Archive for Chit Chat

Fare Thee Well Owl John, Fare Thee Well

by Mr Omneo
May 12th, 2018

This piece discusses mental health and suicide. If either of these topics are likely to cause you discomfort you should stop now and instead read this post I wrote about Love, it’s marginally less distressing.

Friday 11 May brought the news that many expected despite hoping that they were wrong; the body retrieved from Port Edgar on Thursday 10 May was indeed that of Scott Hutchison, founder and vocalist of the band Frightened Rabbit. Scott had gone missing the day before.

Scott made no secret of his mental health difficulties, you only had to listen to the lyrics of his songs to get a glimpse of the struggles he had, yet he managed to not only lay them bare but set them to beautiful melodies. As someone with my own set of mental health issues I was soon a fan of the band as, cliché alert, the songs felt like they were written just for me.

I never succeeded in seeing the band perform live, I did get a ticket for their Brixton Academy gig in November 2013 but on the day of the gig I just wasn’t in the mood to go out and enjoy myself, like so many time before and since, so I gave it to someone I talked to on Twitter who I knew was a fan. Last month when I saw they were going to perform at Robert Smith’s Meltdown Festival I mentally shouted at myself, “Quick! Buy a fucking ticket”, but I dithered and when I eventually got around to it they were sold out. “Never mind”, I thought, “I’ll catch them next time…” Read More→

Categories Chit Chat, Music
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Where Did It Go?

by Mr Omneo
April 19th, 2018

Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty four hours in a day, seven days in a week. Time marches on. It goes fast, it goes slow…it just goes. Never to return.

It feels like just the other day I penned my first post of 2018, full of high hopes and aspirations of returning to a regular schedule of updates here and yet it’s mid-April and, if I actually get around to posting this, this will be my second post of the year.

It’s not for the want of trying. I have just reviewed and deleted four draft posts. They were all long and unwieldy and the best form of editing was clicking the ‘move to bin’ link as no amount of tinkering would have made them worth the effort, not for me and certainly not for you. Read More→

Categories Chit Chat
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Here We Go Again

by Mr Omneo
January 28th, 2018

At the start of this year I said, to myself, that I would return to blogging and cut back on Twitter. I’m pretty sure I said something similar at the start of 2017, looking back I see I managed three posts in 2017, an improvement on 2016 when I churned out one post. So here I am, 28 days into 2018, posting my first update. I only have to add three more after this one and I’ll have improved upon last year’s effort. I’m not going to count my chickens just yet.

January is usually the month I sink into self assessment procrastination woes. I registered as self-employed with HMRC in 2007 and since then have always managed to leave doing my tax return until January. Usually I start it the first or second week in January and by start I mean I talk about it a lot. Looking over my submission records, the earliest I have ever submitted my return has been the 25 January and that was this year. The normal routine is I come home from the day job and open up the computer, stare at the excel spreadsheets I created the year before and try and make sense of the figures, then I browse some websites and decide I’ll look at the tax return the next day. Rinse and repeat. Read More→

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Halfway There

by Mr Omneo
March 7th, 2017

Halfway where? I hear you ask (in my head at least) and the truth is, I have no idea. I also have no idea if I’m actually halfway there anyway, hell I don’t even know if I’ve started the journey. The journey to where ever it is people journey to when they have never had any idea of where they want to get to.

When I was younger I knew I had to get somewhere, somewhere other than where I was. Now? Now I have moments when I feel I have no desire to go anywhere at all, sometimes not even out of bed. On those occasions I find myself asking that age-old question, What the fuck am I doing with my life? I always answer the same way, I have no fucking idea! Then I ask myself What do you want to do? to which, again, I find myself answering in the same way, I have no fucking idea!

Several years ago I figured out that the chances of me falling in love without fucking it up were slim but, like the eternal optimist, I still hold out hopes that I’ll manage it, despite my vocal protestations to myself to the contrary. I have no idea why the desire for a human connection, bond – call it what you will – is so strong. Certainly stronger than any other drug that I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a few. Read More→

Categories Chit Chat
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We Begin At The Beginning…

by Mr Omneo
February 26th, 2017

Do we? Begin at the beginning, I mean. Common sense says anything you start has to start at the beginning but of course you and I know that one thing common sense isn’t is common. If it were, we wouldn’t be in this mess we find ourselves in, the World over.

Whether it’s Trump implementing policies affecting not just the USA but the World to Brexit, that affects not just the UK but Europe, or rather those countries grouped together under the EU umbrella, that we’re now told the will of the people have decided they don’t like standing under so we’re going to soak up that rain and bathe in it’s misery.

That will by the way is the often touted 52%. What we should always take into account is that it is really 52% of the 71.8% of people who were eligible and who bothered to vote, or 37.34% of the population in real percentages. Read More→

Categories Chit Chat, Politics
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