I've been giving positivity a new appraisal!

Positively wired!

For my first blog in quite a long while I’ve put aside just boringly listing what I’ve been doing in the last year, (not very much & it wasn’t a very nice year, though happily it did get better towards the end). I actually had some very good & unexpected news just before Christmas about an acting job, you’ll see it on my news page & I’ll excitedly talk about it in a later blog,  And although you might naturally think this has influenced the tone of this, I'd actually decided on this radical course of action before!
Oh It was by the way a particularly lovely Christmas, spending it for the first time in years with every single one of my Fab 4 nieces, 2 nephews, mum, my sister & bro in law. I even had a fun new years eve, (never at the best times my favourite night), almost certainly because…(drumroll), I’ve been giving positivity a new appraisal! 

Well, sure I’ve heard people extolling it’s virtues for years, often surprisingly in the light of sheer gloom & doom &bravest enduring the worst things in life happening to them.Although being moved  I was never thoroughly convinced though & perhaps shamefully wallowed in me misery of happily nothing that awful happening to me, ( NOTE to self to stop doing that 'me" instead of my thing, I used to think it endearing, but not anymore), ... Except of course going without a girlfriend for a far too long, depressing periods in my life, not being allowed to be paid to act, again for far too long periods, trouble with accommodation & just, simply getting old whilst all that's happening or not happening as the case may be!.  
I even prefer the word melancholy to positively. Positively, positive has a smug, self satisfied bearing to it, and those who utter it, do so with annoying upper inflections like they’re instantly lecturing you on the merits of self worth. Melancholy on the other hand is such a lovely word that delights the tongue and is unassuming & self effacing. It’s poetry & it’s beautiful & has always appealed to my gothic. sorrowful sensibilities.
​Now although i may know a few Morrissey lyrics (not that anyway I subscribe to the view that Mozza's lyrics are just miserable, they're wonderful), and a large proportion of my favourite films  don't have conventionally happy endings, I haven't tended to go about outwardly miserable, can do cheerful really well, maybe my finest acting half an hour!
I have indeed had my moments of being extremely positive, but it's never of course lasted and I haven't ultimately believed in it as a philosophy.
​ There is a lot to be negative about in life, always has been even pre Brexshit & we can't always be being our own personal North Korea, brainwashing ourselves that everything's great! 

However I have come to believe, without any cause or reason or indeed epiphany this Epiphany, that this positive thing may be on to something, Positive thinking what have I got to lose? Only negativity. Optimism is on paper anyway a nicer word that pessimism.
Whilst still being suspicious of alacrity & not wanting fully to part company with my old acquaintance worry for fear of tempting fate in the real worry stakes. I’m of course not positive anyone else actually reads my blogs, but I'm positively not worried about that and positively they do help me, so I write them  just for me and I do positively (positively over using the word positively now), think they are worth writing! That said if you should be reading, please bear in mind that I am a new convert to this positivity thing, so wish me luck & be positive about it!

Anyway as a celebration of my conversion, i’ve been whiling my time compiling a list, yes another list), of things in life to positively love most about it, a good percentage of them are material, but they are all life enhancing & the reason I feel joyful to be walking & sharing this earth with them, or the thought of them. Now i don’t want to appear smug or annoyingly self congratulating, (even if I do have good taste & a nose for the best, though I say it myself), but this is good. I’ve gone right inside my mind to the darkest, sweetest, pervyest & happiest recesses of it. This list is so much more than a list, that word undersells it so... negatively. What this is is just positively Earth magic!  

So In the spirit of the great Ian Dury and his ‘Reason’s to be Cheerful' & also that magnificent Sunday Times ad, I don’t know if you remember it, when to the strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, ( I've helpfully added this accompaniment below & suggest you press play before reading the following), he magnificently extolled the virtues of simply being Magnificent…. 

HAVE SOME OF THIS…….!

 Three masted ships, witches, liquorice 
& cheese omelette and chips. 
Playing Poets & Pirates, the short stories of RLS, 
& the swish of a silky dress.
Straining spaghetti thru a tennis racket, 
velvet jackets & being both empathetic & enigmatic.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Dorset’s Maiden Castle
& Dicken’s Christmas Carol. 
The dawn when you don’t have to get up in the morn, 
Raymond Briggs’ drawings, light up globes with snow storms
& french maid uniforms. 
Playing gin rummy on trains, the Masterpiece board game
& the true theatre of dreams at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
Sinéad singing Molly Malone, being at home in Rome
& Paddy Kavanagh’s Christmas poem.
Mermaids, model railways, roman mosaics, 
Hendrix’s Purple Haze & Richard Harris’ Bull McCabe.
The Damned’s New Rose, French toast, crows
& the peek of petticoats.
A piano when played at by Tori, telling ghost stories
& The Royal Observatory.
Weymouth’s seafront & harbour, Bowie’s Life on Mars, 
my super power Tara & the musical Les Miserables.
Black cats. a pint of Bass
& Depardieu’s Cyrano de Bergerac. 
Castle ruins, pickled onions
& double chocolate chip muffins. 
Stevie Nicks voice, early Pink Floyd,
​Dinky toys & Midnight Cowboy.
Lurrrve purrs, Helter Skelter & ginger preserves
& a woman’s curves in jodhpurs. 
Dr JCC’S Beesley Street, old movies on Talking Pictures tv
& Jupiter from the Planets Suite.
The Pogues & the Cure, Kate Bush & Christy Moore
& John Lennon’s look in Magical Mystery Tour.
Dublin’s fair city, peaty Laphroaig whiskey
& darling Julie Christie.
Fairy lights, Marmite, The Beatles White 
& Wuthering Heights.
Redheaded women, Alan Garner’s senses
& guitars even when i can’t play them. 
Faustino Rioja, Eliot’s Prufrock 
& any Little Richard rocker.
John Hurt, Botticelli's Venus, black satin pencil skirts 
& a Gibson Les Paul in sunburst.
The Last of the Mohican’s, the Can-Can & Brendan Behan, 
​Robin & Marian, Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man
& tight shiny pants like worn by Olivia as Sandy when a vamp .
Conor McPherson’s The Weir, Cheshire meres, 
Nell Gwynn, Emily Bronte & Boadicea.
Billie Fishers’s dreams, the colour green 
& black stockings with seams.
Feeling refreshed when having overslept, 
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec & a Jensen Intercept’.  
Crooning I like New York in June & The Leaving of Liverpool, 
always seeing a New Moon
& a wiseman who knows he a fool!
Chuck Berry singin You never can tell,
Peter Gabriel, Autumn’s smokey smell 
& the word Mademoiselle.
And the bluest & the greenest & the greyest sea.
AND happily, luckily, wonderfully 
that my mums still with me! 

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