The Wrath of Karma.

Over the past two days I’ve rediscovered an old and almost forgotten pleasure: having a cold beer sitting in the garden on a warm, sunny and calm afternoon while birdsong bedecks the silence and traffic noise doesn’t.

I’ve been a fan of beer all my adult life, but I lost my taste for it after the operation for some reason. I carried on drinking it for a while out of habit, but eventually gave it up because I came to accept that I wasn’t enjoying it. In consequence of this I’ve had nine bottles or cans of beer sitting idly around my house looking superfluous for quite a long time, two in the fridge and the rest in my office.

But yesterday I decided that the warm weather and the garden work was causing some degree of dehydration, and thought a beer might solve the problem. And so I had one, and was surprised at how well it had stood the test of time. It was most enjoyable, so today I had another one.

What I’d forgotten, however, was that drinking beer in the afternoon on a warm day tends to give me a headache. I got a headache, and wondered why karma has to be so bloody-minded as to make you pay for something as simple and innocent as having a beer in a quiet country garden on a warm afternoon. I suspect it’s preparing me to be a Buddhist monk in my next life, when what I really want to be is a deep space astronaut.