Always Chasing the Carrot.

The Shire today has been excessively dreary. The rise in temperature and shows of occasional sunshine which we were forecast failed to become manifest. Instead it remained cold, the wind rose, the rain became persistent from around lunchtime, and the leaden sky occasioned the need of lights in the house from about 2.30 onwards.

We go into December on Saturday, and so begins the longing for the light time when the busy flight of bats and bees graces the air, butterflies float from flower to flower, moths dance seductively through the balmy evenings, and trees stand proud in their summer finery, whispering as the breeze strokes them instead of hissing in the autumn and falling silent in the winter.

When I was a kid people would tell me not to wish for tomorrow because to do so would be wishing my life away. I believed them of course, but I could never follow their advice. All my life my perceptions and responses have owed more to my prospects than my present, and so I suppose I’ve spent that life wishing it away. When life seemed an endless future this wasn’t a problem, but ever since those dear old intimations of mortality set in it’s seemed a little sad and somehow ironic that my eye was always set firmly on where I was going and largely belittled the experience of the present.

It isn’t too late to change, of course, but I don’t have it in me to change. It’s how I am and how I’ve always been. Christmas Eve was always the best day of the season for my childhood self, while Christmas Day was always an anticlimax. Only on a few rare occasions did I connect unreservedly with the moment. There are times when how you’re made is a life sentence, however much the writers of self-help books like to make money from telling you otherwise.

So how do you think I felt when there was a very real prospect that I would never see the sights of spring and summer again? I felt empty and pointless, that’s how I felt. And now that I’ve been afforded a reason to look forward to another summer, that’s what I’ll do.

One day it will end in that most cataclysmic of moments to which all life is directed, and then I might or might not have a bridge to cross. And when that moment comes, no doubt I shall be more interested in what lies beyond the bridge than the bridge itself. And the irony contained within all the above is that I could never get to where I wanted to be because where I wanted to be was always held firmly on the end of a stick strapped to my back. 

‘I hope there’s pudding’ seems oddly appropriate in the circumstances.