A Failed Muse on Transition.

I did try, you know, I really did. It being the last day of September, I was consumed with a deep desire to write a post about the different qualities we ascribe to the months of September and October respectively.

I wanted it to be insightful and I wanted it to be lyrical, and so I thought and thought and thought. I wanted to say that September is the month when summer is still in sight but drifting away on the wake, while the golden hues and shortening days of October declare themselves the harbinger of a wholly different course. It was going to contrast hedgerow berries with crisp and fallen leaves. I tried to find a way to compare the occasional balmy twilight in September with the first icy chills of its successor. But I kept falling into a mental muddy pool and getting my knees dirty, so I gave up. I do remember the final sentence, though:

‘I expect it’s different in Barbados.’

Sorry I failed. Happy Halloween (just in case I’ve given up the ghost before we get there.)

Learning a New Skill.

I’ve noticed that Google has a neat little trick up its sleeve to ensure that YouTube viewers toe the party line.

Just about every video now has one or more adverts to sit through before the entertainment begins, and as soon as you place the pointer over the ‘sound off’ button so you don’t get your ears, eyes and mind polluted by the insult, the whole window shakes.  Time and brain power being what it is, you soon learn to track the shaking so you hit the mark with increasing regularity and feel very proud of yourself.

Shouldn’t this technique be included in the primary schools curriculum? I mean, we do have to keep up with the arch tramliner’s neat little tricks, don’t we?

A Note on Pain.

There used to be a commonly used cliché where I come from, which ran: ‘You’ve got more guts than gumption.’ For those who don’t know, the word ‘gumption’ simply means common sense, and so the statement is a kind of backhanded compliment.

Somebody said it to me once when I was around twelve or thirteen because he’d noticed that I was able to tolerate physical pain without complaint or response of any kind. And it was true; I could.

I’d developed a technique, you see, of separating the neurological response from the psychological one. In effect, my consciousness somehow stood apart from my physical body so that I could observe the phenomenon without being seen to react to it. It’s a skill I’ve lost as I’ve grown older.

I’ve been the unwilling recipient of quite a lot of physical pain over the past 3½ years, occasioned by a number of different circumstantial triggers, and now I react with the more usual squirming, screwed up eyes, and a variety of vocal emanations. (I suppose it means I’ve become a wimp, but should I care?)

But I’ve realised that it isn’t only the physical discomfort that troubles me. It’s also the sense that pain is often an indicator that something is broken, or is at least perceived as such. And what do we do with broken things? We call them worthless and throw them away. And since pain often restricts – or forbids altogether – certain actions or activities, it really does make us, at least partially, worthless and fit only to be thrown away. And I don’t like that.

(I suspect that this post is hopelessly incoherent. I choose to blame the pain in my injured arm which is making it difficult – and painful – to do almost anything with my right hand, including the typing of this post.)

The Ashbourne Volvo.

There was a car in Sainsbury’s car park today which stood out against all the others. It was huge, almost new, immaculately clean and shiny, kitted out in battleship grey metallic livery, and proudly sporting a Volvo badge. I thought it hideous. (I dislike big cars by default, and anyone who knows anything about me will no doubt understand why.)

And then it struck me as odd that it should be a Volvo. Volvos are Swedish, or used to be, and Swedes are generally known for their refined taste. There was nothing tasteful about this monstrosity. It was heavy and clumpy and needed a cowcatcher to finish it off. And of course, I naturally fell to wondering what sort of person would spend all that money to not only own such a monument to the ugliness of opulence, but even be content to be seen sitting in it. Probably not a Swede, but I won’t go on.

Loving Greta.

Now that my heroine, Greta Thunberg, has allowed her hair to cascade freely, I’m becoming uncommonly fond of her. Not only is she strong, courageous, single-minded, and possessed of a voice redolent of a Viking’s battle axe, she’s also shorter than me. I wonder whether she would come to tea if I asked her nicely.

Yes, I know I should be thinking deeper thoughts than this. Sometimes I do.

Accepting the Visitor.

There was a young woman in my bedroom this morning. Did I become breathless and weak at the knees? No. Did I become excited and begin to tremble uncontrollably? No. I took it all in my stride, maintaining a laudable degree of equanimity in spite of the fact that no other young woman has crossed that hallowed threshold in the fifteen years I’ve lived here. I didn’t even need to make any effort, and so it would appear to be true that old habits do, indeed, die hard.

You will no doubt have surmised that it was the land agent come to check whether my place of abode is a fit and proper habitation for a denizen of the 21^st century to lay his head at night (I didn’t get around to mentioning that I’m somewhat removed from being a denizen of the 21^st century, and she didn’t ask, so I think I managed to keep my reputation intact.) ‘Do the taps work,’ was what she did ask. ‘Yes.’

