Deep thoughts,

somehow filtered into words,

so many words available and there is the confusion to be broken, solved, I nearly reached for the dictionary! But the filtering is done with an ever present self-consciousness that this is public, this is potentially on a stage greater than any theatre, circus ring or television screen can offer. So anything written here is potentially, with everyone looking over the shoulder of anyone’s body of reality.

I almost succumbed to using Latin words there for a moment to describe the body of my illusions. I can hear scaffolding being erected and the planes overhead, the hiss of the fire and the processor’s fan. They are attempting to distract while I try to tell you how I attempt to untangle the mesh of language that belongs to the individual wiring of my mind ….to simply explain why I am typing?

"This box of tricks" unlike paper and pen is not hidden in a folder or a binding cover later to be placed in a draw or cabinet, its out there!.…and what about all those influencing forces that restrict or limit what can be said so the reader will come back?

I keep thinking of something that amazed me about the newspaper press, the media. A friend of mine asked if I was going on THE protest march, his politics a little more radical than mine, that we should support the miners because the government had decided to withdraw any subsidies. Many people came and many policeman dressed in riot gear. It was a long walk, around the mainstreets of London.

Afterwards, we walked back through one of the Royal parks and exhausted, stopped for refreshment at a cafe at its centre. There sitting next to us, were three or four guys noticeable because their strangely similar suits and raincoats were a little shabby and they were obvious drinkers, not only because of the glasses in front of them, but the size of their waists! What interested my friend were their notebooks and their loud conversation, ‘that the miner’s seemed to have no support on the affluent pavements of Kensington and Chelsea’, that the ‘Sloane Square girls had gone about their executive secretarial business without time for the deep earth labourers’. We objected, engaging them directly, pointing out the same ladies they were discussing, had been hanging out of office windows waving and cheering everyone on.

To our astonishment the next day 3 newspapers led with what we had told them. One even headlined that Sloaners support the Miners! We had written the reporters column space for them because they had not marched or walked or waddled. They had not seen or even heard a fraction of the whole event, but adored the idea of the relatively well off supporting the soon to be unemployed. Just to get the reader to come back, to pay for the paper, to pay their salary. I suppose one could say, we had been their inspiration, that is why they had been sharing notes, tangled up wordsmiths were untied by two annoyed guys who wished they had been more self-conscious and kept their mouths shut.