Pleasures | Matt Wingett

Paul Daniels – A Little Bit of Magic

By Matt on Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Matt Wingett reviews Paul Daniels at The King’s Theatre, Southsea, 22nd February 2012.

Paul Daniels was, when I was a lad, something of a hero of mine.

I liked his funny patter, I liked his smooth magic, and of course, when I was an adolescent I loved seeing his beautiful assistant “the lovely Debbie MacGee” getting tied up in scanty clothing, only to mysteriously emerge without explanation in another part of the room.

So when it came to seeing Paul at the King’s Theatre Southsea, I couldn’t resist.

The fact was though, that I went along with some doubts. Would he still have the magic? And what had happened to him in the intervening years? Somehow, he had crashed out of public life – suffering a humiliating series of vicious attacks from a British media intent on knocking down anyone who got too popular. Stories had circulated of his arrogance, and there was a continual dig at the fact that he wore a wig, which supposedly showed he was vain. It was petty, and it was stupid – but somehow after the Press did their worst, he sort of withered away.

The question was: could he still cut the mustard – and then make it disappear?

Making a definite virtue of his hairpiece in the name of his new show “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” was cheeky and funny, but also strangely telling, considering how this ridiculous brouhaha about a wig seemed to have overshadowed this top performer’s reputation in the 80s.

With that “hang the journalists” attitude implied in the show’s name, I have to say that the first half of the show did look like Paul was on the back foot. The audience was disappointingly scanty for one of the top performers of the 1980s, with perhaps a 100 people in the massive King’s Theatre. This certainly didn’t help the ambience.

Paul himself seemed subdued, and started off reiterating the point that he never really cared about his wig in the way the papers had implied – he came on sporting one, in order to make fun of it. It was a strange opening. To me, he seemed to be fighting an old fight that was long gone, and his continued barbs at the Press throughout the show implied that he’d been “got at” more than his “It was never important to me” implied.

The first half sputtered along unevenly. He did a nice levitation routine, and disappeared some handkerchiefs – but really it was all rather pedestrian. The guest appearance by Kev Orkian, an Armenian illegal immigrant who was a genius on the piano was spirited – but he had to work hard to get this small audience to respond. Which, actually, he did.

There were moments where Paul’s personality shone through. His kindness to Jen and her little boy Cas in the audience was really endearing, and he managed to win the audience over. Nevertheless, by the end of the first half, I was approached by one guy who said that he was disappointed thus far.

The second half, though, was a very different matter. Paul’s magical effects increased and there was a definite reigniting of the old magic. His quips with the audience were on the money, and very funny, and the comedy added an extra twist all the way.

Then something extraordinary happened. Paul took it to a level in which – half way between supposedly messing up tricks, he appeared to hypnotise two volunteers from the audience, with no explanation and no induction.

It is possible that they were stooges, but I like to think they weren’t. They were very believable and one, being a street cleaner and the other an employee in Game in Pompey, it should be pretty easy to verify.

The effects built one on another, with signed playing cards appearing from nowhere, a lovely running gag about a £20 note, and a series of befuddling, funny tricks that really got everyone thinking.

Did he hypnotise, or didn’t he? How did he get that note hidden away?

If the measure of a magician is in the way that people continue to ask questions after the show, then I would say that Paul still has the old magic. I am scratching my head even as I write! It was good to see his kindly, funny show of the old school.

It wasn’t just nostalgia. Yes, this is a great show to see!

Opinion Pleasures

Arts and Their Impact on Human Relations – by Maha Moussa

By Matt on Saturday, December 18, 2010

I have a guest writer on the blog today. I first met Maha Moussa 10 years ago while I was working for the British Council in Cairo. Maha was interested in learning English, and was a wonderful hostess to me, taking me around the markets and secret places of Cairo, walking along the Corniche, teaching me about Egyptian food and taking me to cultural events, including Sufi dancing. It was a wonderful time.

