Anton's Ideas
Anton Wills-Eve on world news & random ideas
Month: April, 2015
22/04/2015
THE BOY WHO HEARD TOO WELL
I originally posted this story some time ago in 507 words. subtracting the title and the first 250 words I reduced it to this 250 words (without title)
THE BOY WHO HEARD TOO WELL
Callum’s brain was much the same as anyone else’s except that he suffered from advanced hyperacusis. His hearing was by far his most acute sense. He could hear people talking in whispers on the other side of the street and had to concentrate to shut out other noises when following a conversation or lecture. But this condition served him more good than bad.
His family attributed his success, in being offered a place at Cambridge University to read theology, to his ability to digest an enormous wealth of spoken knowledge despite his limitations in communicating it to others. But what part did this knowledge play in his own belief in God? I determined to ask him when he attended my tutorials in his second year. He said
“Well, doctor, it’s the sound of God’s love that effects me most. I love God because I can tell just by the sound of his words how much he cares for what he has created. I have no sort of vocation to any religious life or service but I do enjoy praying. It’s saying prayers, thinking them through and listening to others reading them out loud that really convinces me that God exists!”
So I asked him to prove how he knew, just by saying and listening to prayers, that God had actually created the world and everything it. He replied, “Well my favourite line in any prayer is, “Behold the hand made of the Lord!”
No one had told me he was dyslexic.
AWE
ps: how on earth can any of you know I am telling the truth & ergo meeting the prompt?
21/04/2015
BETTER THE PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/polite-company/”>Polite Company</a>
why polite ?
BETTER THE PERSON YOU DON’T KNOW
You should never talk politics or religion with people you know, because that infers that you already know their views on these dicey topics. Much better if you don’t know. That way you can be honest and the other person knows you are. Also you won’t sound condescending which gets your friend’s back up. But worst of all if he/she thinks they know the way to Heaven (religion) and you know the way to hell (politics), you’ll have a very short chat and never speak to each other again.
AWE
20/04/2015
RAINBOW COLOURS
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/roy-g-biv/”>Roy G. Biv</a>
colours
RAINBOW COLOURS
Red is for stop, when driving a car
Blue’s for the sky wherever you are
Orange is juicy and fresh to the taste
Green’s ‘start again’, but without too much haste
Yellow’s a ribbon to tie round a tree
Violet’s been my wife since marrying me
Lastly bad “indigo” says what the police saw
“In you go” to prison for breaking the law.
AWE
total time taken 1minute 47 seconds
19/04/2015
NOT ANOTHER!
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/four-stars/”>Four Stars</a>
two days ludicrous prompts in a row
NOT ANOTHER!
I can’t write an account of my life because it’s still going on. Like a detective story, I won’t know who did it until the end, and then I won’t be here to oblige you. Sorry.
AWE
19/04/2015
A PROMPT RESPONSE
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/karma-chameleon-2/”>Karma Chameleon</a>
Your words and actions will influence what happens to you in the future.
A PROMPT RESPONSE
I have put the main idea of this prompt in italics because it is so obvious, stupid, and trite I can hardly believe it has been posted. Briefly, all life is aimed at speaking and behaving in the way we do in order to bring about the progress of our life as we want it to be. So what can one say other than , “Yes, I know”.
AWE
17/04/2015
TWO MANY COOKS
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/powerful-suggestion/”>Powerful Suggestion</a>
twenty years ago.
TWO MANY COOKS
If I could have 1995 all over again I might not have given up writing for my own pleasure on April 14th that year. You must think I’m mad. A lot of people do. But honestly, that was the day I wrote back to a major publishing house and regretted I could not accept their generous offer of £150,000 ($250,000) advance to write my autobiography. The thing that stopped me was that I could not have done it without telling the truth. If I had told the truth my family would have been distraught and I would have lost many of my close friends. So I just said sorry, no deal. Well what’s so bad in that? My life was exciting, interesting, sad, funny and full of all the things many people wish they could say with honsesty about themselves and what they had been through. But the faces in my dreams just crushed me into nightmare after nightmare and I pulled out. I’m not sorry because I still have many friends who would not be talking to me now if I’d told the truth about them. But what I hate about my decision was what it led to making me do.
