On Gulags and Getting in the Way.

Mel’s analogy of the wasteland to which we cyborg-resisters are being consigned (not quite gulags yet, but maybe they’re coming) seems nicely appropriate to my life at present. I thought of making a slightly clever post about how wastelands are too cold to be comfortable, too dark to see anything, and too thinly populated to afford the opportunity for meaningful communication with fellow humans except at a distance. But then I asked myself whether being slightly clever affords sufficient justification for committing one of the direst of sins – being miserable and therefore tedious. I decided it didn’t, and so the post landed on stony ground and duly perished. (There must be a label for this technique; there’s a label for everything else. Madelines probably know.) Instead I thought I would recount the mildly interesting story of a creature encounter.

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I was walking through a wood the other day when I heard a scrabbling noise to my left and a fox broke cover only a few yards in front of me. He ran across the path and headed up the rising ground to my right. He was a big dog fox, and his heavy winter coat rippled sequentially with the muscles evidently beneath it. In fact, he looked remarkably powerful for a fox, and that’s the closest I’ve ever been to a wild one.

And then I noticed two pheasants walking in sedate pheasant fashion a little further along the path, and it seemed I had interrupted Mr Reynard’s pursuit of his dinner. That troubled me. I have a profound dislike of nature’s requirement that one thing has to kill another in order to survive, but I take the view that I have no right to interfere.

I looked up the lea to see Mr R looking back at me. I apologised mentally, but he didn’t look at all pleased.