On the Jazz

You could never trust Hannibal when he was 'on the jazz', riding high on life and planning the things no one else could plan, and that was mainly because he was a pretty awful planner. He 'loved it when a plan came together' purely because it was amazing they ever worked at all! And that was 'The A-Team' in a nutshell. (Good show, don't go beyond season two). It was a show that lived and died by the jazz, as does this very blog. On a day to day basis there's no telling what will pop up in this this august (or demented) publication except that every other posting is a self-indulgent waffle. Sadly, you're reading one of those waffles right now, but there is still time escape if you press the sketched abort button on the side of your computer. Still there? Well, you need to draw that button on a sticky note for next time! Now we shall continue.

Being on the jazz is essentially being in the sweet spot of life, being in the moment and knowing it. It's dangerous, sweet, and ever so slightly serene as you float from thing to thing, dealing with all on the spot and moving on without checking the damage. Oh, to be on the jazz every day! Or even any day at all! It would be lovely to be on the jazz while filling in Job applications, but they are such curious chores; activities you want to be able to dispose of quickly and with little effort but which instead become little works of paranoid perseverance that always manage in my case to exhibit just one vital flaw in the moment after I've clicked 'submit'. I'm sorry, Nottingham Trent, and do know that the environment is not coastal in any way. Maybe they'll think it's metaphorical?

Suddenly, the second holiday of the two this summer is approaching and that more travel is on the way! Holidays would be so much more fun if the travel could be removed painlessly, but at the same time holidays don't feel real unless you've done the journeying the hard way. Hence a marathon train trip to Marseille and Barcelona looms, with accumulated journeying time of about forty hours in an eight day period, almost all by train! At least you get to see the world from ground level and marvel at the great expanse of Europe, that oddball appendage to the greater continent of Eurasia. It will be more fun than flying repeatedly but at the same time the wear and tear in prospect is looming, as is the terror of having to cross Paris between trains for the first time. London is bad enough but at least there are Oyster cards; In Paris it's still paper tickets and buy on the day... Horror! Holidays are truly the ultimate madness! In the novel 'Hopscotch', Marseille was portrayed as a less than desirable place, so let us hope it was exaggerated or things have improved or both.

You might wonder how a jobless person can technically have a holiday, but being unemployed doesn't mean being short of work. At the moment there are three different stalled projects all proving intractable. There seems to be a law somewhere stating that all topics undertaken by an Oliver must be impossible. Still, they're an interesting bunch, comprising a three-dimensional extension of thesis work (going quite easily), modelling foams as elastoviscoplastic fluids (recalcitrant), and refraction of light in foams (stopped at the outset by a technicality).

If any of those work tomorrow then there will be jazz!

O.