I was 52 years old at the time and had a son of five and a half just starting proper school. I couldn’t expose him to what I would have written. His brother, then aged 26 would have been far more deeply hurt so it wasn’t on. But what did I do instead? Well I somehow managed to carry on fighting a dreadful illness, and keeping a lot of the world up to spec on the main breaking news stories, and manage to get to Mass at least once a week. But to do this I started to increase my alcohol intake seriously. Nobody noticed because I had a huge tolerance to this form of abuse which I had been using for most of my life to get through my health problems. But it was just enough to turn a very bad anxiety neurosis into a form of cancer that was diagnosed in February 2,000 and has been with me ever since. It keeps me in agony most days. Was I right to keep mum when I did? I know what I think.
What do you think?
AWE
16/04/2015
HOW ROSE ATE HER OWN WORDS.
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/daily-post-take-that-rosetta/”>Take That, Rosetta!</a>
a language I don’t know yet.
HOW ROSE ATE HER OWN WORDS.
Without any doubt I would want to be fluent in American. I already understand a lot of it and can write and read and talk it, well 23 of its dialects, but completely fluently? No, Mr Webster saw to that. I am not actually 100% fluent in any language but probably I could claim 99.8761% in English. Where I fall down is the limit of my vocabulary. There are still quite a lot of words I don’t know, probably never will, so although I’m nearly there what I have will have to suffice.
But why would I choose American? Well it would involve the smallest amount of learning, writing, reading and speaking. It is the one language I could actually see myself getting over 99% fluent in and that would be a wonderful feeling of achievement. At present I am about 98.14% fluent in most American versions of itself but perhaps I exaggerate. I may have a bit of trouble in inland North Eastern Alaska when it comes to coloquialisms and I know that the I have not yet mastered Hispanic Arizonian verbs. My youngest son’s American sister-in-law comes from New Mexico and I can talk back to her perfectly, but she assures me there is a difference over the state border. I must get over there and see if I can detect it.
In literature the greatest challenge for me with American is the spelling of words with which I am familiar in English. I remember tearing Henry James to pieces in my last year’s exams at school because he used the ‘Oxford’ Z, for those of you who know what that is, and I thought it a tragedy that a man who had mastered our language as well as he had should fall at the last fence – alphabetically literally – and pretend he thought Oxford spelling meant spelling as people did in Oxford, England. It doesn’t. It means in the style of academics at the University of Oxford. Not the same thing at all.
But many people flatter me and say how incredibly well I speak those languages which I have made a lot of headway in during my life. This is due largely to two things which on reflection I am sure are good tips on how to master a foreign tongue. I lived more than 28 years altogether outside the English speaking world so learned to speak like the people I was with. And I was blessed with a natural ability to mimic both vocally and in my gestures. But the other main help was greatly due to my passion for sports and classical music. You learn the words of arias in foreign tongues because you love them and they soon come naturally. And with sports you listen to the commentator and, as you can see what he is saying, you also can learn what his sounds, and thus his words, mean. Well I have strayed a little from the prompt if not the topic but I wish I had been asked which of my six fluent languages I found most difficult to overcome. You see the answer is I couldn’t possibly know. If I had known then, of course, the natural side of picking up the language would have made me worry about whether I was doing it right and that would almost certainly have made me do it wrong!
AWE
15/04/2015
I CAN’T SAY I HAVE
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/mentor-me/”>Mentor Me</a>
ever had a mentor?
I CAN’T SAY I HAVE
What on earth is a mentor? Oh dear I’ll have to Google it. It’s a what!? Strewth no. What would I want with one of those? You can’t teach an idiot to perfect the art of going mad, what use would I have had of one? I perfected my role in life by the age of , let’s just say much younger than usual.
But seriously. If you specialise in being an anomaly then you are in a sense unique. Now if there is one thing a mentor, if I’ve understood it correctly, could never do is duplicate unity. Apart from being a tautology wrapped in a contradiction, it would also mean the mentor would be unique as well. Think about it. That too is, an impossibility, isn’t it?
So if such a person should happen to be passing my door and on a whim knock on the bell and ask if I needed a mentor I would immediately invite her in. I certainly would not encourage a man to indulge in my madness. No, when it comes to the hard jobs in life I am definitely a feminist. – No! I said feminist! Tasks would have to be devised for me to master and I should like to start with a mildly esoteric form of insanity. I would like my mentrix to teach me exactly those.