As she was leaving I decided to grill her gently, and maybe a little surreptitiously, in order to establish an opinion as to whether she is a nice person. I got the impression that she is, so she can come again if she wants to.

Stumbling Blindly.

I was reading a few pages of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman tonight, and one of the characters reminded me of a woman I used to live with. She didn’t handle her liquor well, and she used to like me to hold her long hair back while she was vomiting into the toilet. It sometimes surprised me that she never asked: ‘Was I really revolting last night? It can’t have been very nice for you, having to hang over me while I threw up.’ She never did, but if she had I think I would have replied: ‘It really doesn’t matter. It’s only passing the time.’

Because that’s all we have, isn’t it? Time. We come into this world owning nothing but a load of time to do something with. There’s nobody to tell us how much time we've got, and nobody we can truly trust to tell us just what we’re supposed to do with it. And so we live by rules and expectations invented by other people who also don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it. It’s like being pushed into a dense fog by a blind man who says: ‘Go and find the thing.’ ‘What thing?’ you ask, but he’s disappeared.

Keeping the Cafetiere.

I was making a pot of coffee tonight in my very ordinary cafetiere. (It is very ordinary, you know – one of the standard black plastic ones they sell everywhere for between £6 and £10 depending on whether it’s a discount store or not.) I had the sudden thought that maybe I should buy a new, more expensive, more stylish one.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ asked one of my brother personalities who must have been standing next to me all the time.

‘Well,’ I answered confidently, ‘if it was more stylish, I’d feel more stylish.’

‘And what purpose would that serve?’ answered the brother.

‘Erm, let me see… It would boost my sense of self-worth.’

‘For whose benefit?’

‘Why, mine of course.’

‘Just because it’s stylish?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because stylishness is a belonging thing, and you’re not a belonger.’

‘I’m still human.’

‘Only just. You don’t walk with humans, you don’t talk with humans, you don’t have humans visiting you and saying “Oh my, Jeffrey, what a stylish sense you have in the matter of cafetieres. I wish I was as refined as you.” Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you are then.’

Point taken. The old cafetiere can stay. (The last one I had was white, by the way. Something untoward happened to it – don’t remember what – and now it’s one of the things I use to cover seedlings if there’s a frost due.)

The Visit.

The land agent is due to come here tomorrow to conduct a property survey (whatever one of those is) and I’m at a loss to know how to handle it. The fact is, you see, that all previous agents on this estate have been male, 6ft 2 or over, and possessed of a superior attitude just to let you know that everyone has their place and yours is one step up from the pigsty. I always supposed it was the old role of the land agents as bully boys for the landed gentry still holding sway in the rural backwaters of the English countryside, and my part in all proceedings with them was to fight my corner from a position at least two steps above the pigsty.

 

But the current one doesn’t fit the picture. I encountered her in passing one day and was surprised to see that she was not only female, but also young, blonde, of average female dimensions, and fresh out of university and surveyor school (or wherever they go to learn their time-honoured speciality.) So how am I to approach her? I thought of trying the following method:

 

But maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea since I’ve learned that presuming on a stranger’s sense of humour can be dangerous, and land agents have ways of making life difficult for you if you give them cause to want to. I suppose I’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe that fabled capacity for charm which a few people once told me I had still has a little charge left in the old battery. Or maybe I should play the cute little old man role and mutter the occasional ‘yes miss’ and ‘no miss’ as circumstances demand. Then again, I could always try offering a few little anecdotes like the black dog leaping out of the wall at me, and things being moved around in the kitchen without my intervention, and seeing blue lights hovering above the hedge when I was burning my Beltane fire one year. Maybe she would back out of the house as fast as her flat professional shoes would shuffle and save us all the trouble.

In the event I expect I’ll just be me. While I hold that role playing is fundamental to the prosecution of human life, I’m not actually very good at playing manufactured ones. If you hear never more of me, pray for my soul.

On Petrol and Potter.

Do you realise how irritating it is to feel the urge to write but having nothing to write about? Today was tedious and my injured arm precluded any gardening work.

I suppose I could mention the road fuel shortage which is causing much gnashing of teeth in all relevant quarters. Blame is being laid far and wide. The Road Haulage Association, Covid and Brexit are all being held up to be shot at, but my favourite villain is the media. When I saw how the BBC was sensationalising the relatively small problem at a few BP stations on Friday I predicted panic buying and so it has proved to be. According to the body which represents the independent petrol stations, two thirds of their members are now completely dry with the rest due to join them over the next few days. Well, there you are. Let’s blame the panic buyers. It seems there’s plenty of road fuel in the country, but it’s all in the wrong place – at the refineries rather than the filling stations because the filing stations are being swamped by customers crying ‘me, me, me’ and there aren’t enough delivery drivers to cope.

