Pride and Prejudices

  You have alighted in my dark little corner of cyberspace either by accident, or out of curiosity. If it’s the former – I wish you good luck with your continuing search for the dentist in Nova Scotia or the kid you went to school with in Bolsover. I am neither of those John Caddens. Should you be here by design, I feel obliged to offer a few insights in return.

 On the basis that we can learn quite a lot about people from their passions and prejudices, I offer the following of my own……  

SOME WHO DIED: 

 too soon                                 too late                         about the right time 

Hendrix                                 Wordsworth                            Keats 

Marlowe (Kit, not Philip)              Elvis                                Mozart 

Lennon                                  McCartney                    Dean (James, not Martin) 

Lenin                                        Castro                                 JFK 

Gandhi                                      Swift                                Voltaire 

Shelley                                    Henry VIII                           Kerouac 

Joplin (Janis & Scot)                    Dali                               Fitzgerald (not Ella)    

Einstein (despite his age)       Johnny Hallyday                     Socrates 

SOME WHO SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BORN:

Nobody. 

On the Judas Principle, even the usual suspects – Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Manson et al (Capone) – were necessary to the shambolic scheme of things. 

Rewind…..Nobody except Margaret Thatcher. The others destroyed people – she destroyed a whole country. As Trump is trying to do!  

THE IF-ONLY-ONE-PIECE-OF-WRITING-COULD-EXIST PIECE OF WRITING:

Blake – Proverbs of Hell

OTHER SERIOUSLY IMPORTANT PIECES OF WRITING:

Voltaire – Candide 

Bronte – Wuthering Heights 

Frost – Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening 

Auden – Musée des Beaux Arts 

Eliot – Four Quartets 

Yeats – Grant Me An Old Man’s Frenzy 

Kafka – The Trial 

Chamfort – Maxims 

Heller – Catch 22 

Beckett – Endgame 

Hardy – Return of the Native 

Shakespeare – Othello (in every aspect, the perfect tragedy)   

WRITING THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED; 

Austen – all (Seriously? – just airheads looking for 'lurve' in such a momentous epoch?) 

Flaubert – Madame Bovary (puts the ‘turd’ in ‘turgid’) 

Proust – A La Recherche….(the only temps perdu here is that spent trying to read it) 

Adichie – Purple Hibiscus (Things Fall Apart had already been written – many years before) Attwood – The Handmaid’s  Tale (1984 - ibid)

 …….and just to show this isn’t a Woman/French thing….. 

Betjeman – all 

Browne – Da Vinci Code 

Kipling – most of his books and poems, all of his cakes 

God – some of the Ten Commandments (my neighbour has quite a covetable ass)   

PLACES THAT MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING:

Las Ramblas – at night 

Mount Athos – at dusk 

Ngombo Beach – at dawn 

Anfield – on match day 

Any pub/bar – anywhere in the world, at opening time 

Standing before – a Turner painting....or a Balinese sunset (preferably in a bar……with a Turner on the wall ….and  Liverpool – Man Utd on the telly) 

London’s West End – early Friday evening 

Dingly Dell – Sevvy Park 

Anywhere in the world – that's not the M25 or Fourvière Tunnel at rush hour   

LIFE-GUIDING PROVERBS (As I lack Blake’s status/vision/talent, mine are from Hull, not Hell) 

# Look within; look up, look down, look around; look within again. Play Spot The Difference 

# If there’s no rehearsal for life, I want my money back. I don’t pay for badly prepared   productions 

# Silence is often the best way to make yourself heard 

# When writing ‘shed some light’. If you can’t do this, go and ‘light some shed’ rather than  churning out ‘ leadsome shite’ 

# Truth in whine 

# The ‘common people’ have absolutely nothing in common 

# Two wrongs may not make a right, but they can be a way of having twice as much fun 

# Give me Groucho over Karl every time 

# If you must be moderate, be extremely moderate 

# Social Media is to meaningful communication what King Kong was to origami

# When lost, stand still; when confused, stand apart; when troubled, stand firm; when flush,  stand a round 

# Maps are seductive delusions of certainty 

# Sorry, Mr Frost, I love walls 

# It’s still worth leading a horse to water if you need a drink 

# Opposites do more than attract. They give everything its meaning. Polarity drives the  universe – though bi-polar people do not necessarily start with an advantage 

# Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed…..Manson, West, Brady…..Go figure….. 

# Sometimes is better than Never. Never is better than Always 

# Imagine if vultures, rats, hyenas and cockroaches had hired the dolphins’ PR agency 

# Time is endless and Time is relative – especially if you’re staying with family 

# When you reach old age, walking past a branch of Next can give serious pause for thought 

# Go to a travel agency. Point at their decorative globe. Ask – “Is that all you’ve got?” 

# Today – or Never 

# To thine own selves be true. (All of them) 

# We are all climatically-conditioned, weather we like it or not 

# Death is the full stop at the end of a life sentence 

# Good ideas are like good sausages – they always come in connected strings 

# Tea and sympathy can help; beer and laughter can heal; whisky and silence can make whole 

# Keep moving. Look what dogs do to trees 

# The Best Before date on ‘passion’ is always carefully concealed 

# If tomorrow never comes, how come it made it into the dictionary? 

# Actually, Oscar, it’s better to reach for the stars from the gutter, rather than simply gaze  at them 

# Time is a lover with no heart 

# Descartes’ splitting of the mind away from the body, heart and soul did more harm to  humanity than the splitting of the atom 

# A baby’s smile is a thinly-veiled threat. A lover’s smile is simply a veil 

# Do not walk in front of me, for I may not wish to follow. Do not walk behind, for I may not wish to lead. Do not walk at my side, for.....Look, just piss off and leave me alone

# We die from what and who we are