If she had a good sense of humour as well we could think up some super situations. I could be asked to stop people in the street with a microphone and interview them for our local radio station. I doubt I would run out of questions pertinent to our locality, you know like “how far from here was the last open golf championship played? Nice try, but the answer is 987 yards not 216 miles”. You know the sort of thing. And the public love being on the radio. They always ask, “When is this going out, which station did you say you were?” It’s a perfect person trap. Have I ever done it for real as part of my work? Yes actually I have, often, but it was too tempting to last more than two or three minutes a person.
But all the time I was playing the fool with the mike, or taking the Mike with some fool, my mentrix would be scribbling notes about me on her clip board. Imagine people strolling up to her and asking, ‘what are you doing?’ To which her reply of
“Being a mentrix” would elicit the remark aimed at me,
“Lucky you, mister!”
Yes I am begining to see the sense in this insanity and starting to approach this prompt with more passion than jocosity. I might even advertise in the local paper, “Mentor looking for desperate subjects. I only charge a small sum and you’ll come out a new man!” But if the person advertising were a mentrix, this might not be the case. Oh, I don’t know though, if you think about it you still might.
AWE
14/04/2015
VOLARE SU TUTTE LE FURIE
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/mad-as-a-hatter/”>Mad as a Hatter</a>
the last time you flew into a rage.
VOLARE SU TUTTE LE FURIE
Personally I have never flown into a rage in my life. I fell into one once when ski-ing in the Alps and missed a slalom gate. Boy was I flaming as I shot off the piste into the spectators. I really was piste off.
But rages and flying and I have yet to form a triumvirate. I drove into a rage when I was nineteen and had had a few drinks too many on the cobbled streets of Brussels. They found the front of my sports car, complete with unharmed driver, wrapped round a lamp post and the rear seat and wheels some one hundred metres further up the road. I loved that car, it was my first genuine racer. But the rage came when I was told my ‘accident’, what unwitnessed highway stupidities are called in Europe, meant I was withdrawn from that weekend’s formula two motor race at Francorchamps. Imagine missing a key race in a series you were leading and in your first season in the sport. Now that really was being driven to distraction. Rage time with a vengeance.
I have encountered rage in other ways too. Have you ever stormed into a rage? Not easy to do usually, but this was in a thunderstorm on the cliff road between Barcelona and the Pyrenees and in persuit of a felon who I had watched knock down a small child. It was twlight and the summer sheets of lightning were throwing walls of fire across the Western end of the Mediterranean sea. Incredibly spectacular but I was more concerned with catching my crook. The boy was not very badly hurt but I did not know that as set off after the villain. It really was straight out of Edgar Wallace, without the cups of tea. My father’s German saloon car was no match for the baddy’s Spanish tortoise and I finally pinned him on a corner overtaking him on the coast side of the cliff where he least expected me. The Spanish police hailed me as a hero and the French police as an idiot who could have killed himself driving like that in such an ‘orage’. I had never forgiven the officer who called me that until today when it allowed me to make the most awful bi-lingual pun!
Another brush with rage came when my wife dropped one of a pair of crystal champagne flutes which had been given to us as a wedding present. Hand crafted for us, too, by a leading glass blower in Florence, and a true work of art. How I kept my temper I do not know to this day. But she wept so contritely as she brushed up the shards of glass that the scene ended in rag time, not rage time; the pair of us just cuddling each other until our love outlived our chagrin.
So, you can see that though I have a temper of sorts, it is simply something into which I have never flown. But I have a friend who flies into rages all the time. He is in the Royal Air Force and his wife’s name really is Rafaella. Apparently they fly into rages regularly, but always out of them again afterwards, deo gratias! But you’ll never believe the tag line to this story. His name really is Roger Wilco.
AWE
13/04/2015
OMG IMHO
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/from-the-collection-of-the-artist/”>From the Collection of the Artist</a>
what they’ll think of us 100 years on
OMG IMHO
We can’t blame them. They only had basic communications technology so could not convey what they wanted others to know, think, see, hear, sense or smell except by using their rudimentary machines and even their own hands. Some people were even reduced to using their brains, but luckily medical research made great strides in curing that.
Poor sods, what a life. But at least they hoped to reach Heaven when they died. We did so, of course, by using that red button thing the archeologists found in Moscow in 2091. So perhaps they were on to something a century ago after all.
