Wan, Weariness, and the Way of Things.

Today has been a non-day. The hours of light and wakefulness offered nothing pleasurable by way of practices or prospects, and the wan day went down in wet and weariness. For those who don’t know, the last nine words are taken from a work by Tennyson describing the last days of the court at Camelot. And that’s how the days feel to me now. These are the last days of the world as we know it and my life in particular. (But it’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it? It is.)

I was looking back over some old blog posts earlier and discovered that Tennyson gave me some of the best of them. However much I sometimes fell out with his style of writing poetry, I do at least have to thank him for that. I didn’t realise just how many times I’ve quoted ‘the world is white with May’ or some fragment from The Lady of Shallot. And it seems that he was highly attuned to the effect that climatic conditions can have on one’s state of mind, as all sensitive people assuredly are.

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It’s been a bad week generally in the JJ world for various reasons. I drove through two areas of the city in which I lived for almost the entirety of my teenage years, and witnessed so many changes that I felt my personal history being taken from me by the rapacious appetites of time and exigency. My memory of those glorious years has always been an abstract phenomenon, as all memory is, but at least the environment survived to provide solidity of a sort. That’s no longer the case, and that depressed me.

And then there was the falling out I had with E.ON, my energy supplier, for the third time in a year. Their behaviour with regard to my account (which is fully paid up to date, I might add) is becoming increasingly incomprehensible, inexcusable, and consequently insufferable. I won’t tell the story because it wouldn’t be worth the time to either write or read it. I am inclined, however, to recommend to every reader living in the UK that they should have nothing to do with E.ON. But maybe that would be pointless, because maybe E.ON is simply following the rest of the corporate world into increasing seediness, self-obsession and the practice of placing profit before service. I don’t think it’s right for a utilities provider to behave that way in a civilised society, and I’d be glad to see the government take utilities back into public ownership. It’s not likely to happen, of course. Mrs Thatcher switched the points to the rails of the free market, and that’s where we’re likely to stay.

But now I’m off to close the curtains against the wet and weary night, and then fret a little over tomorrow’s prospect of having the Orcs of Ordinariness invade my private world. Hatred of invasion is the root of my principal neurosis, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I will probably be back.