Sconser

I can see how this might seem from outside. Late in life, a bloke starts new job teaching at an Irish Institute of Technology: decides to document the process of transition and record some funny thing happened in the lab tales to edutain others in the same business. Blog degenerates into rants about politics; poorly informed speculations about exo-planets; and hard-to-follow streams of conscious more appropriate to the psychiatrist's couch. This post tends to the latter; read on . . .

At the beginning of the month, a slightly younger and much more successful pal said that they'd shared my contax with a mutual acquaintance who was trying [very] to reach me. That contact turned out to be a silly, quite snobby, enquiry about The King's County Ancestry [L] which I was able to put to bed quickly and move on.

I'm soooo non-attachment nowadays that I wasn't particularly riled up. Not even about the fact that this was the [checks gmail] third time in 5 years, that I had email contact in similar circumstances with said snobacquaint which needed a third party to mediate the interaction. In my teens I dated a well connected gal whose titled grandfather refused to acknowledge he knew anyone in Surrey [home of riff-raff and -gasp- stockbrokers], so would address letters George Good-Seat esq., Goodseat Castle, Guildford . . . Suffolk.

I did peel off a rant to our go-between: I can't imagine why he wants to contact me. He's spent the entirety of our relationship (and that's 50 years) looking over my shoulder to see if someone more interesting is passing by. Most recently at the 2022 Christmas Do: he turned his back on me when I was in mid-sentence as the Emeritus Dean of Importance hove into view . . . I take this [advice the perp had given another mutual pal] with a big pinch of salty tears. As Protestant in Chief, he has for half a century been sent a steady stream of middle class youngsters for career advice. Invariably he told them "you'll always have climbing / opera / cello / gouache / carpentry /poems as a hobby - make sure you get your [science] degree first". He's possibly done more to scuttle creative Ireland than any man alive. Then again, in fairness, he caused a student to duck under my wing one Summer in the last century: a brief encounter which could be said to have launched that student's meteorically successful career. But that's just bollix, that was-a-student would have been Top Gun in any field they went for. Could now be an EU commissioner . . . editing the Irish Times . . . a patent lawyer in Strasbourg . . . director of policy at McGill U.

It is a categorical error to look back at a life [yours, mine, theirs] from some teleological peak or trough and think that it all turned out fine because of a series of random encounters and lucky breaks. My mother made her own luck when she landed a peach job in post-WWII London. I don't doubt that she would have been happy enough if she hadn't met my father as he blew through town in 1950 and married the local doctor instead (they had been an on again / off again item).

More or less exactly after that to-fro, I found myself listening to Ellen Langer on Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. The sound quality is comically bad: feed-back echo; dogs barking; phones ringing and there is A Lot of push-back in the comments. But a few interesting ideas are aired over the 72 mins. One relevant to the current post, is Langer's suggestion that people start in life with an infinity of possibilities but only live one life: ". . . people make decisions to take action. Once you take that action, there's no opportunity to evaluate the other alternatives that you might have chosen. You can never know". There's no future in beating yourself up about 'mistakes' made in the past. If life isn't a Panglossian "best of everything in the best of all possible worlds" it can be pretty good if, having made your bed, you lie in it . . . rather that complain about the crackers someone ate in the bed since you last washed the sheets.

If you want a modern Pangloss you might listen to Hanif Kureishi who suffered a freak accident a couple of years ago and broke his neck. He's still writing, still mouthing off, still thinking, still being funny from his wheelchair. Try James O'Brien Full Disclosure or wherever your get your podcasts. Which makes me think of Simone Giertz and her tumour. 

Sconser (n.) A person who looks around them when talking to you, to see if there's anyone more interesting about. A defn from The Meaning of Liff (1983) by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.