AWE
10/04/2015
HOW HE DID IT
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/the-interview/”>The Interview</a>
choose someone fictitious to interview
HOW HE DID IT
It was the last straw. The interest rates at all banks and financial institutions were so low that Dr. John Watson had no idea how he was going to carry on if he did not dip into his capital. He had some £40,000 in his current account at the Royal Bank of Spain and Northern Morocco, but as his good friend, the great detective, became ever cleverer at devising ways of saving his patients’ lives the good physician found he was making less and less money out of curing the rich. His friend was too clever at assuring they were never ill.
“I say, you couldn’t help a chap out of a scrape, could you old man?”
“And what sort of scrape would that be, Watson. I see you have no mud on your shoes so it is not a bootscraper, and as you know nothing about the culinary arts it cannot be scraping butter onto bread. Enlighten me Watson.”
The good doctor sighed and said, ” I fear I shall have to sell my home if I am to maintain my current standard of living. I am down to my last £40,000.” The gaunt sleuth eyed his friend with quiet concern but suddenly rose to his feet, lit his pipe, shot some dope into his arm and reached for his violin.
“No.no my dear chap, how can you help me in that condition? I need money, not the sad necessity of attending your funeral!” Came the worried crie de coeur.
“Elementary my dear Watson. If I pop round to the television studios dressed like this they will sign me up for a mini series at once and shower me with enough money for both of us to live happily for years.” Watson was stunned. Could he let his friend risk being shunned by casting teams who had not even heard of him? Alas he had no choice, he had to let his friend do as he pleased.
It was four months after the mini series had taken the world by storm and made both men very rich indeed that I, a young cub reporter, was asked by my editor to interview the great man and ask him how he had managed to get the part and assure the series’ success.
“Tell me Sir,”I asked in an awed whisper when he granted me an audience, “How did you do it?” I noticed the faithful Watson curing a rich man in the background.
“I’m afraid I don’t know how I did it, but all my inspirational devices and ruses, together with my scientific logic, must have worked at once. How do you think I pulled it off, Watson? ” he asked turning to his trusted colleague.
The doctor smiled whimsically at him and replied, “By calling the series Sheerluck Holmes.”
Which is also, of course, how I became editor of my newspaper.
AWE
07/04/2015
A SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPH OF AN OLD GIRLFRIEND WHO HAS JUST DIED
a photo of an old girlfriend who I have just heard has died
ON A SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPH OF AN OLD GIRLFRIEND WHO HAS JUST DIED
Oh my Glen. I miss you so.
Why oh why did you have to go?
In your photo, so shy and pretty
You fill me still with love and pity.
As I recall each innocent kiss.
Was I always the one you missed?
Empty hearted I still ache for you.
Look! You’re smiling at me, too.
With your brown check school dress
And those fair hands, whose soft caress,
Always left me lonely and broken hearted,
Your hair on my cheek, each time we parted.
Then that April night, under our twilight tree,
What happened to make you stop kissing me?
Did you keep my love with you as you went,
Leaving all the coin of our realm unspent?
So very young.
So smiling bright.
My sun by day.
My moon by night.
My singing wren.
My snow white dove.
My own sweet Glen.
My one and only love!
Anton Wills-Eve
04/04/2015
WHAT A DAY TO BE FREED
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/imho/”>IMHO</a>
suffering for the sake of others
WHAT A DAY TO BE FREED
I have just read of a fifty eight year old man who was released from prison yesterday after serving thirty years in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. Why was he held so long, and why was he freed?
From what I have read, and it is all I have to go on, he could not afford a defence council and expert witnesses who would have had him out of that jail in one day. The trial was a farce, the chap was coloured, nobody in judicial authority cared two hoots about him and so they found him guilty but let him appeal in case the travesty was so obvious to everyone in the State of Alabama it might look racially biased. Well that would not have been news.
Why was he brought to trial on the hearsay of someone who thought one of his elderly relatives might have possessed bullets that might have been used in a gun that was used to shoot two people dead? Because he could not afford, nor could his defence council, to hire an expert witness who could have shown on the spot that the bullets did not fit the gun. Eventually this was admitted by the prosecution yesterday and he was freed after losing half his life. But, Like Jesus on the first Good Friday he had something very painful to celebrate. Jesus celebrated our freedom by suffering for all of us and it is to be hoped that the victim of this miscarriage of justice will also have sparked off a movement to stop all detention on death row ever again.
