RETROSPECTIVE: YOMS (YOUR OLD MAN SAYS)

I was just messing around looking at the statistics of this blog....you know, how many people have viewed it, how many posts I have done....and the trend is not my friend, really. More than 7300 people have viewed it, which in the greater scheme of thing is nothing. To wit: Gangnam style had over a billion and a half hits. But 7300 is the size of a small town (bigger than the town I came from, actually). Maybe it is the title...a bit obscure I realise, but set up really as an advice place for my son (thus the old man sobriquet). Maybe it is of no interest. No matter, hopefully at some point someone read something I wrote, or looked at a video, or saw a picture, and nodded their head and said: yeah.

That would make it all worthwhile, and if that is the case, then thanks for taking the time.


I also looked at the number of posts by year, since this has been up for about five years. They drop by about 25% per year. There are some worth revisiting, some even I look at now and nod my head. So that in and of itself makes the whole venture worthwhile.

We live life in a digital world where nothing is but what is not. Everything is temporal, and like stones being tossed into a pond we will leave a few ripples and then disappear.

Apparently the ether which is the internet will not disappear, so somewhere on a server or set of servers this digital record will survive, and someone in the future might, and I say might, just wonder who the hell Your Old Man was and what the hell he had to say.
  

TORSO

TORSO

London

May 2013

WREN'S DREAM

A rare burst of sunshine and the awesome splendour of Christopher Wren's dream: St. Paul's Cathedral.

WREN'S DREAM

St Pauls London

May 2013

PARKING: THE LUNATICS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE ASYLUM

This is what is clearly wrong with modern life. Check this unbelievable nonsense from the parking mavens at Hounslow. The District Line is suspended to Richmond at Turnham Green. My wife comes to pick me up. Thinking she can't stop at the zig zag line, she rolls forward to the single yellow line over which a taxi rank dotted line has been painted. I get in and zoom away. The whole operation, as captured and corroborated on CCTV, takes 13 seconds. For this we receive a £55 "parking" fine, generated automatically by the We Will Soak You Because We Feel Like It department. I have of course appealed. This amusing vignette sums up what has gone horribly wrong in London.... Public Transport which fails on a consistent basis (signalling problems between Richmond and Turnham Green 4 days out of the last week). It seems that such a technological challenge can't be overcome despite billions of investment. Not so the ever present CCTVs and algorithms which capture every waking moment, and in some cases (this one in particular) "enforce" indiscriminately. 13 seconds? Parking? Come on......

EVERY VICTORY IS A DEFEAT

Remember the poem by Shelley: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings  Look on my works, Ye Mighty and despair.....


When you get to the top of the mountain....look for another mountain.

Climbing is life. The trophies mean nothing but the climb. Your joy is in direct proportion to the effort put in, and you and you alone can ever know how hard the struggle was.

Someone said that all politics end in defeat. As does life. Victories are just moments, and like Shelley's statue in the desert, they will soon be covered by the dust of the ages. The only thing that will live on is the memory, and memory is love. Nothing else.

Remember that, and have it etched in your mind as this was carved in stone in the Alhambra.

E. V. D.

Every Victory is a Defeat.

EVERY VICTORY IS A DEFEAT

Alhambra Granada

Mar 2013

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' 

Percy Bysshe Shelley