On Candyfloss and Contentment.

I kept seeing candyfloss in my mind’s eye today – a big, multi-coloured candyfloss the size of a basketball. And along with it came the nagging realisation that if you were to reduce such a confection to the sugar of which it is composed, it probably wouldn’t be much bigger than a dried pea. And then I got to thinking that maybe here is a clue to the nature of life: that life is actually something of very little substance which we spin out in our minds until it looks like a giant, multi-coloured confection.

(And I must point out here, just in case a winged confection of American stardust should happen to fly to this corner of the blogosphere, that I do mean life in its grand sense, not somebody whose name happens to have been plucked out of a classical language.)

To continue:

Shortly after receiving this startling bit of speculative intelligence, I realised something else. I have never been able to tolerate contentment for very long. Contentment has always brought a growing sense that the shine is wearing off my world and I need to find something new to buff it up again. I suspect that the two things are connected, and that I’m probably a candyfloss person after all.

(And I was further struck last night by the fact that the word ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘web log,’ and yet it has gained such currency in its own right that we now permit ourselves to refer to a video log as a ‘vlog,’ which isn’t actually a contraction in the same sense. This is quite irrelevant, but mildly interesting.)

This post was made in lieu of the other one I was going to write, about how the Victorians gave vent to their misplaced notions of good and bad taste by painting Tudor half-timbered buildings black and white, and how this has led to the false impression that they always looked like that. It would have been very tedious.