Friday, 15 February 2013

Mind of Still Water.

'How terrible it must be,’ he thought, ‘to be the water in a stagnant pool.’

My mind felt stagnant all day today, maybe because nothing in particular went wrong for a change. I thought it might revive a little if I moved all the furniture off one wall of the living room, rubbed down the exposed skirting boards, undercoated them, and then put all the furniture back. So I did, but it didn’t help much.

I got only mildly interested in the story of five hundred people in Russia having been injured by the shock wave caused by a meteorite falling into a lake, but a little more interested in the fact that the Ceefax news report called it a ‘meteor,’ which isn’t strictly correct. The BBC isn’t what it was, you know.

And the walk was pretty uneventful apart from one thing:

(Two, actually, but let’s not mention the ladies in their colour-coded dressing gowns who sometimes remind me of characters in a French painting.)

As I was walking up Lid Lane, the extremity of my torch beam caught two eyes looking back at me from the darkness. The size suggested a local moggy out on patrol. Nothing remarkable there, I agree, but I had a thought:

You know all those films in which somebody is wandering through the jungle at night and hears the low, guttural growl of a big cat close by, and we all feel really, really scared for him? Well, it seems to me that if there really was a big cat intent upon devouring the itinerant human, it probably wouldn’t growl. It would surely remain silent so as not to betray its presence and location to the prey. But then we wouldn’t feel really, really scared for him, would we?

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