When I moved back to the UK, we lost touch, until one day she popped up on facebook and said “hello”. Maha has lately been studying English again, and she sent me an essay that she wrote for her teacher. I was impressed by it, not just because of the competency of the English, but because Maha engages with her subject with a great deal of honesty, joy and optimism. It is the second essay she has written on the course. Before now, Maha was all self-taught – writing to friends in the West, and meeting Westerners in the markets. I think it is impressive for that feat alone – but above and beyond that, she raises some really wholesome points and some great, uplifting descriptions. It is very different from the way that I write – and I hope you enjoy the change!

Arts and Their Impact on Human Relations – by Maha Moussa

Music, Singing, Dancing, Drawing, Poetry, Movies, and Plays, each of them is an important aspect of the culture of different countries and their civilizations. As such, they help us to form our ideas of life with many different perspectives.

There is no need to learn to be an artist, or even to study The Arts in order to feel the beauty which we see in the painting of the great works of Leonardo Da Vinci, or in the painting of an unknown person who lives in a slum area in India, for example. Napoleon Bonaparte said: “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and yes, this is true . There is also no need to speak several languages to be able to enjoy the wonderful music and songs that we listen to in different languages. All we need is to learn how to feel, to see, and to listen to these inspiring arts, by using our senses, our hearts, our minds and our consciousnesses. We can follow our desires to become acquainted with other people’s cultures and deal with them on a human level through their arts. That is all that we need to appreciate art.

One of the most famous quotes by Victor Hugo is: “Change your opinion, keep to your principles, change your leaves, keep intact your roots”. Thus, to be proud of our roots, our civilization, and our culture’s artistic heritage is something truly good and healthy. This sense of pride should help us to have a deep sense of understanding and respect for the cultures and arts of other countries, too. It gives us a wonderful chance to know more about the arts that contribute in some way to shaping the hearts and minds of other people, and affects our ways of dealing with each other in life. The fact is that, the global exchange of arts between countries, such as music, singing, dancing, drawing etc., provides opportunities for humanity to open the door of knowledge, to help people to add richness to their values, their dreams, and their ambitions to create a smooth path to communicate with other wonderful people around the world, and accept their differences. In this way, we learn to accommodate others in a way that is less severe or intolerant, regardless of their beliefs, their customs, their religions, their nationalities, or even their lifestyle. This shared gateway frees us to meet each other naturally and respectfully with more flexibility, respect, and tolerance.

Someone once said about music: “Music expresses feeling and thoughts without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.” So, if anyone has the opportunity to watch or to listen to any of the various music performances that come to Egypt from different countries such as: Korea, America, Zambia, France, Ireland, Pakistan, or India, etc., I think that the most useful way to be able to enjoy and feel this music is to let your soul go free and clear your mind, as if you are traveling to those wonderful countries and attending these performances by yourself. This is my advice from personal experience.

A few months ago, in the last Month of Ramadan, I was attending one of the greatest and most talented performances that I have ever seen in my life, along with one of my foreign friends, who was working in Cairo at the time. This wonderful show was one of religious music. It was the international annual festival of “Samaa for sufi music and chanting“. It was a new cultural event that started 2 years ago. It is held annually during Ramadan, in one of Cairo’s oldest and most iconic Islamic buildings, El Ghoury Dome, or Qobat Al-Ghoury. The event I attended this year at the festival had bands from many countries, such as: India, Morocco, Spain, Turkey, while the core band had members from Egypt, Indonesia, and Akabila. This wonderful performance was a mixture of Islamic religious chanting, Coptic hymns, and Opera songs, at the same time. All of these bands were glorifying God, and His messengers Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but with many languages and in various musical styles. They provided to the world through their music ”a message of peace“, to explain that God created us equal. Regardless of the religions or the beliefs we follow, we all are humans. When my friend and I were listening to them, we felt as if the amazing music and sounds came to us from heaven. All we could do was just enjoy the Islamic Sufi chanting and the Coptic Hymns and we felt that there was no difference between them. When the whole group said the same words together, such as; Allah, God, Mohammed, and Jesus, we became surprised at how they felt the pleasure and the power of their words, and how they transferred that feeling to us, even with our inability to understand most of the languages in which they were performed. We had no choice but to respond to their music and their songs. Really we felt as if we had already traveled to each country.

