Busy Doing Nothing

I remember watching a backgammon game when I was twenty and asking a friend of mine whether it was worth learning. He had been playing all afternoon, and his wry comment was, "You can waste a lot of time playing backgammon," so I decided to give it a miss. I can hear howls from all backgammon fans. I have since questioned this decision, as I enjoy dice games and any peaceful pasttime which does not require one to ingest mood-altering substances to take part has to be good. Still, I have resisted so far. Instead, I have been writing, in one form or another. You can certainly waste a lot of time writing, and, if you have readers, you can waste a lot of their time too.

Of course, I also have a normal life. In it, the every day story of the smell of sex is as real as anything else, and the dialog engendered by writing and reading is as real to me as talking and listening. That's one of the reasons I like blogging. The other main appeal for me is that it is, like every new art movement, autodidactic. Whatever the reason for releasing the chattering monkey upon the illuminated page - the screen - there is no one way to blog, no certain course leading to blog success, no academic measure; there are no blogging certificates not issued by spurious institutions not worth the paper they are not printed upon. There are however many excellent bloggers who for some reason use up precious chunks of their lifetime putting it down in words.

Song writing, on the other hand, needs no explanation or analysis.

Ever since I can remember, Busy Doing Nothing has been one of my favourite songs. For a short time only, purely for review purposes, here are my two favourite versions - the original one sung by by Bing Crosby, from the 1947 film A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court and one from the early 1980s by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, which I particularly love because of the sneaky mood of unease which creeps into the arrangement.

Waste some time listening to them, while you can.