So it seems there are lots of people to blame. OK, that will do. The modern world is becoming amazingly dysfunctional and this is just the latest example. Do I care? Not at the moment because my arm still hurts and I’m still getting bouts of feeling unwell.

I’ll tell you what is odd, though. Last night I developed an unaccustomed urge to watch the Harry Potter movies again. It’s strange because I’ve watched them all so many times that I know the stories, the scripts, the plot holes and the continuity errors backwards. It’s just that I felt a sense that I’ve missed something in them somewhere, some unintentional message which can tell me something I need to know. I thought a tree said as much to me when I was standing under its branches last night, but I might have misheard it.

Opposing Views.

I was watching a shuffle dance video on YouTube tonight, and it occurred to me that if I were to copy it to a DVD and smuggle the article into Afghanistan, I would no doubt be subjected to summary execution by the most horrific means available. And that made me wonder…

Are shuffle dance videos – being largely composed of nubile young women cavorting in skimpy attire and often backed by glitzy settings – an example of the superficiality and decadence to which the western world is largely committed, or are they an expression of healthy creative abandon?

I have sympathy with both views, but I prefer to side with the latter because I like seeing young female legs being gaily cast about while still being attached to their physical host. I can't decide whether that's a weakness or not.

On Cows' Feet and the Algorithm.

I’m very curious to know why YouTube keeps offering me videos on the subject of diseased hooves in cattle. They do, you know, every night, accompanied by disgusting images of exploding pus, flesh being eaten away from the inside out, black rotting stuff which I can almost smell through the monitor, and sundry other retch-making conditions which come close to putting me off my nightly scotch.

I just don’t understand where their algorithms get the notion that I might be interested in the subject of Gruesome Diseases to Which Cows’ Feet Are Prey. I’m not aware of anything I have ever said in an email, a blog post or a YouTube comment – my three modes of communication on the internet – which might justify it.

Should I conclude that the dreaded algorithm is truly the biggest and most insidious pandemic striking at the heart of modern mankind? I truly think it might be, so when are we going to start designing a vaccine? And can I be the first in the queue? 

The Sleeping Time.

I know that the subject of twilights has become something of an idée fixe on this blog over the course of the year, but I have to mention something else that came to me this evening. Every twilight appears to have its own character, subtly different from all the other twilights, and I seem to be becoming more aware of the varying nuances.

The same doesn’t seem to be true of the days and nights. Every warm, sunny day in a given season is much like every other warm, sunny day. And the same can be said of dull, rainy days and dark, moonless nights. Twilight is the exception.

Tonight’s twilight was intriguing. It was darkening prematurely due to a heavy cloud cover drifting purposefully from the west on a light breeze, and yet it was unusually warm for late September. And then I felt the sense that something was missing. It was like the effect of a sudden silence when you’ve become accustomed to a regular hum. It reminded me of the night when I was keeping vigil by the bed in which my comatose mother had lain for a day and a half, and a nurse came into the room and told me her life was over. A sudden rent opened in the fabric of familiarity. In the case of today’s twilight, I supposed it was the earth energies – or growth imperative if you will – winding down to become near-torpid. I settled on that explanation in the absence of a better one.

So what is this sudden sensitivity I’ve developed to the nuances of twilights? Could it be simply a matter of ‘as the day, so the life’? That seems reasonable, too, so I’ll take it for the time being.

On Pains and Perceived Pleasures.

A couple of weeks ago I did the second toughest job in my garden, and did some injury to my right arm in the process. Muscle tear? Ligament damage? I’ve no idea, but it hurt. Ever since then I’ve been doing relatively lightweight work, and the pain in the arm seemed to have eased. So today I decided to do the very toughest job, the one I’ve been dreading ever since I did it last year. I wish I hadn’t.

The fire which smoulders in my forearm grows to an inferno every time I do anything with my right hand, and some little imp indulges its sadistic tendency by sticking a needle into my elbow. Filling the kettle to make a pot of coffee hurts. Lifting the coffee pot to fill the mug hurts. Lifting the mug to drink the coffee hurts. Even typing this post hurts. And that’s not all.

The condition I’ve been calling angina (but which might be something else according to the doctor) didn’t take kindly to the fairly strenuous effort either. It gave me a pounding heart, pressure in the chest, light headedness, general debility, and loss of appetite. It’s all a bit dispiriting, you know? It is.