In my opinion, there is no specific way to enjoy the different kinds of arts; every person has the absolute freedom to see, to listen, and to taste the art in the manner that suits him or her. Art and freedom are two sides of one coin. Thus, our freedom creates a sense of love, care, tolerance, and respect between peoples. So let us know and learn more about each other from our arts and our cultures. They translate many great and deep meanings in life into one common language we can all understand. Art provides us with convincing answers to many questions that we have in our minds about others, and the answer always is this: that we are all human, just human.

Pleasures Writing

My New Word – “Synecdoche”

By Matt on Sunday, November 21, 2010

Okay, so I’ve got to share this with you because I think it’s one of those unusual words that I didn’t know existed. I was just reading Seamus Heaney’s notes on the Anglo-Saxon poem, “Beowulf”, and this really unusual word jumped off the page. When I find new words I get as excited as an amateur naturalist finding a new species of beetle. Here it is:

“Synecdoche.”

It’s pronounced to rhyme with “select a key” – so: “Si NECKED a key”, with the stress on the second syllable.

The context it was in was to describe the Old English word “ecg”, as used by the Anglo-Saxons. It is pronounced “edge” – and interestingly enough, means “edge” – as in the edge of a blade.

Now, here’s the thing. In Anglo-Saxon writing, the word “ecg” doesn’t only mean the edge of something. It stands for far more – because it can also means “sword”. What happens is that the part of the object referred to gets to stand for the whole thing. So, “ecg” by transference, also means “sword”.

That’s synecdoche.

You’ll hear synecdoche all the time in modern English, where the part stands for the whole.

For example: “Here comes Big Mouth,” is a good example, although in this case, you could argue that the part stands for the hole. Another example would be: “Who’s the suit?”

And it’s not only used this way. It can also be used the other way round, where the whole stands for the part. “The street was jumping for joy” doesn’t normally mean that houses, lamp posts and gardens were involved in uplifting athletic activity. Just the people, normally.

Another form of synecdoche happens when you talk about the container of something when you mean its contents. For example, when you say: “I’m just going to boil the kettle”, you don’t actually mean that you are going to get a kettle, put it in some form of crucible and watch it first melt and then bubble off as kettle vapour. Nope, as far as I understand it, you are going to boil the water in the kettle. And when you say “Do you take plastic?”, it doesn’t mean you can pay for your goods in empty milk cartons.

Then there are the words in which you use a specific class name to refer to a single thing. I’m not sure, but I think the annoying habit of a friend of mine to refer to all women as a “Doris” might fall into this category. “I was out with this Doris the other day, and…” He’s a nice looking boy, and the only Doris I knew of was an elderly lady with a blue rinse with a penchant for knitting. When he tells me this, I see him in my mind with his hairy chest and open-necked shirt in a swanky bar, seducing a woman in pink carpet slippers and 1950s glasses, who will take her teeth out and put them in a jar at the side of his bed, before the evening is out. Which pleases me no end.

Finally, there’s the version of synecdoche which is a general class name that refers to a individual items. To be honest, this one I don’t really get. With “Prepare to abandon ship”, for example, it’s pretty obvious that it means the ship you’re on. You know, the one that’s sinking. Besides, abandoning someone else’s ship means getting on to it in the first place. Which I suspect would be counter-productive. I think that’s a form of synecdoche, but I’m not sure. Synecdoche is, after all a new word for me, so I am sure there is much more to learn about it. What I know is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, if anyone can shed a bit of light on that final class of synecdoche, I will be most pleased.

In fact, to be synecdochetic about it, I will be all smiles.

🙂

Pleasures

NLP Follow Up – Laughing Out Loud In The Pouring Rain

By Matt on Thursday, November 11, 2010

After the NLP session I did yesterday with a client, today I had the following text from a very much more smiley individual than the one whom I met before the session began. Bear in mind it was tipping down with rain when I received the text, which explains the rather cryptic first line:

I’m wet and fabulous! Spent most of yesterday laughing just because I can. Saw two friends last night. One kept touching my knee constantly to make me laugh! And there is something delightfully wicked about laughing out loud in the pouring rain. 🙂 Got the pic back briefly, but quickly shrunk it and moved it to the side then thought about something else!

