Lisa of Chasing Grace has written something that tells me why I should continue this crazy blogging occupation (not that I was thinking of stopping, mind you).

On the blogging landscape you will find mansions and hovels, fortresses and castles, shopping malls, business, galleries, theaters, humble homes, gardens, quiet places of meditation and amusement parks. There are institutions of higher learning, and galleries of talking cats. It’s an amazing world of megabytes and mega pixels, guaranteed to entertain, frustrate, cajole, mesmerize and bore you to tears.

I’m amazed by it, and a bit overwhelmed. I wonder why I even bother to continue with my own. Mine is just a tiny little house, on an immense landscape that seemingly goes on forever. A tiny little house, with one cat in the window and a small garden of little consequence.

So what is Barnabas Quotidianus? Fortress, mansion, humble home, amusement park? It’s certainly not a shopping mall and I hope I don’t bore you to tears.

Lisa says she would definitely continue, even if no one came calling. I share that. As Lisa says, it’s her own little space on this vast landscape.

It’s one tiny synapses in the growing collective mind of the blogoshpere.

So, bloggers and readers, I’m going to continue working on my synapse, as small and insignificant as it may be, just because it is part of this growing collective mind.

The Baha’i sacred texts refer to this time in history as the coming of age of the human race and envisage the growth of a global civilization based on justice and a deeply rooted understanding of human oneness (while welcoming human diversity). The web, and particularly the blogosphere, is creating a collective global mind - indeterminate, often vague, mutually contradictory, reflecting all of our humanness - good, bad and indifferent.

(Hat tip Tess of Anchors and Masts for posting about this and linking to Lisa’s blog.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, collective mind, global civilization, Baha’i, Bahai

We love “overcoming the odds” stories. There’s something inspiring about someone who uses his wonderful singing voice to escape from being bullied at school and working at Carphone Warehouse.

Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from South Wales, brought the audience for the ITV show Britain’s Got Talent to their feet by singing the Pavarotti favourite Nessun Dorma. More importantly, he turned the show’s judges (Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden) from cynical eyebrow raisers (On no! Not another phone salesman who thinks he can sing opera? Opera? Oh, for god’s sake…) to tearful admirers, full of praise for this unlikely winner.

So what’s the trope here? Well, Paul Potts is (to use a very British phrase) “an ordinary bloke” (American translation: “a regular guy”) and intends to remain an ordinary bloke in his Burton suit. Except that he’s an ordinary bloke, bullied at school as a child, who idolizes Luciano Pavarotti and can sing opera so wonderfully that he wins a “reality TV” talent contest. At least, that’s the Daily Mail’s take on the matter. And it’s the stuff of many folk and fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast sort of stuff.

Oh well (Barnabas Quotidianus pauses to wipe a slightly sceptical tear from his eye), we shall see. Showbiz makeovers don’t always have happy endings and real life stories don’t always have the punchline that we’d like. But - and here’s where an overcoming-the-odds story can beat cynicism into the ground - I really hope Paul Potts accomplishes what he wants to accomplish and can sustain it without destroying his life.

Watch the video here and - here’s a challenge - stay real.

Technorati Tags: talent contest, opera, Pavarotti, Nessun Dorma, makeover, transformation

Smell is surely the most evocative of our senses. Every now and then I catch the very minutest “glimpse” of a smell (can one catch a “glimpse” of what cannot be seen?) that instantly takes me back to my childhood. Often the memory is fugitive and inconclusive, a fragment briefly seen and as quickly lost.

I can tell you that a warm autumn day in Harmergreen Woods smells of old summer houses. In particular of the summer house at West Close, the long low bungalow on the edge of Exmoor where I lived from the age of minus one until my father passed away and my mother married a man 20 years her senior who lived up on the moor itself.

To enter the summer house at West Close - out of the back door of the house, across the tarmac yard, over the lawn and past the beds of lupins around the leaky concrete pool my father made - was to enter a warm, close, place, a repository of discarded objects, a treasury of smells. On summer days my mother would open the double doors at the front of the summer house so that my father, who was frequently - and, as it turned out, fatally - ill could sit and soak up the sun. Our piano was there, on the right, just inside the doors, and chairs, deck chairs, travel rugs and - in the deep, dark back half of the summer house - old beds and blankets, books, dead leaves, spiders, cobwebs, woodlice.

My friends and I would play in the summer house - “mothers and fathers” and unspeakable medical dramas with the Attwater girls; Davy Crockett with David Hosegood or Sue Kingdon - and I was put to lie out in the sun outside the summer house with my Dinky toys as I recuperated from pneumonia or scarlet fever.

The timber and asbestos walls of the summer house - this was in the early 1950s, long before they discovered how dangerous asbestos was - absorbed the sun’s heat and warmed the musty things inside until they gave off that compound of decay and wool and canvas and upholstery and last year’s leaves that I smelled in Harmergreen Woods last Thursday.

Technorati Tags: UK, Hertfordshire, autumn, smells, childhood