Can you imagine a worse torture than not knowing from one day to the next whether you are going to be alive at sunset? It does not bear thinking about. The President is a coloured man, he should speak out against this appalling practice in the US. In the eyes of foreigners it marks the country down as the worst and most cruel nation on earth whose laws have been passed by its elected representatives and senators. No, the only reason why miscarriages of justice such as that revealed yesterday are committed are because many rich Americans believe in revenge. What dreadful people they must be. Especially the coloured ones who do not even stand up for their ethnic peers. You can’t tell me there wasn’t a single coloured , very rich, man in Alabama who could have sorted this out 29 years ago. I just don’t believe it!
AWE
03/04/2015
THE BEAUTY QUEEN’S LAMENT
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/three-letter-words/”>Three Letter Words</a>
just for fun
The Beauty Queen’s Lament
When young, Oh my, could I wow,
The boys as they gazed
At my beauty, amazed,
But please don’t look at me now.
All my mirrors are draped in shrouds.
That outmoded mess,
My beauty queen’s dress,
Would look good with a harp and some clouds.
The make up I wore at the ball,
When I was crowned,
As my world twirled round,
Today looks like damp leaves in Fall.
It is probably mostly the gin.
Jealous friends said,
– But they are all dead –
Make my dimples crease up when I grin.
But I hope I’ve outlived one bitch
Whose malevolent tongue
Was like pure cattle dung.
I hope that she’s dead in a ditch!
Anton Wills-Eve
03/04/2015
HAPPY EASTER
a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/three-letter-words/”>Three Letter Words</a>
HAPPY EASTER
This is the nicest type of blogg,or post or whatever you call it. I just wanted to wish everyone a very happy, holy and enjoyable Eastertide. You deserve it for reading my rubbish so regularly. 🙂
AWE
03/04/2015
IN A COMA
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/three-letter-words/”>Three Letter Words</a>
a post with no three letter words
IN A COMA
I lost consciousness with a vague, very vague memory of driving; no more than that. A girl sitting next to me laughing, lurched towards me as a lorry smashed into us. I lost control of everything, brakes, steering wheel even my ability to think.
That really is when my coma must have started. Nothing I have tried to recall comes back into my head. I remember a dreadful pain in my back, otherwise just blank frames of nothing fleeting across my brain. I felt scared without even knowing what frightened me.
Many days later I learned about what happened, details that sort of thing. However, while suffering, afraid in my nightmare awareness because anything that remotely made sense remained well beyond my cerebral powers. My first intimation of recovery came with being certain I could pick out a light. A doctor or nurse’s torch, perhaps, though very faint at first.
Flickering, quite certainly a light, followed by returning sight allowing me to pick up shadows of human forms. Nurses in their uniforms became clear at last. However, when trying to shout or speak I realised I was incapable of making a sound. I tried three languages, every one to no avail.
“Aiuto!, Au secours! Help!” Nobody moved or looked at me. I spent three days like this, apparently, in unconscious hell before I found gradual, returning hearing accompanied my sight. After that faces around me smiled as they realised I understood what they were saying to me. That I could communicate again started my mind thinking normally, while being able to move my limbs came next, before eventual full recovery.
Where does a human mind go when in a coma? I have no idea. What I do know, though, is that I never want to go back there again as long as I live.
Anton Wills-Eve
02/04/2015
I SHOULD KNOW MYSELF THAT WELL?
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/its-a-text-text-text-text-world/”>It’s a Text, Text, Text, Text World</a>
How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?
I SHOULD KNOW MYSELF THAT WELL?
If you naturally write in such a manner as to convey to your readers exactly what you want them to understand then that is all you need to be able to do. Emotion and intent will come with the phraseology that you use. In short, if you automatically write as clearly, concisely and expressively as you need to get across everything you want your readers to pick up, then you have no problems and have done everything this post asks.
But if you are able to do this by just being yourself as you write then two things will result in answering the questions in the prompt. Firstly, you will never know how you have done it because it is not something at which you have had to study anything outside the skills you already possess. And secondly, you will never be able to tell anybody else how to do this because, given that it has entailed no learning on your part, then it follows that you will not be able to teach your skills to others because you have not had to analyse them. Granted you could learn how other people attempt to do what is required, but it will never be your own natural, individual style. En bref, one must ask, can anybody know themselves that well? I doubt it.
AWE
Anton's Ideas 