Saturday

Balanced on the top step of our aluminium step ladders, reaching, straining to saw away branches from the tree that overhangs the little block paved path that leads to the top half of our garden. I don't even know what kind of tree it is but I do know that it sends out long spindly branches that reach for the sky and need to be pruned from time to time. I see this tree from our back windows and every day I think - gonnna prune that mother! Well today I did it. The tree has had its long-awaited haircut.

My beloved Hull City lost again. This week we ditched our manager and so the assistant manager is in charge. Supporting this club is a pastime filled with pain and so little sunlight. How could we even dare to dream of the Premiership? It looks like we are sinking back into the abyss again. There can be no other supporters in the Football League so goddam hungry for success - just a little walk in the sunshine - that's all we ask.

At the pub tonight we watched the Bolton boxer Amir Khan strut his stuff - a clear points victory. Irish Joe was there and we swapped pint buying duties. And the Romanian student Rejvan was there again. His dad is a politician back in Romania. Rejvan is only eighteen but he's full of knowledge, curiosity and a zest for life. He's here in Sheffield as an undergraduate, pursuing a degreee in International Relations. Me and Shirley have invited him home for a traditional English Sunday dinner tomorrow evening.

Well, what can you say? These are the dark days of December before the Winter Solstice. You just have to get through it - in the knowledge that round the corner there is light, new growth, a new year. On Sunday, I will be writing Xmas cards as I did twelve short months ago. How come time is speeding by faster and faster? ....Sorry that this is such a mundane little post.

Sleep

An escape from everyday life or a time for recharging batteries. Sleep - oh come to me - you are night's daughter - so sang The Incredible String Band. "Sleep perchance to dream" said Shakespeare. And if I spent a few research minutes, I could find lots of other reflections on sleep. It's something all human beings have in common. Sometimes I nestle in to the clean cotton sheets that Shirley has laundered and it feels like easing into the Mediterranean - when warm waters lap over you and beneath the surface you are deafened, made lighter than you are, enveloped by womblike waters. It's like a rehearsal for death.

The night is filled with dreams but for me they rarely wait behind - they're gone like gossamer. I try to grasp them as I wake but they slip away and in any case, I know they are meaningless - just the brain ordering itself - filing and making some kind of sense of the ocean of data it receives each day. Sometimes sleep evades you when you need it most. When your head is filled with anxieties or pain and no matter how you try, those demons won't get lost. They torment and they torture till the morning palely brightens and you feel you've climbed a mountain. You're still exhausted.

We never talk of great sleeps we had in the past. For the majority of us that means we don't talk very much at all about one third of our lives. I remember Athens Airport in 1980. Rucksack checked in and a five hour nightime delay. I left the heaving terminal and under a nearby olive tree placed my passport and wallet under my head and fell asleep. I woke to a pastel Grecian dawn, before the sun rose like an angry eye and wandered back into the terminal where travelling chaos ensued.

Sleep - sweetest friend I ever had - always waiting there to embrace you. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Anonymous

Anonymity can be attractive or enormously irritating. Positive anonymity might be when you're lost in a crowd or you're in transit between places - just another human being in the flow of life, leaving the niggles and stresses of the everyday world behind you. When nobody even knows your name. And being an anonymous giver or hero is also attractive. I enjoy news stories about kind strangers who help old ladies to escape from house fires or pull somebody from a car wreck or pay thousands to prevent a hostel for the homeless from closing. Then of course, there are all those anonymous war heroes buried or lost - for example, where the plains of northern France meet Belgium - the unknown soldiers - entirely deserving of our endless honour.

Bad anonymity is different - the nameless morons who smashed my car window on five occasions to get at the CD/radio - the graffiti sprayers who leave their ugly scrawl for the rest of us to notice - the bureaucrats who don't give you their names when you're on the telephone - and in the world wide web there are those maddening but unnamed spammers and cowardly stalkers who leave "anonymous" messages in blogs - sometimes of an offensive nature.

However, maybe I'm being a little hypocritical about this because of course my parents didn't christen me "Yorkshire Pudding"! I have another name that people outside this cyberworld use and perhaps it's time to come clean. This whole blog has been an invention. I have never been to Yorkshire. My real name is Earl Radsinsky. I live in Baltimore, Maryland and I have been commisioned by the CIA to hunt down "anonymous" contributors to wholesome blogs. May I assure everyone out there that I know who these "anonymous" computer users are. I am gradually closing in on them and in the course of time they will each be, well, let's just say - eliminated!