Preparing the Answer.

You know, I realised only yesterday, when I was putting a glass of scotch and a pastry out for the little people at midnight, that my birthday falls precisely four weeks after Halloween. Fancy not noticing that before, and at my age too.

On similar note. I’m waiting for somebody in the Shire to ask me: ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ I have my answer ready:

‘That’s like asking me whether I believe in ghosts and whether I believe in God. There are two answers to all three. The first is “I don’t do belief.” And the second is “It’s complicated.”’

And then I’ll walk away with the sort of detached air which befits the sigma INFJ.

Trump and his Qualifications.

I was reading this morning of King Donald’s massive reduction in the USA’s immigration quota, and particularly of his intention to give priority to white South Africans. Sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?

‘Oh no,’ says Donald, ‘it’s not racist at all. It’s because white people in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in large numbers by nasty black people. I have photographs to prove it.’

And then he smugly produces photographs of body bags stacked up and awaiting disposal, and expects us to believe it. Meanwhile, Reuters points out that the photographs didn’t come from South Africa; they came from the Democratic Republic of Congo thousands of miles to the north. They have nothing to do with South Africa. The White House, apparently, declined to comment.

So I’m still a little confused as to why the majority of American people voted to make Donald their President, but I have a theory.

(A Little Aside: I think I know why Donald wants to take possession of Canada and Greenland. Not satisfied with being merely King of the USA, his ego craves the title Emperor of the Americas. He wants to be added to that star-spangled list along with Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Ming the Merciless. Donald the Dunderhead fits nicely. But I digress…)

The theory: We all know that the world is mostly ruled by idiots, psychopaths, cheats, and liars, so Donald probably has the perfect qualifications in the minds of the majority of Americans, he being able to tick all four boxes with supreme confidence. And who can blame them? America is, after all, still a fledgling culture. It didn’t live through the Middle Ages and learn the error of its ways as most of the rest of the world did. Could that explain it, I wonder.

(And I must just mention again that some of the finest people I have ever known have been Americans, just not the majority.)

The Geese Are Going Ga-Ga.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that every autumn I see, and hear, a large gaggle of geese flying north. I still don’t know why they would want to go north since north is generally colder than south in the northern hemisphere. Notwithstanding the apparent lapse in credibility, however, north is the direction they’ve always been taking. But not this year.

Over the past few days I’ve seen – and heard – four smaller skeins flying over my house. The first was heading west, the second south, the third east, and the fourth south-east. Why is this, I ask myself. Does it have something to do with the earth’s magnetic field, or climate change, or that infamous comet 3I/Atlas and its close proximity to the sun? My own feeling is that they’re either bored with taking their hols in Svalbard every year, or they’re tired of honking at the aurora.

And I still don’t understand why I still find the honking of migratory geese so magical, but I think I’m getting there.

Is Gen Z Destroying My Country?!

The sensationalist title to this post was deliberately engineered to mock YouTube where such titles predominate almost to the point of being ubiquitous. Just so you know.

To continue…

I’ve noticed that Gen Z seems to have no concept or appreciation of banter at all. If you try to engage a person of that era in banter you’re mostly met with a quiet stare which varies between blank and bemused. It’s as though you’ve asked them a complex question on the subject of advanced thermodynamics and done so in the most ancient dialect of Mongolian. Gen Z doesn’t do banter, and on thinking about it I realised that it’s also uncommon among Millennials, so maybe they started the rot.

Wiki gives the definition of banter as ‘playful and teasing remarks.’ So it is, and it’s central to the life blood of British communication, especially among the peasant classes from which I originate. I’ve often wondered whether it grew out of the hardships of working class life during the horrors of the Industrial Revolution when the majority of the population was condemned to labour on treadmills and live in crowded conditions.

If so, maybe we have a reversal of a trend going on here. If the Industrial Revolution, which threw large numbers of people together in adversity, gave genesis to the propensity for banter, maybe the Technological Revolution, which discourages human contact except when conducted in the limited environment of laptops and smart phones, is now taking it away again. And one of the primary aspects of human connection is being lost.

The State of Me.

I felt fine when I woke up this morning. I continued to feel fine all the time I spent lying there ruminating on the prospect of not ruminating but getting up instead. But get up I did eventually, and then I didn’t feel fine. My face was suddenly attacked by the combined forces of earache, toothache, blocked sinuses, and a general facial malaise down the left side. So then I felt rough instead.

But being ever in thrall to my practiced routines, I still had a breakfast of a bowl of cereals, milk, and sugar, and I still went out for my customary walk, and after lunch I completed the job in the garden which I’d set myself to do today. I even worked through the light rain which was falling at one point. So then I told myself what a good boy I am and noticed that the symptoms of the earlier lurgy had eased quite a lot.

By the time I’d finished the garden work the light was falling rapidly and so I spent an hour or so thinking about the Lady B. I often do, you know – think about the Lady B. I’d watched a YouTube video last night, you see, about the genetic origins of hazel eyes – which the Lady B has to complement her very dark hair – and the fact that they’re commoner in Ireland than most places. It encouraged the speculation that the Lady B is not (physically) a throwback to some ancestor from the regions around the Mediterranean as I’d often suspected, but has an element of the dark Irish in her antecedence.

And that led me to another realisation. The good Lady once told me that she was attending a course on some aspect of computing with her sister, and members of the group had remarked that they couldn’t tell them apart. To me that was nonsense because to me they didn’t – and still don’t – look even slightly alike. And further, neither of the girls look like their mother. And that was when I realised that when I look at somebody I don’t just see the outward physical form. I add to it a quickly formed sense of the person’s innate characteristics, and so their appearance takes on a different quality. Maybe I’m weird. Who can tell?

