click here for part 1

Contents:

1. Always look on the bright side of life.
2. People and a pigeon

A walk into town to meet my wife from work and buy a new blender. We’ve been using a horrible cheap smoothie maker to make tofu for the past few years. Thankfully, it degenerated into a dysfuntional lump of plastic and metal, and so, if we wanted to continue making home-made tofu, we had no choice other than to buy a new blender type instrument; it had to have a fairly large capacity – at least 1.5 litres, and be heavy duty enough to cope with grinding up soaked soya beans efficiently enough to justify making home-made tofu in the first place.

I got to town earlier than planned, because instead of walking I jumped on a passing bus, so I went for a walk around, pausing in the market where I bought 2 dairy-free bounty-type bars from Clancys, the vegetarian stall.

After coming out of the market I heard someone playing the guitar and singing the song “Always look on the bright side of life,” from the Monty Python film. As I got closer it amused me to see that the guy with the gitbox had the most miserable expression I’d ever seen on a busker.

What I really wanted to do was to film a video of him singing that song with that downturned mouth – I’m not kidding – it would have got a fair few views on Youtube I’m sure. But,  because I’m too shy, or not cheeky enough, or a coward, I carried on walking past for going on for 50 metres and took the photo that the picture below has been cropped from – it’s only a phone camera after all.

As you can see, he’s looking the other way so I didn’t catch the expression I told you about.

He wasn’t bad actually – voice-wise and music-wise – I’ve paid to see less entertaining performers.

I’ve never done any busking but I did beg on the street once or twice, mostly in Tenby when I was about seventeen; sleeping on the beach and harassing holidaymakers.

The police threw us out of town in the end. They drove me and a mate Jimmy, from Birmingham, to a spot just outside the town boundaries and told us to bugger off.

We hitched to Torquay – got harassed out of there eventually as well. But that was a long time ago.

I was still too early so I sat on a small bench type piece of street furniture outside the library and watched the people and the pigeons doing their things.

It was busier than it looks in the photograph – and sunnier.

We’re going out for a drink tonight – now, in fact. Hope it’s not too busy. Will report back . . . .

It’s twenty past eleven, back from the arty-farty centre after 3 pints of cider and a quarter packet of crisps. Had some proper craic with some proper people or maybe I was just a little drunk.

Besides the people we had arranged to meet we bumped into an old (young) friend from the old (old) village. He’s an actor now and doing all right.

Overall we talked about art and music, theatre and television performance, writing and publishing – what did you expect in an arty centre?

But after all that the point is that it just all goes on – I mean in our small party there were people over 60, people in their fifties, people in their mid-forties and early thirties and people who haven’t quite left their teens, but the point is that we were all human beings of the sort that are willing to investigate and challenge the received wisdoms that we are required to subscribe to – up to our own individual limits anyway.

I get the feeling that this piece of writing is not working so I may abandon it now , , ,

But, hold on. I promised you I’d tell you how it all works – if you believed the title of this blog post that is. And since it’s related to part 1 then it should have at least a little relevance to that previous post where we talked about how many stars there are in the universe – i.e. – out there.

So, now we must talk about in here, you know, we must drill down into the sub-atomic level and beyond that even into the quantum foam.

Suffice it to say that where there are 400 billion stars in the galaxy and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe then are are just as many particles, or bits of stuff, at the quantum level. As far as I know from my limited knowledge of quantum mechanics and from the results of my own contemplative thoughts then everything is made of particles from molecules via atoms to sub-atomic particles, But when you examine a particle then it is far too small to actually see it – it exists only by the effect it has, and individually a particle is far too small to have any effect anyway – so there is nothing!

What it all boils down to is that nobody knows anything and anyone who tells you they know something to be an absolute truth is either daft or deluded.

But the way it goes is that we have to use what we’ve got, so, just let it be, get on with it. Keep on trucking!

That’s how it all works.