to write them again, here:

I’ve learned that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.

I’ve learned that my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time.

Oh, yes. Simply, yes.

I had a little whine, I had a little cheese. I put on my hair shirt and I walked to the shops on crutches, not because I’m lame but because I was feeling lame. The shops had sold out of everything I wanted but I bought some essence of crab and some sour grape juice anyway for a little retail therapy. Spending money somehow makes me feel better about myself.

I hobbled round to a friend’s house on the way back and knocked on the door. I knew they weren’t expecting me as I’d seen them already this week but I saw the curtain twitch and could see they were in. They saw I saw and Eesaw, my friend, opened the door and let me in. I handed Eesaw the sour grape juice and Eesaw responded with a rictus show of teeth.

We sat in the kitchen drinking bitter herbs and Eesaw smiled a little and nodded at my comments about life, the universe and everything. Eesaw looked down from the loudly ticking clock and smiled a little more upon seeing me put salt instead of sugar into my hemlock-flavored brew. The kitchen was a little chilly so I had to rub my hair shirt to keep warm and this was not pleasant. Eesaw put a coat on and I took this as a sign that it might be time to go.

Two hours later, as I was leaving I noticed Eesaw had been doing some more sculpting in wax. Sure enough, there was a little figurine of myself which Eesaw had been using as a pincushion. I was touched by this and by the attention to detail, especially the hair which Eesaw had tweaked from me one strand at a time only yesterday. I was even more touched by Eesaw’s gift as I left the house. It’s not many friends will think to give you a plank to whack yourself about the head for the journey home!

I saw 28Days this week which is a navel-gazing film amounting to far less than it clearly could and which is therefore a disappointment. It stars Sandra Bullock as an alcoholic who goes into rehab for four weeks, hence the clever title. It seems to have suffered from art by committee syndrome and is basically Hollywood paddling in the shallow end of the ‘coming to terms with addiction’ pool.

The only line that really stuck out, to my mind, was something about how addictive personalities are people who get caught up searching for a quick fix solution to life’s problems. And the more I think about it, the more I think that actually applies to nearly everyone in the modern western hi-tech consumer-oriented world. We’re sold on the idea of a quick fix by television, comic books, newspapers and those short catchy pop tunes all of which are geared to filling you up for three minutes and leave you feeling unsatisfied. Set meal for one, two and keep the change.

We’re living in the age of flavor enhancers and artificial colors and, although it’s not hard to find something that isn’t chock full of monosodiumglutamate, those things are swamped by the pretty pretty snacky snacky things.

An example. I’ve been seeing the name Yo Yo Ma pop up on various internet discussions this week. That’s an odd sort of coincidence or maybe he’s just in the public consciousness at the moment because a friend was telling me about him just before that happened. Now anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not a great classical music buff but I like to try things and music is always such a wonderful thing generally, I thought this would be good – start listening to someone who is regarded as the best cellist in the world.

So yesterday I went on the hunt for Yo Yo Ma in the town where I live. Five record shops. Shouldn’t be a problem. Should it? Well, yes it is. Two of those shops are owned by the same chain and have, err, stuff all in the way of a classical selection. The Queen Mother’s Birthday Favorites, Nigel Kennedy and music to watch commercials by hardly qualifies as a selection. The third is Woolworths, which had Niel Young and a lot of empty cases in the Y section. Fourth was HMV which was slightly better but not really.

I went into the self-styled jazz and classical specialist, a tiny store with four racks. And that was four racks of very very little. The poor sales assistant was having trouble explaining to someone with hearing difficulties (irony?) that they needed to clean their CD to stop it skipping. I left empty handed and will search in the big major got-everything store in central London today. Thank goodness for London!

This also reminds me of Robbie Williams standing up at the Brit Awards a couple of years ago and saying something like, “I’m amazed that I get an award for something I find so easy to do.” Duh. That’s because pop music is mass-produced rhythms and a lot of big marketing budgets, methinks. A triumph of form over substance and technically clever but not really deep is it? Or am I just being cynical? Is great art or great music really just a five minute wonder with a short shelf life?

Okay I buy it because I enjoy it too. I’m a victim of quickfix MSG culture and I want it want it want it. And why not? I’m certainly not knocking Robbie Williams, who clearly does have talent. But I’m also an adult now and I don’t want to eat candy all the time, so why is the nourishment being undersold? Is it just cheaper to market chod or is marketing a big con trick anyway run by MSG junkies? Answers on a postcard and never mind the cost of the stamp.

This kind of happens to a few of my friends the first week of each new year. They party to excess over the holiday season, drink too much, dance all night, get up and try to work too. All the money gets spent and they have that alcohol ‘come down’ which everyone gets but usually only gets acknowledged physically rather than emotionally.

You do know alcohol’s a depressant doncha? It lowers our psychological barriers, our inbuilt resistance to doing stuff. That’s one of the reasons why it’s fun. You can be more yourself than you are regularly. But afterwards, there’s usually a price to pay. The next day there might be physical symptoms and it can knock the immune system out of the ballpark too. Look around you at all the flu that’s going around. Coincidence?

That’s not all. There’s also an emotional come down. While my buddies are feeling physically drained, they’re also getting emotionally down. I know this won’t last but it happens and it’s worth realising that it does. Then it’s not so much of a shock. Play some Howlin Wolf and get into it. Detox, exercise, keep to your regular patterns. Ignore people who write in slogans. Ha! Caught you there.

Physically run down. Emotionally under the weather. Cold. Fluey. No money left after the excess of Christmas. There’s only one thing left for my poor friends to do. Go out and buy themselves hair shirts in the January sales.

Well, it made me smile.

So that was last week. Now everyone is little more detoxed and it’s time to get off the sofa. Play some music. Pick that guitar up and start thinking about a holiday in the sun…