This is what makes doing hypnosis such fun. I think of the client now, her hand suspended in mid-air as she sat in the cafe, internalising the learnings I had given her. It was like a textbook session. I will report back over time to let you know how she does.

Pleasures

Moderate Depression, Wiped Out With NLP (And Hot Chocolate)…

By Matt on Wednesday, November 10, 2010

I had a lovely result today. On a sparkling day in Southsea, I met a client in a cafe, over a cup of hot chocolate.

She was a young woman with a slightly lost expression, looking pained and a bit confused. Upstairs in the cafe, in the bright light of the Autumn sun, she sat across a table from me, telling me how she couldn’t get over a break up with a guy who was, essentially, one great big waste of space.

I have been so busy lately doing other things than hypnosis, and this was a great opportunity to dust off the NLP skills and give her a blast of reprogramming.

It was a lovely environment to do it in. Soft chairs, silence, clear light – oh – and the hot chocolate.

How did we make the change? First: I ran a series of metaphors about how we use technology to find places so much more easily these days. The email I sent her had a link to the cafe so she could immediately find out where it was, rather than have me take loads of time talking to her and giving her boring directions. Instead of blindly groping around searching for answers, we find what we are looking for with the help of novel ideas for more quickly… such a change in the speed with which we get to where we really want to be would have seemed impossible just a few years ago…

And then, on to the reprogramming. A simple disconnection of the current feelings from the memory, then moving swiftly on, finding positive emotions and getting her to journey with them into her future.

I kept looking over my shoulder as I put her into a trance and lifted her hand, doing good old-fashioned arm levitation to get her to reprocess the information I programmed in. I thought how strange it would seem if a member of the public walked in to the room, seeing her in a relaxed state, eyes closed, giggling as I tapped the anchor on her leg. She was an amazingly responsive client.

After this, when I asked her about how she felt about the break-up, she looked at me blankly and said: “What break-up?” before struggling to recover the memory. Then she added: “It’s weird… I feel lighter…” and she smiled a broad, happy smile.

We walked out into the sunlight, with her still wearing that broad, sunny smile. I will keep my eye on her, but I’m pretty positive we’ve nailed the depression.

Thank you Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. You showed me how to knock out another little patch of unhappiness in the world, and plant a garden there, all in about 45 minutes!

Banana Republic Pleasures

A Little Boy, Lost In The Moment

By Matt on Monday, November 1, 2010

A tiny moment of pleasure. Scene: The Street Outside An Acupuncturist’s Clinic on Palmerston Road, Southsea. Time: 3 p.m. The shop is divided into the clinic, and a private living space, and the door to the living area has been left open.

As I walk down the street I hear the sound of a piano being played, and passing an open door, see a little Chinese boy of around 5 years old intensely concentrating on the keys of a piano as he falteringly produces the tune to “Camptown Races”. I stand by the door and listen as he works his way gradually up the keyboard, changing the key as he proceeds.

A still moment. The traffic and people pass by outside, and he is totally focussed on his music. He’s not brilliant at what he’s doing, and he makes mistakes. But he corrects his mistakes, and carries on, teaching his fingers to pick out the notes in a certain order. I absorb his total concentration, as if it, too, is emanating from the room on to the street. Sensing him totally absorbed, feeling his way – learning, co-ordinating, learning, persevering. The sound is not pretty, but enchanting – and it tells a story.

We live in a muddled world, and that makes it fun, too. That little Chinese boy lives in a Victorian house in Southsea, where the English general public are treated with Chinese medicine, and plays a Black American tune on an old German piano.

I stand and enjoy.

These are the little pleasures of life.

Pleasures

I’m back.

By Matt on Tuesday, October 12, 2010

It’s been a little while since I wrote my blog, for a pretty good reason.

I’ve been away. I’ve got a lot to tell you about the things that I’ve been doing, but as a starting point, let me give you an overview of some of the great things that have been going on in my life.

Firstly, discovering France.

Okay, so I didn’t discover France; there are tens of million people there already. But really I discovered that France is okay. In fact, better than okay, it’s stupendous. I have become a Frogophile.

