PILE UP ENOUGH TOMORROWS AND YOU’LL FIND YOU’VE COLLECTED NO END OF EMPTY YESTERDAYS

A bit late, but Szczęśliwy nowy rok and here’s hoping it’s a better one than most of the previous! Got to say however that, despite a jittery last few months, the new year has already kicked up some promising stuff, including a much healthier look to the work, including a couple of new and promising contacts!

Still, losing my dad, however expected his loss was supposed to be, has been taking its toll on the everyday activities which normally keep the rest of us ticking along!

Thank GOD for Dominika - I really don't know what I'd do without her right now!

Just about everything has either washed over me or has seemed completely trivial in the last few months since just before and after his death, and if you will forgive me just a little more self indulgence here, I continue to miss the auld fella more than I can say - Can't quite get my head around the thought of never having a good old chin-wag with him ever again - Suppose my dad is the closest family member I've lost to being a good mate - Just wish we could have spent more time together - have him in the mix a bit more with all my regular friends/mates, if that makes sense!

As he once said to me during the many times we talked through his long illness however, (and I’ve no idea where he got the quote from, but, he always liked to collect the odd line of wisdom or two), ‘You pile up enough tomorrows son, and you'll find you've collected a hell of a lot of empty yesterdays’! Well, there’s no end of truth in that, and my dad would have been the first one to admit that he piled up far too many tomorrows than’s healthy for any thinking human-being – For him, and he would be the first to pat me on the back for saying this, for myself, I continue to try not to make that mistake!

Was it Edwin Bliss who said, Yesterday is a cancelled cheque: Forget it. Tomorrow is a promissory note: Don't count on it. Today is ready cash: Use it..! Well, he might well have simply meant this to apply to time management in the world of commerce and industry, but it applies equally to ‘artistic’ creativity and living in general! And, perhaps this’s where ‘trivia’ isn’t such a bad thing after-all!

I know I’ve been accused many a time of wasting a great deal of the stuff of life on trivial activity, but, hey, one person’s trivia just might be another’s E = MC or perhaps should be.., and, I stand by the ‘belief’ that all life journeys lead to the same old place, but as long as you get there with a smile on your face then you’ve been lucky enough to ‘spend’ that ‘ready cash’!

SMOKING ‘TABS’ AND GOOD ‘CRAIC’..,

.., well, they go together with having a beer or two in the pub, don’t they? Not anymore of course, what with the smoking ban back in Britain as a whole. And, what do we have in the meantime while any good den of iniquity we did have is either closing down or just surviving by ‘donning the clothes’ of the new righteous.., what will we have as a replacement full-stop, well, more bistros than a community will ever need and bloody kiddie friendly restaurant bars.., and as well as being simply a sad state of affairs that such a great institution will disappear forever, I suspect the full cost to society in general hasn’t yet been fully calculated!

The once great English pub has long been the meeting place where society’s misfits, rebels, great thinkers and the like mull over the latest craic on any given subject, and the terrible fact is, that some of the greatest theories and the subsequent creativity that results from this atmosphere from within smoke filled bars is about to be resigned to the great ashtray in the sky worldwide forever… What we’ll finally be left with when the ash settles is anyone’s guess, but if my recent sad visit to what used to be my favourite haunts back in England is anything to go by, then most likely we’ll be left with little more than the real horror of trivial chit chat, (if any talk at all), and the need to drink up as quickly as possible to head off home to enjoy something more exciting like, hmm, what’s on the telly… Yes, and along with what all this entails - the formulation of germ-free ideas and the resulting sanitized art, whether it be music, painting or any other medium you might care to think of.

As I sit with friends and colleagues alike over a beer or two down at the local, cigarette burning in one hand, glass in the other, burning issues falling from the lips like gifts from above, the sad fact is that it just isn’t going to last anywhere for anyone for any or much longer – It appears the tide has unfortunately and irreversibly turned – the virtuous surfing in on their wave of untarnished rhetoric, for if it wasn’t bad enough that the great English pub has been purged of any fertile activity, there’s now talk that in the foreseeable future, Polish bars might just be heading down the same sterile slipstream of fresh air!

Sad days indeed – Why oh why can you non-smoking dull f*ckers not just stay away and leave the dangerous environment of smoked filled pubs, clubs and bars to those who dare!

And one last quote for now: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want”..? :-) Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.