where art collides philosoperontap

It’s uplifiting. The conservatory doors are wide open. The birds are singing away happily knowing that they have a beautiful sunny day ahead. The lawn needs a bit of a cut but there is no rush. I was going to cut down the undergrowth at the bottom of the garden but I think I’ll leave it until tomorrow. Manyana. I’ve got some lively musing streaming over the wireless interweb. Radio Oxford fwiw.

I realise  I should be tuned in to Radio Lincolnshire and news of the Waddington Air Show but an offspring is reading the traffic and travel news in Oxford so I am being a dutiful parent. I’ve been to the Air Show a couple of times and it is a fantastic day out. Long queues very long queues on the roads though so if you’re thinking of going you need to get there very early. Waddington is probably three miles from our house and the cars back up on the road outside us. You have been warned.

I don’t know why we don’t go to the Air Show more often, considering it is such a good day out. The only times we have been are when one or two of the kids has been playing with the school band in one of the hangars. This is the best way to do it as we get a free family ticket and a car pass so that we can park right next to the hangar and not have to join the unwashed masses in the public car park. This also makes it easy to nip back to pick up the picnic.

Although there have been wet weekends for the Air Show on balance the weather has usually been great. On one of our visits one of the kids forgot to bring a hat and I had to share mine. The concept of hat sharing is quite novel I think. Probably not original though. Hey you can’t live your life doing completely new things all the time. Most of it has already been done before – taking a shower, making the toast, cutting the grass. You get my drift.

You’d never get anything done if it all had to be new and original. Spend all your time doing nothing trying to think of something new. I suppose you could cut the grass in a different way. Make interesting patterns with the lawnmower that gradually disappear as more of the grass gets cut. That would be a valid “new thing” because each pattern would be different even if the concept might not itself be new. You can’t spend all your time cutting the grass in a new way though because once cut the grass would need to be left a week or so to grow back to a cuttable length again. You could cut if very slowly but I don’t think it would fly. You are going to have to think of other things.

Paining a big landscape watercolour could be one way of doing it. Unfortunately I’m not a very good artist. Also I don’t have any watercolour paints and in any case this is just a mental exercise. You don’t actually have to do any of the things being discussed here although I’m not stopping you. You should let me know what happens. Take a pic of the grass half way through the mow for example and send it to me on Twitter. Simple to do and a highly effective way of sharing. I might even retweet it if I thought it was good enough to share. You could find that everyone on the planet ends up seeing your picture of the pattern in your lawn. Not that everyone is online yet but I’m sure someone would print off a copy and post it somewhere public so that everyone else could see.

The only drawback with that level of publicity is that you would find your house besieged by the press all wanting to take “exclusive” pictures of your lawn. You would spend all your time doing interviews and never have enough time to cut the grass. If you charged a fee for the interview you might be able to afford to hire a gardener to cut the grass for you but that would somehow defeat the object of the exercise. I imagine, and this is pure hypothesis you understand, people would even hire airplanes to fly over your back garden for photographs of your lawn. Google would redo its satellite shot of your house to incorporate the pattern on the lawn. How cool is that. Pre-pattern images of your lawn would begin to sell at a premium although that would not last long because we all know how easy it is to copy images on tinterweb.

This whole sad line of reasoning is of course built on the premise that there is actually a pattern to be viewed so you’d better make sure you don’t finish cutting all the lawn like  I originally suggested and leave  a pattern. Think how disappointed everyone would be if there wasn’t one after all the fuss. You would start getting adverse comments on Facebook and Twitter. People can be very cruel you know. It may all stem from jealousy and their own pathetic inadequacy but that is real life.

The alternative is not to stick your head above the parapet. Don’t do anything original. Nobody will then notice you and you can go to your grave in soon to be forgotten ignominy. You may get a few people along at the funeral. The odd passer-by and a priest, if you are that way inclined, paid to do a job of work.

“Shed not a tear for this departed brother for he was not different.” You may now cry if you think that person is you.

3rd Law Part 48 here

3rd Law Part 50 here