Batshit Crazy

'Oh she's bat shit crazee
She's batshit mad
The batshit it has taken away
The little bit of ummm....something something...
Whatever.'

To be sung to the tune of Football Crazy, by Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor. Preferably in a cellar with the door shut.

Bright Shiny Things and Dirty Little Secrets

I’ve got another Diary to read*.  

This time it’s Kenneth Tynan’s.

It’s spiky and incomplete and full of quotations that caught his eye.  I’m very much enjoying it, so far (I’m on page 44, just).

The thing that popped into my head is this.  He had a bright shiny life full of dirty little…secrets.

That is not a bad thing.  Everyone has dirty little secrets.  They’re the things that drive us on.  He was only fortunate to have the bright shiny life part, as well.  I’d go so far as to say that he wouldn’t have had the bright shiny life part without the secrets. I’d perhaps venture even further, and say the dirtier the secrets, the brighter and shinier the life.

Dirty big secrets aren’t really interesting.  You want a dirty little secret.  It’s the grit in the oyster.

When you read a Diary you think you’re getting the nitty gritty. You’re really not, of course.  The only Diaries in which you’d get that are raw, pure diaries that you might find under a random pillow of a random maniac, or at the other extreme, a 1920s ‘housewife’ recording her seasonal jam-making** and such-like.  Someone who writes unself-consciously because they don’t imagine themselves a writer and who seeks simply to record the daily grind.  Which in itself is full of miracles that jump from the page as you read.  Published Diaries, of course, are carefully edited. Nevertheless they're probably my favourite type of book***.

I suppose if nobody had secrets nobody would write.  It’s secrets that drive some people to write, some people to paint, and others to hide themselves away in a cave, with a supply of custard creams, a sleeping-bag****, a flask of best brandy, and all of their secrets, dirty or otherwise, locked away in a strongbox.

I could go on.  But I won't.

*Two pounds eighty one off of Ebay, by the way, including P & P.  If ever I come into money, I'll pay full price for books.  She says shamefacedly.  Till then... 

**George Orwell recorded such things in a section of his Diaries.  A wonderful read.

***As I was typing that, I knew it was wrong. I also like biographies and, well, anything really.

**** and earplugs, to muffle the sound of the secrets fighting to escape from their prison.

Remember when....we had privacy

Remember before the internet - when we had 'privacy'? When we had - for want of a better word - 'boundaries'?  Before emoticons and DMs and photographing your own bottom and transmitting it round the entire planet?  Remember when you actually had to make an effort, if you wanted to spy on somebody?  You couldn't just do it from under your duvet using only your thumbs while working your way through a tube of Pringles.
Now we're all being spied on - all of the time.  And nobody cares.  Nobody cares!  It seems normal! NORMAL!
It's not normal.  Nothing about life in 2016 is normal.  The weather's not normal.   Food isn't normal. And being in contact with people ALL the time isn't normal.  It's freakish and unhealthy and creepy. Where's the psychological space?  We're all under constant surveillance, all of the time, whether it's the obvious things like having your shopping 'choices' monitored and scrutinised so they can sell you more, and your so-called friends and family poking their noses in via the internet and thinking they know all about you, or darker things like the 'security services' (who are they?) and stalkers that you'll never ever know about because they live in their bedroom in Nebraska and you live with your son's ex-girlfriend in a semi in the Wirral and earn your living videoing your own bottom and your husband's dead in the freezer with a tattoo of I heart David Attenborough on his left artificial pec, and - and it certainly isn't 'normal'.
Everything's done 'online'. Banking.  Shopping.  Listening to music.  Watching telly.  Making stuff up. Like what I'm doing now.
It's not normal, I tell you.  Not NORMAL!  Nothing is, nothing is.  I used to think I wasn't normal till we got to this appalling stage and now I think I'm the most normal person alive.
Nothing's done 'outside' any more. By 'outside' I mean outwith the parameters of the internet. Because nothing CAN be done outside any more.  Or so it seems.
Remember when you could close your front door and take the phone off the hook and that was IT? Peace and bloody quiet.  If someone wanted to spy on you they had to stand outside your house and WAIT.  Writing stuff down in a real notebook with a real pencil and taking photographs with a real camera containing a 'spool' or 'roll of film' which they then had to get developed in a 'dark room'.
Remember that film, One Hour Photo, with Robin Williams, where he spied on that family via their photographs?  It seemed freakishly hi-tech back then and now it's like the dark ages.
And oh yeah - remember when, if you got fed up, you could get on a random bus to Wick or Land's End or Milton Keynes and VANISH - and nobody would know.  You weren't traceable via CCTV and your mobile phone, and you wouldn't have your coupon blasted round 'social media' until you were 'found', whether you liked it or not.