Then there was going up mountains, and jumping off them, and jumping into glacial meltwater and bobbing down rapids without any boat, and avoiding the rocks, and swirling in eddies and feeling the delicious joy of just cutting loose and finding out where the current takes me.

Cooking breakfast at the top of Monte Rose — Breakfast in high places

I found out more about the joyous sunshine that is caught in bottles of wine – and seeing how the genies that live in them grow on mountain slopes, on hills, in valleys – fattening in the summer sun, before that sunshine is trapped in a bottle and stoppered up with wood.

I ate snails before a thunderstorm and the next day watched others promenade with their shells in the rain, and I stood eye to eye with oxen so big and so beautiful that they looked like drawings of animals; as if a cartoonist had thought: “Now, how do I make this creature look big, soft, huggable – and powerful all at once?”

I climbed into a volcano, and watched a silent sea of ice in its frozen flow down a mountainside. I saw the specks of mountain climbers and walkers moving beneath me on the ice as I hung from a cable above them.

I saw the palace a postman built straight out of his imagination, and the palace a river built from rain and lime, hidden in the darkest, clearest caves.

I have got so much to tell you about how life is amazing. And in due time I will do, now I’m back from my travels.

Thanks for bearing with me!

Pleasures

A Little Moment of Delight In Darkest Africa…

By Matt on Thursday, May 27, 2010

Surfing the net a few days ago I found this video of Damian Aspinall and his reunion with a long lost friend with a difference. I don’t really have anything smart or witty to say about this. It’s a definite “Aah” moment that I wanted to share with you. You know, I’ve seen a lot of bad news come out Africa over the years, and it’s just great to see something a little more uplifting. Okay, it plays to one of the stereotypes of Africa: big jungles and gorillas. But then why not? Africa does still have, thank goodness, both of those things.

And it has something else, too. A certain amount of magic in its wilds that you won’t encounter anywhere else. A little moment of honest feeling between two friends, no matter what species they are.

That’s enough to remind me, and I hope you, that yes, life really is amazing!

Pleasures

For Sale: One Motorhome Filled With Good Will

By Matt on Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Okay, so there are pitfalls to buying online – and I guess this is my place to let you know all about it.

I’m always one for a deal. I like to do deals, and I like to make a little bit of money. The best deals are the ones where you make a phone call and you sell something you don’t yet have – they’re fun. But then there are the other deals where you buy something, do it up a little bit, and move it on.

These usually go well for me. But this one… well this one is one that I thought I’d let you know about so that you can maybe just learn a little lesson at my expense.

I saw the motorhome on the website Gumtree, at a great price. I had sold a few that year and had a nice little reserve of money to play with. And this one was a beauty, judging from the photos. Not the rusty hulks that I had been dealing in before, but a really nice van.

So, I gave the number a call, and I got through to this Irish woman called Kathleen, and she told me that I should ring another number because her boyfriend, Tony, was dealing with the sale. I had a chat with him. He seemed easygoing enough, and when I asked him to send me the chassis number, he did so straight away. I did an HPI check on the van… all was well and good. So, could I come and see it? I had the address for the place off of Gumtree.

“Ah,” he said to me, nice as pie. “The thing is, we’ve just moved and Kath has put up the wrong address.” He gave me another address in North London, and I agreed to meet him later that day.

So, up I drove. We were in a car park on a council estate, and I looked at it with a little bit of something niggling at the back of my mind. Why was it on a council estate? And why was it so cheap?

Before I could even answer the questions Tony filled in the background. “The van used to belong to my dad. I’ve had it for about a year now, but it’s expensive to run and it’s a bit big for me.” I looked at the back of the van where the faring had got a little crack. To confirm my thoughts he said: “You see, I don’t back up so well.”

He was a medium height guy, a bit taller than me, slightly fat with an unhealthy pale skin. Tony told me all sorts of stuff: how he was a gardener, he didn’t earn much. They had just been moved to the local area by the council, and they were in a tiny flat nearby. He pointed to a building. “What’s worse, I’ve got my little one in there, and he’s been running a temperature. Don’t want to wake him.”

I looked over the van. It was pretty clean and smart inside, and I liked the look of it. Did he have the log book and the MOT?