After that I decided to research the author Algernon Blackwood, the well known writer of paranormal and mystical novels and short stories. He’s especially known for his stories The Willows and The Wendigo, and the great Lovecraft himself considered Blackwood to be possibly the best of all such writers. I read The Willows and a few others many years ago and was very impressed myself, so today I finally got around to finding out a bit more about him. It turned out that he was very much like me in his attitudes and interests, which pleased me.

The ear, tooth, and sinuses are pretty much back to normal, by the way. Time now to make the usual highly laboured attempt to persuade my old friend (and he really is old) computer to play YouTube videos. The Lady Guanyin usually helps eventually. 

Another Encounter from the New World.

Having made the acquaintance of the girl from Brazil yesterday, today I encountered another woman from the New World. New York this time. She’s a volunteer in one of Ashbourne’s charity shops, and ingratiated herself into my presence by extolling the virtues of one of a range of appointment calendars which charity shops routinely sell at this time of year. All the monthly pictures are line drawings, you see, which are meant to be coloured in when the recipient is bored in January after the light and glitter of Christmas has passed.

And so we chatted about America and New York for a while, but I forgot to mention that I don’t really see NYC as part of America. It’s always seemed to me that it has the air of an independent city state about it. But I did manage to squeeze in my theory that the USA might benefit from splitting into several separate countries. The clued-up north east could become the first, everything south of the Mason-Dixon line would be the second, the Midwest could be third, California would be a state in its own right because it’s a bit odd, and that just leaves Oregon and Washing State stuck up there in the north-west. I suggested that Canada might be prevailed upon to accept the two orphans as a new province.

Oddly, she didn’t disagree, and that was the end of the conversation. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her whether she knew Zoe Mintz.

A Brief But Exotic Connection.

I watched the women’s football match on Saturday between England and Brazil, and it occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever met a Brazilian. Well you don’t, do you? Australians, Americans, and to a lesser extent the Dutch, buzz around the world like horse flies at a knacker’s yard. Brazilians are a rarity.

But today I was walking around the Shire when I saw a young woman approaching from the opposite direction. I’d seen her twice before and each time she’d smiled, waved, and said ‘hello’, so I thought it was time I elevated the connection.

I opened with some nondescript pleasantry and noticed she had an accent that wasn’t British. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘Brazil,’ she said. ‘That’s interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from Brazil,’ I replied predictably. (I consciously avoided any mention of both horse flies and beach volleyball, since both seemed inappropriate in the circumstances.)

So now I’ve met somebody from Brazil. It was the most exciting thing that’s happened to me for a number of years. I asked her what her name was and she told me, but I don’t remember it. It began with L.

Having a Bejewelled Window.

Having succumbed to an autumn whinge yesterday, I thought I’d balance it up today with something a little more pleasant.

On the opposite side of the lane which runs along the bottom of my garden stands a big old sycamore tree. It’s one of the first local sycamores to adopt autumn colour, and this year has been a particularly vibrant shade of golden yellow. (I expect it has something to do with the warm, dry summer we had this year.)

It stands opposite the front of my house and a little to the right, so if I go into the front bedroom on a sunny morning the sight of it fills the window with its golden glow. To put it simply, the window is full of shiny, golden jewels, and it’s rather pleasant.

(Yes, I know nothing in the material world is innately coloured, but one has to pretend sometimes. And the effect it has on the mind qualifies for the term ‘beautiful.’)

Dour Day.

If days have personalities, today was dour and mean-spirited. A cold, dark, and depressing heaviness hung in the air, seemingly intent  on pressing the life and cheer out of the land and all who move upon it. A light rain left pools of filth on road and field alike. The sky was neither bright nor menacingly dark, but that shade of nondescript grey which leaves the spirit in limbo.

I had to go out to the town this morning and really didn’t want to. The view from the window looked cold and grudgingly hostile. The wind had little power, but its sharpness seemed to bode no good. I went anyway, and felt constantly on the edge of a cold, incisive presence despite several heavy layers of clothing.

Maybe it was all due to the bad night I’d had, a night filled with dreams of being in a familiar place but no longer welcome there, only tolerated. I was woken four or five times feeling chilled, and every movement placed some part of me into the frigid domain of cold cotton sheets. Maybe it was the rewinding of clocks an hour, which we did in Britain today. It happens every year, but today it felt like sending the light of life back towards the darkness whence it came. Or maybe it was just the awareness that the cheerless presence of winter is visible on the horizon and heading my way. I dislike winter.

And maybe tomorrow it will all seem like a mirage.

Being Proud of Being British...

My YouTube recommendations are currently awash with exaggerated stories of how nice we Brits were to German combatants after WWII. They carry headlines like These German POWs Thought They Were Going to Be Ill-Treated in Britain, but actually… And this is followed by a picture of a nice British Army officer talking to them nicely. There was These German POWs Thought They Would Suffer Badly From the Cold in a British Winter, but actually…, and is illustrated with a picture of a nice British Army officer handing out heavy winter coats. And what about the picture of women in uniform parading through the streets with a nice British Army officer in attendance, accompanied by the headline These Women POWs Were Amazed That They Were Allowed to Parade Through the Streets Without Chains. There’s even one showing captured Japanese ‘comfort women’ in uniform, naturally expecting a fate worse than death, but actually nobody touched them.Or so it is claimed.

It’s all silly propaganda, of course, but there was one I found amusing. These German POWs Thought They Would Be Poisoned in British Camps it began, but actually... And then an obviously AI-generated picture shows a group of wild-eyed German soldiers reaching out in a state of ecstasy for a parcel of… fish and chips (wrapped in sheets of old newsprint as they were in those days.) Fish and Chips was, after all, the proletarian dish which put the ‘Great’ in Great Britain. Didn’t you know?