A Note from the Hell Hole.

The invasive, sub-zero east wind has continued only a little abated today, so I decided I had to ease the cabin fever and get out of this hell hole of a house for a few hours. But where to go? Where is there to go from here without tearing up my road fuel budget and pretending I’m rich? Heaven knows I’m already tearing up my household budget with the unaccustomed use of electrical heating appliances in a near-fruitless attempt to make this house a bit less of a hell hole.

And so it had to be Ashbourne as usual, there to treat myself to an egg and cress sandwich, a cup of Americano with cream, and a piece of Costa’s tiffin which is very nice but more expensive than most of their other sweet comestibles (is this plan to avoid unnecessary expense working, I ask myself?)

But then the adventure offered the lamentably rare reward of seeing the Lady B hurrying past the coffee shop at a greater speed than I would have thought advisable for a lady in the state of pregnancy. But what would I, a mere male, know of such things? Psychology has always been my interest, not obstetrics. It always seemed to me that if this life has any point to it at all, it must have something to do with what we experience, how we react to our experiences, and how we conduct ourselves subsequently. I might point to the Herman Hess quotation in the sidebar of this blog by way of vindication.

Not that I am blind to the miracle of procreation, of course. There is, indeed, something rather magical about the process of conception, gestation and birth. It’s just that I’ve never given birth myself, so my experience of it is necessarily limited.

The Lady B didn’t notice me, by the way. She rarely does. Or maybe it was because she was wearing a woolly hat which appeared identical to my memory of the woolly hat her sister was wearing the last time I saw her. Maybe it was the same hat.

Now I’m descending to a level of triviality extreme even by my standards. It’ll be dark soon. Better go and see that the birds have enough food for the morning and then hunker down in the hell hole. Bye.