A Candle in a Cold Twilight.

Recently received intelligence informs me that the sack of deleterious prospects for the new year and beyond continues to grow heavier, and so the persistent drip of anxiety is quickening.

Where have all the flowers gone? Where the sunlit company of the inestimable Lady B? Where the means to sit and observe some random minutes of the meandering steps of random strangers? Where the bright and mellow mornings when I was content to start another day? Where the inspiration to commit my own mental meanderings to the vastness of cyberspace?

Darkness rules now. Covid is the only headline. Warnings, restrictions and impediments block the view ahead. Risk is the watchword of the hour, and reluctance its dedicated bedfellow. And while the spirit feels cabined, cribbed and confined, the leaden sky continues to glower, disgorging its cargo almost daily to swamp the torpid landscape with wetness, filth and the detritus of decay.

*  *  *

But at least I have Charlotte Brontë and her Shirley to provide a little blessed relief. I’m about a third of the way through it now (much of the prose style is heavy and complex, and so requires a high degree of concentration) and am becoming engrossed for a most unexpected reason: I’m learning – or think I’m learning – an awful lot about Charlotte Brontë. I’m sure it’s the only book I’ve ever read in which reading between the lines is more engaging and enlightening than following the plot. There isn’t an awful lot of plot to follow so far.