“Oh, yes, got them just here.” He pulled them out for me to have a look at. Yes, they all looked legit. In all, a pretty nice motorhome at an affordable price.

“The truth is,” he said, “I just can’t keep taking days off work for people to come and have a look at it. I’m up for selling it today, if the price is right.”

So, the paperwork was there, it all looked good enough for me. And the address was for a different part of London – but – hey – they’d just moved, right?

My radar clearly wasn’t working that day. In the end, I handed over the figure we agreed, in cash, and I asked for a receipt. He looked embarrassed.

“I don’t write so well,” he said. “Can you write one up for me? I’ll sign it…”

So, sure, I would do that. I felt kind of concerned for him. You know, he clearly hadn’t been given the best breaks. And when he asked me to fill in the Log Book too, I thought: “Great, I’ll just keep hold of this for a while. Won’t be long before I sell it, so why put on an extra owner? I mean, I’ll have shifted it in the week – then I’ll be well ahead!”

And so the deal was done in quick order. I drove it home and booked it into a body shop to get it tidied up – get the cracked faring sorted, get it valeted and get it sold.

This is when I started having problems. The first one was that the body shop took forever to get it into the shop. And then it took forever to do the work. I went down week after week – whenever I could – and the thing just didn’t have any work done on it. Christmas came and went. And then the new year came. By February I was getting desperate.

And something else was going on, too. It was that, every few weeks I would wake up from a dream with a really unpleasant feeling that there was something wrong with the van… I did three more HPI checks, and it still showed as okay. But I still wasn’t convinced. I double checked the MOT. It was also legitimate. Then I double checked the mileage on the MOT. It was wrong. The MOT had an extra 30,000 miles on the clock reading.

I rang a mechanic friend of mine. “There are lots of reasons why it might be wrong. It could have been clocked – or the original odometer might have broken, so they got one from a scrappy. I shouldn’t worry about it.”

But I did worry about it. So I checked the VIN plate. Except there wasn’t a VIN plate. It had clearly been pulled off.

Once again, my mechanic friend was reassuring. “Sometimes this comes off when the front cross bar has to be taken off. Taking out a radiator, or the van having a knock on the front could do that. It doesn’t mean it’s hooky. But there is another chassis number stamped into the chassis by the driver’s side foot well. There’s a cover there. Take it off. You’ll see.

And sure enough, when I checked, there was the chassis number – correct as per the log book and the HPI check…

So why did I still wake up feeling so damned uncomfortable about it?

Eventually the body shop finished the job tidying up the paintwork and valetting the car. I got it home and it looked a stunner. A really nice van. but once again the feeling had me waking up with a deep suspicion inside me. I did one more HPI check. This time something had changed. The van showed 7 owners on the online check, whereas my logbook showed only 5 owners. Now, something was wrong, and I knew it.

I took it to my mechanic friend again. “Let me have a look at the chassis number,” he said. He took a torch to it, and kept looking at it. Something was clearly bugging him.

“I think we should take the footwell cover off,” he said.

We did so, and that’s when it all fitted together. The chassis plate I hade been looking at had been stamped into a piece of metal that had been riveted over the real chassis number. You couldn’t see what had been done unless you dismantled the footwell cover. My friend looked at me: “Oh dear,” he said to me. “Matt, I’ve never seen anything like this before. You paid a lot of money for it and… well, what can I say? I feel for you…”

I had no idea what to do. Someone had said to me previously when I had expressed doubts about it: “You bought it in good faith, you sell it in good faith. If it’s hooky, it’s not your fault.”

But I knew that it was hooky, now. I got in it, in a state of denial, took it back home, got in my other van and drove around for 20 minutes, wondering what to do.

It didn’t take me long to decide. I’m not a criminal. There had already been a lot of misery put into that van with its theft, and with my loss of money. I didn’t think it would be fair to pass that misery and stress on. It had to stop somewhere. So, it was going to stop with me.

I walked into Havant nick with the logbook and the MOT certificate, rang the bell, and announced: “I’ve got a ringer for you.”

At first they didn’t believe me, until I told them all about how I bought it. I had written down the real chassis number for them, and they checked it. It did come back as belonging to a stolen van.

