I was sitting in the garden with a cup of tea this evening
while the sun was still up, when a blog post on the subject of it being August
ran through my mind. It was a very good blog post, so lyrical it might have
been a poem, or at least a few lines of Shakespeare written all on one line. I
remember that it mentioned elderberries and rosebay willowherb, but that’s all
the detail I do remember. I recall it going onto a different tack entirely,
which pleased me because it would have meant adding at least the benefit of
variation to an otherwise one dimensional post, but I’ve completely forgotten
what the tack was. Such is life, I suppose, when the muses no longer consider
you worthy of their extended company, but simply call to you briefly on the way
to somewhere else and are never seen again. Or maybe my brain is becoming
deficient in some way. Who can tell?
(But in typing this I suddenly remembered the nurse at the Royal Derby
Hospital who asked me the
oddest question I’ve ever been asked in a hospital: I think it was during the
course of a pre-op examination, and she asked: ‘Has anybody ever told you that
you have mad cow disease?’ As far as I recall, she had no reason whatsoever to
be joking.)
And that little recollection reminds me of something I must
say (possibly by way of repeating myself, but I honestly don’t remember) about
Shirley Jackson. She had the driest of dry senses of humour. I just read a
short story of hers called All She Said
Was Yes, and it’s full of little phrases and asides cast to the ether like
all insignificant little phrases and asides, only they’re not insignificant. To
a mind attuned to very dry humour, they’re actually very funny. I think I would
have liked her.
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