Roll of the Dice - Take a Chance

I was completely out of my comfort zone in the casino. I’ve got an almost zero gambling ethic – I do the lottery, that’s all – and the clientele around the roulette tables were nothing like I’d seen in the James Bond films, disappointingly.  The ‘let’s do something different for our Christmas night out’ had fallen a bit flat with some colleagues leaving soon after the meal. The food was delicious. All three courses cooked to perfection, presented well and plenty of it. Afterwards, a few of us milled around various games, being shown how to play and maybe having a go. We had complimentary chips to use. One of us won herself a small fortune and had real money to take home, not me. I dabbled with pontoon and something else to do with cards, watched someone rolling dice and quietly sipped my drink, biding time until I could leave. I was aware of someone playing the same slot machine hours on end and it bothered me. It was certainly not my business and I wouldn’t dream of interfering. They might have all the money in the world to lose, but I don’t want to be in that place. I remember wishing I was at home with Gogglebox and my knitting, where I would have been if I hadn’t volunteered to drive a few of us. And I didn’t want to be thought of as boring.

I think I’ve always leaned towards ‘cautious’ rather than ‘risky’ which makes me wonder what would have happened had I taken the less safe choice. Our lives are built on decisions and choices over one path or another and doing what it right for us at a particular time. How daring it might be to do the exact opposite. And, ‘To thine own self be true’, might surprise others, but you’ve got to go for it.

When I was younger, I thought nothing of taking off in my car, belting down motorways into unknown places for no special reason. Looking back, I think it was daring – old car, before mobile phones, no RAC cover, the list is endless – an empty, dark M6, so that dates it nearly fifty years ago, feeling scared listening to Pink Floyd’s Meddle and turning the cassette off in fear. My fear should have been the possibility of car failure and being alone. I wouldn’t chance anything like that now. I only drive if I have to and I keep off motorways.

Our five year old grandson likes to play Snakes and Ladders. He’s just about stopped throwing himself down on the floor with a whingy whine if the big snake gets him. He is teaching himself various methods of rolling the dice, usually from a shaker, to determine what number he gets. It’s useless, of course, he can’t program the dice, but I have caught him flicking it over, the little monkey.

Roll the Dice

If you're going to try, go all the way

otherwise, don't even start.

If you're going to try, go all the way,

this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

Go all the way

it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.

it could mean freezing on a 

park bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery.

isolation.

Isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it

and you'll do it

despite rejection and the worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

If you're going to try

go all the way

there is no other feeling like

that

you will be alone with the gods

and the nights will flame with

fire

do it, do it, do it,

do it

all the way

all the way

you will ride life straight to

perfect laughter, it's

the only good fight

there is

Charles Bukowski  1920 - 1994

Thanks for reading, keep safe, Pam x

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Channelled

“A two-kingfisher day, with sparrowhawks thrown in
and we were bickering at Kingswood Junction.
Water won’t be told, she said, you never learn.
We settled to the first of nineteen locks.”

These are the opening lines of Jo Bell’s vivid poem to begin her collection Navigation, and one of the reasons The Canal Trust and The Poetry Society invited Jo to become Canal Laureate of the UK, a post she so merits, and uses to great effect to celebrate the romance and not-infrequent stubbornness of the motorways of their day, the tremendous canal network of our country.

Canals came into being in the mid-18th. century because the Industrial Revolution (which began in Britain during the mid-18th century) demanded an economic and reliable way to transport goods and commodities in large quantities. In 2015 we tend to regard the purpose of canals as being for leisure, and I have fished on the Lancaster Canal close to Garstang as well as been boating on a canal holiday. As Jo Bell’s companion comments in the poem, “water won’t be told” is the first lesson learned, but the manufacturers of industrial revolution goods were bright enough quickly enough to recognise that water would float barges full of their produce not fast in today’s terms, but certainly far faster than the horse-and-cart snail’s pace on muddy and frequently impassable “roads” which were little more than farm tracks.

From records surviving from the time, there took place 29 river navigation improvements during the 16th and 17th centuries, beginning inevitably with the Thames locks and the River Wey Navigation.

The biggest growth was in the so-called "narrow" canals which extended water transport to the emerging industrial areas of the Staffordshire potteries and Birmingham as well as a network of canals joining Yorkshire and Lancashire and extending to London. We rarely hear the word “navvy” today, but our canal system, just as our 20th. century motorway system, owes so much to the armies of Irish navvies who sent home their earnings to the families they had left behind. The Birmingham where I worked in computing in the late 1960s owes its criss-cross of fast urban motorways to the navvies I used to serve pint after pint to at the Crown and Cushion near Aston Villa’s ground. It was their watering hole after another day’s slog creating the roads, and the wages I was able to earn helped pay for my first car.

Given the variety of wildlife which has made our canal network their home, it is little wonder so many enthusiasts are drawn to the water, and fishing in a canal or slow-sailing along one is as much to do with observing Nature in what was a man-made environment. For us today, canals are a great stress relievers. Do try them.

(c) C J Heyworth (Christo James)
November 2015

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