To cut a long story short, within the hour, a truck was towing it away to a pound. And my investment of thousands was wiped out. I looked at it as it was going up the road, and I started laughing. The PC who was with me looked at me in surprise.

“You’re taking this very well,” he said.

“Well, it’s kind of a relief. I mean, I took charge of this by coming into you and giving it up to you. And that means quite a lot. Besides, I’ve got two arms and two legs, and I know how to make money. So these thousands I’ve spent on it I can earn back a different way. The thing to do is focus on getting on with making it, rather than crying over spilt milk.”

Yes, I really did say that. And I even meant it!

The officer was impressed. A few hours later he rang me from the nick.

“I’ve done some enquiries,” he said. “Turns out that the owner never claimed on the insurance. I’ve spoken to him, and he wants to talk with you. His name’s Malcolm Stewart. He’s an ex-Met copper.”

I duly rang. I liked Malcolm immediately I heard his voice. He had a proposition for me:

“The thing is, I never reclaimed the insurance because I have been dealing with my mum, who hasn’t been well. I always hoped I’d get it back. But a few weeks ago I gave up and bought a replacement. So, now I’ve got a spare van. I’m going to sell the nicked one, do you want to buy it? You can have it for 6 grand…”

It was tempting, but to be frank, I’d done my money on it. I told him so. “But,” I said, “If you agree to it, I’ll act as your agent, get you your 6 grand – and anything over, I’ll keep.”

“There it is,” he said. “Sorted.”

It was an interesting scenario. I had lost quite a lot of money, but I had a lot of good will from the owner. I had a mental image of myself as a kind of psychological valet, taking all the misery out of the van, all the anger about the theft, all the disappointment about my loss of money – and filling the van with something bright and positive. Good will. I had filled the van with good will.

So, here it is: one van, secondhand, well used. Great for holidays – and filled with something you don’t find too often.

Good feelings.

Now, where else can you buy those?

Pleasures

Waterstone's Delight

By Matt on Sunday, March 7, 2010

A little while ago I decided to rise to the challenge of writing in a hundred words or fewer about something that really delighted me, so that I could upload it to the Waterstone’s Delight website. I found out about the website when I bumped into the web developers in a pub on the South Bank up in London. The website was to go live on the very next day. It meant that for a short while, my piece was the most visited on the site.

The thing I love about the idea of Waterstone’s Delight is its guiding light: that in a time when things are really grim, when no-one’s got any money and tv newsreaders keep telling you that the world is about to get blown away in a banking disaster of Apocalyptic proportions, you can still focus on the the good things in life. And the fact is, there are plenty of them.

There are golden places in your mind, stored up, filled up with moments of delight, like the honey from a gorgeous summer or top quality champagne that’s tucked away in a safe place, just waiting for you to revisit and savour again. Right there, in your noddle – all the hope and aspiration and delight you could ever possibly want. And what’s even better about what you’ve got in your head as opposed to champagne or honey, is that no matter how much you drink of it, or eat of it, there’s always more to come. You can bask in the sunlight of a single thought for a thousand years, if you’re minded to live that long. It’s better than tv.

And what’s more you don’t even have to subscribe.

So, here is my piece below. I hope you enjoy smiley

Sand And Sea

Let me tell you about the sea, and the tides. For in their movements there is a delight to be found – a gentle one as soft as sunlight on the water, that laughs like the gurgle of the ocean caressing the shore.

When the full moon comes there is a sand bank close to my house that is laid bare for just a few hours. It is a massive expanse of sand that stretches flat beneath the sky, a transitory landscape. At each appearance, the sand bank is different, its character changed with the shifting seasons, new shapes sculpted in the sand by the draining sea.

A few evenings ago, as I walked out more than a mile onto the sand bank, the sea was reflecting the dying summer sunset with a satisfaction at a job nearly completed. The season, it seemed, was putting on its woolly jumper. The last dog-ends of the summer were burning themselves out under the windless shelter of seawalls. My love and I kicked around on the sand, a lunar landscape revealed by the moon’s movements. We saw horses in the sea. Of such events are the bottled tinctures of future delight made. A potent brew.