I’ve always liked the Sex Pistols song ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as I find it hilarious, and often actually laugh out loud when listening to it, primarily because of the parenthetical insertion at the end: “… and I want to be an anarchist! (and get pissed). Destroy!” I was talking to my partner about this yesterday and he said the song is about “the lyricist passing judgement on the ‘anarchist’” which seems about right. It’s all about the petty acts of ‘revolution’ (that aren’t really) that might, just maybe, bring about anarchy. Like giving someone the wrong time when they ask. Or holding up a line of traffic!
I think we’ve all committed these small acts of subversion, that of course are utterly, mind-numbingly conventional (and unoriginal).
Mine was buying a Tube ticket (in the days when you had to go up to the window and ask, this was before we had Oyster cards!) at Charing Cross and asking for a ticket to “St Pancreas“. Revolution! Indeed.
The strange thing though is the other week I was buying some other train tickets for London and the guy working at the station at the ticket desk said “St Pancreas”, thinking I had misheard I ensured conversationally that it was said again, and there it was, St Pancreas. Is it a small act of subversion by a railway employee? A way of introducing some interest (and I use the word quite loosely) into an otherwise tedious day? Or perhaps this guy really thinks it is St Pancreas and no one has had the heart to set him straight!
Or perhaps it really is St Pancreas and I’ve been wrong all this time… now that really would be subversive. I’d get out my Tube map and check but I’m too busy starting my own small revolution.
As a younger self I was fascinated and horrified by UFOs and all sorts of other ‘supernatural’ things in about equal measure. Was I credulous? Not particularly: not impressionable, not so much, but inclined to develop my own strange ideas and then for them to take me over.
Despite, or perhaps because of, being “externally” oriented and actively engaging with the world, I often feel like I experience it at one degree of remove compared to most people. Through a window.
I came back to Starlight Express (the musical) via a rather circuitous route.
Long story short: I’d been analysing ‘Hey Jude’ for an Open University course (no, it’s not “a course in the Beatles”, it was a computing project for which I used the song as an example of how my encoding system would work!) and wanted to have a look at my Beatles sheet music book (similar to this one). Unfortunately I’d ‘lent’ it to someone over 10 years ago and never seen it again! But then I’d ‘borrowed’ it from someone else in the first place. You know how it is.
Anyway, I’d come by the Beatles-book-borrower’s Starlight Express sheet music book by a similar process, which is where this starts.
As a younger self I used to worry a lot about mundane details of arrangements in advance of doing something. “How will I know whether that’s the entrance to the underground or just the exit”, etc. A few years before (going back to being a child, now) I remember my Mum talking to my Nan about how she had lost her PIN for a credit card and would have to phone the bank on Monday and get them to send a new PIN. I was terrified! How would I know how to operate credit cards and PINs when I was old enough?
I don’t keep a dream diary or bore people with “what I dreamed about last night” in general, but this one seemed quite strange and significant, even more so as I have now found the bug in my code (a la Kekulé and benzene)!
I have a copy of Lenore Thomson’s book Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual as part of my research on the MBTI personality type system (a broad subject and one I am going to write about separately at a later stage so I’ll just mention here that I was reading the book and leave it at that for now). I was already aware of my type (ENTP without any real doubt, though I used to test as INTP I’ve never truly been an introvert and realise that now!) so didn’t expect to find out anything really new from the personality test she included in an early chapter of the book, though it did corroborate the ENTP “diagnosis” which as far as it goes is good.
I was particularly struck by one of the questions though (which is intended to measure N (‘iNtuition’) vs S (sensing) preference) – all are in the ‘choose either A or B’ format. “A: My physical surroundings are important to me and affect how I feel. B: Atmosphere isn’t all that important to me if I like what I’m doing.” Answer A indicates towards a Sensing preference and B an iNuitive preference. Very strongly and almost viscerally I answered A (though in general, as a dominant iNtuitive type my responses to the rest of the N/S questions mostly reflected that) and I was surprised that this was so.
Automatic writing is a process of writing ‘unconsciously’ by entering a sort of ‘trance’ state and producing writing that isn’t consciously considered and thought. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while, though was put off by not knowing too much about how it works and particularly what I vaguely remembered reading previously. Now I’m intending to go back to it and try it.
We recently had a 10 year school reunion (ie 10 years since learning leaving) and it sparked a bit of a wave of nostalgia in general including going back through some old diaries and writings etc that I’ve kept from various places. As I don’t have that much storage space at home (since all available cupboards, drawers, flat surfaces etc are taken up with projects of various sorts, or perhaps just mess!) most of the archive papers and so on are stored at my mum’s house, but around Christmas time I did go through some of them and brought them back with me to have a look through and perhaps remember writing them!
that it was said again, and there it was, St Pancreas. Is it a small act of subversion by a railway employee? A way of introducing some interest (and I use the word quite loosely) into an otherwise tedious day? Or perhaps this guy really thinks it is St Pancreas and no one has had the heart to set him straight!