Cockeyed Optimist

This is a pantoum on the subject of blogging,
(A Malaysian verse form that has much going for it.)
This is not about logging, nor yet about flogging,
So disregard those who would try to deplore it.

A Malaysian verse form that has much going for it,
A way of ensuring that poems stay quirky.
So disregard those who would try to deplore it,
Their motives are possibly selfish or murky.

A way of ensuring that poems stay quirky;
Appealing to bloggers, more than closed-minded folk;
Their motives are possibly selfish or murky,
And their knee-jerk response is to mock us or joke.

Appealing to bloggers, more than closed-minded folk;
We’re more confident, cheerful and nicer than they are;
And their knee-jerk response is to mock us or joke,
But we carry on blogging, while they fume and despair.

We’re more confident, cheerful and nicer than they are;
This is not about logging, nor yet about flogging,
So we carry on blithely, while they fume and despair
-This is a pantoum on the subject of blogging.

(See a discussion of Pantoum.)

If you are a whizz at word processing, you can skip this post - you already know it all.  

I see a lot of student essays, and I’ve been struck by the naive way that many people use, in particular, Microsoft Word, to write their essays, reports and anything longer than a letter.

I’m not here to give them some lessons in word processing, I just want to make a simple plea - find out about, and then use Word’s paragraph and heading styles.

Why? There are several excellent reasons:

• They can make the document look nicer. And if you are not satisfied with the way that, say, a particular level of heading looks, you can change them all at once.
• For long documents (like dissertations, or even books), you can make a table of contents automatically, and update it as easily whenever you need to.
• You can view the whole document as an outline, so you can see how it’s structured, and, if necessary, move around whole sections to improve that structure.

That’s all, for now; here endeth the lesson.

Not even my family knew all of these (now they do):

1. I’m an RAF-qualified air navigator (this has probably expired - I qualified in 1953).
2. I used to be a premie (NOT a premature baby - other premies will know what it means).
3. I first learnt to roller-skate when I was over 45 years old.
4. I obtained a PhD in Information Technology at the age of 73.
5. My dearest wish (unfulfilled as yet) is to be able to play a musical instrument.
   

Isn’t that interesting!

My Dad was a self-educated man; he was the eldest of a family of five being brought up by a single mother in a poor area of Richmond, near London, England. My paternal grandfather, who I never knew, had fled to Australia, so we were told. Dad left school at 13, having repeated his last year (I don’t know why). He had a series of jobs, such as deck-hand on a Thames river boat, assistant to a pastry cook (in the Maids of Honour cake-shop), dial-writer in a speedometer workshop, and finished up as a policeman, at age 20.

He met and married my Mum while stationed at Greenwich (where West meets East - literally), and was forthwith transferred to a town in nearby Kent county. I was born at my maternal Grandma’s place (the house belonging to the Greenwich Inlaid Linoleum factory - my Grandad was its works manager).

I might post about my subsequent life-history at a later date, but this post is about my Dad and how he educated himself and acquired the notion that education was the master-key to life.

While still stationed in London, I believe, he had started going to adult education classes at the City Literary Institute, where he took courses on psychology, French, and German, among others; this practice persisted for a long time. And our home was, I remember, different from those of most of my school friends; it was well-supplied with books.

As for me and my two younger sisters, Dad put into practice his belief in education - we were encouraged (sometimes bullied) into doing our best; all three of us eventually went to university; by no means normal for people from our social class (even Police Sergeants’ children didn’t aspire that high - you had to be at least an Inspector).

So I am eternally grateful to my late father and to his optimism about the power of education.

People living on the east coast of Australia are very familiar with scrub (or bush) turkeys. They are not really related to turkeys as they are known in US or Europe; they picked up their name because they have some slight resemblance to them - a red head, pendulous wattles, blackish plumage, but a bit smaller.

What they are chiefly known for is ruining your gardens.

Instead of making a nest and sitting on their eggs like decent birds, the male makes a huge mound of mulch (maybe 3 metres wide by a metre high), and the female(s) lay up to 30 or 40 eggs in it, which are hatched by the heat generated by the mulch. The problem is that the source of the mulch is the topsoil of your garden, and anything else that the male turkey can scratch up - your prize flowers and small shrubs, ground-cover, whatever.

So why do I say that the scrub turkey is not an optimist? After all, he works all day and every day, in the breeding season, with the aim of raising several broods of chicks. He must be doing this in anticipation of success; so why is this not the same as optimism? Well, the simple answer is that (as far as we know), turkeys and other birds have no conception of the future; they do what they do because they are following a built-in script, that’s all.

Perhaps it is inseparable from the character of many of our poets, but it seems that there is almost always a tragic element to poetry. Think of the themes that so often come up — death, loss, love, separation, aging, defeat — how can any of these escape being tragic?

And even when the subject of a poem is ostensibly happy, humorous or light, some tragedy intrudes, as though the author were obsessed with the dark side.

The only way this can be avoided, so as to introduce an element of optimism, is to write ‘comic verse’, which ensures that neither the poetry nor its author will ever be taken seriously … so it goes!

How about this, by Harry Graham:

Auntie, did you feel no pain

Falling from that apple tree?

Will you do it, please, again?

‘Cos my friend here didn’t see.