Rainy Days and Mondays

I will sadden some of my readership by the following comment (Sunday, the day for confessions? Even for an atheist?).

I am not a total innocent when it comes to pornography. Since I was 15 I have had an interest in various forms of it (though notably not bondage, and being heterosexual, Gay movies have no appeal). A few years ago, I might admit it was something of a problem, these days it is an occasional interest still.

So putting that out of the way .....

People selling porn aim primarily at a market of young(ish) men between 15 (yes, I know the legal age is 18, but .....) and 35. There is a (not particularly dramatic) drop in sales to older men, even if the interest is still there.

Which brings me by a massive quantum leap of logic to Karen Carpenter. I doubt whether many men aged 35 and under have all that much knowledge as to whom Karen Carpenter was. On the day they got married they might have had the old record (maybe digitalised) "We've only just begun" played, and may not even realise that it was Karen Carpenter singing.

Her life was sadly short - she died of heart failure at the age of 33 in 1983 (yes, that long ago - so anybody who is now 35 years old would have been approximately 7 at the time! That point will become relevant later). She had battled with anorexia (ditto), had trouble with relationships that never worked out, and ...

She and her brother, Richard, made up a singing combination called "The Carpenters" - well-known to my generation, and producers of the sort of music that you liked to listen to when in a slushy and sentimental mood. I have downstairs in the cellar a "Best Of" album on vinyl that has not been played in years, and that is it. Ageing intellectual chronic depressives do not find much time to be slushy and sentimental.

The song for which they are now best known is the one quoted above "We've only just begun". This is a song of wistful hopefulness, and for sheer simplified optimism, it takes some beating. That said, two riders at this point. Firstly if you cannot be optimistic about life on the day that you get married, then will you ever be? It is the day when hope absolutely peaks. No troughs and valleys to come. Second point - a lot of people out there DO GET IT RIGHT! And congratulations to them!!!

My least favourite line in the song is, though "So much of life ahead". My own view is that there is no better age to be than in your early to mid-20s. Physically you will be at your peak, and intellectually your possibilities are as good as they ever will be. Originality fades as you get older, so plunder it while you can! Plan for the future, yes, but do not sacrifice what you have now to get there.

My preferred Carpenters song (for the melody rather than the lyrics) is "Rainy Days and Mondays". Curious in its way, as the lyrics are the reverse of my life. I am one of those maybe strange people who likes rain (as regular readers will know, I hate cold and snow!). Watch the trees and plants and grass react to rain. Nature in excelsis! And birds using pools of water for their own needs. I have no problems with rain, none whatsoever - even though when I lived in Lancashire, I had to get used to the frequency of it!

As for Mondays - I assume that the reference is to it being the day back at work after the pleasures of the weekend at home? Let me say this immediately. Tomorrow is Monday:

I WOULD LOVE TO BE GOING TO WORK IN AN OFFICE TOMORROW - I CAN THINK OF NOTHING THAT WOULD CHEER ME UP MORE THAN THAT PROSPECT - assuming, of course they were paying me enough to live within my means and they were using my talents. Cela va sans dire.

So what was all this irrelevant junk at the start of this article about pornography?

OK, back to the point. On my meandering round the Internet this week, I discovered that someone has this year come up with some lurid, very likely distasteful but hardly aggressively brazen photos of Karen Carpenter.

WHY?

Even if they exist, where is the interest? 28 years after she died? A woman who suffered from anorexia (hardly the sort of physique that would appeal to fans of that sort of thing). And for what audience - people in their 20s and 30s who hardly know the name, or the sadder version of old coots of my age, who really ought to have moved on to other things by now?

Is this tacky or IS THIS TACKY????

The cult of personality has become so important that this is even slightly interesting? And how important really?

This really saddens me, but it is so indicative of what we are supposed to think. Somehow though, I think that we should be far better than this. For all our flaws (and for mine - reread the beginning of this article)!