I still have a mountain of work to do in the garden. I have to drive tomorrow, which will probably hurt. I have to get the house straight because the agent is coming on Tuesday to do a ‘property survey’, whatever that entails.That will probably hurt, too.

I need a rest. I need to be reclining in a hammock slung within the shade of palm trees fringing a sun-kissed beach. The sun needs to be low and golden as sunset approaches, the folds of low cloud on the horizon need to be tinged with scarlet, the sea needs to be blue and the air balmy. There must be a ready supply of young Filipina nurses on call to massage my poorly arm and make it better, and a brace of bronzèd maidens ready and willing to serve toasted cheese sandwiches, bowls of best dairy ice cream, and endless glasses of fresh mango juice to suit my various tastes. I won’t need a sun hat because I’ll be in the shade.

A dream won’t do, so don’t bother. I need the real thing or I fear I might shrink irreversibly and go pouf.

*  *  *

I finished watching Once Upon a Time in Anatolia tonight, so what should I say about it? Erm… There are some very good-looking women in Turkey, but they don’t say much.

The Shakespeare Conundrum.

The thought occasionally occurs to me that the practice of referring to dead people in the present tense is irrational. We say ‘Shakespeare is dead.’ How can Shakespeare be dead? How can Shakespeare be anything since he no longer exists? I suppose it serves the cause of linguistic brevity, since the more rational form of expression – ‘Shakespeare no longer exists. He died.’ – is unnecessarily cumbersome. But then I thought of another explanation.

It’s often said (even by scientists) that time is an illusion. If that is the case, maybe we should see existence not in the form of a linear flow – past, present and future – but as something more akin to a vinyl record, on which all of the music exists simultaneously but we experience it as the stylus does. It would then follow that Shakespeare does still exist, but not in this part of the groove. He’s over there in a different part of the same continuous groove, and that's what being dead in the present tense means.

OK, so now I’m philosophising, and it seems to me that philosophy is nothing more than theorising and speculating and offering opinions on the unknowable. So having come up with a possible explanation for an apparent linguistic absurdity, maybe we should move on to an even bigger question: why do we bother with philosophers?

 

And now I'm going to watch some more of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. So far, it's dead good (as one example of common English vernacular would have it.)

Being a Shirley Type.

Tonight’s dinner consisted of a bowl of home made pea and potato soup accompanied by a strange tasting roll with a Japanese name. Very pleasant it was too, but not what you would call ‘substantial.’

And so tonight’s post-dinner munching consisted of a slice of buttered toast, a pack of little cheesy crunchy things, a banana, a chocolate, and a rice cake. And as I was reaching for the packet containing the rice cakes, a sudden thought sprang at me from both nowhere and somewhere inside my head simultaneously. It said ‘I must always eat or I shall die.’ It was entirely involuntary.

And this is why I enjoy Shirley Jackson’s writing so much. These odd, involuntary thoughts are the main substance of her main protagonists – they’re very strange characters, and yet strangely compelling because they’re so compellingly familiar.

Obeying the Techno Sheepdogs.

I had to make two phone calls today to sort out a couple of simple issues. One should have taken around five minutes, the other about three. I was on the phone for nearly an hour, waiting and waiting and waiting and listening to endless recorded announcements, mostly along the lines of ‘if you want to do this, use this app’ and ‘if you want to do that, use that app.’ I didn’t want to do any of them, so let me make it quite clear:

I don’t have apps; I’m a totally app-less person. I don’t even have a smart phone because I’ve never felt the slightest need of one. But maybe I’m fighting a losing battle because the smart phone is no longer a lifestyle accessory. It and a whole array of other technological facilities are becoming essential tools for normal function in the modern age, while the human dimension is falling ever more into irrelevance in the business of living a human life. Our affairs are now largely ordered by apps and algorithms which guide us surely and steadfastly to the will of the bureaucrats and the corporate world in order that we should play their game on their playing field for their benefit.

And the result of all this is that delays, dysfunction and unwonted difficulty are the mainstay of the daily grind. Frustration and stress are the default conditions, and resistance, as ever, is useless.

So maybe I should get a smart phone. Maybe I should walk through the ancient streets of Ashbourne poking and stroking it. And then maybe the whole population of our little market town will gravitate towards me, shuffling and grinning inanely until I am surrounded by a sea of Ashburnians, all crying:

Welcome, brother. Welcome home. Now you are one of us again. Let us sit upon the ground and tell fine stories of East Enders, Strictly Come Dancing, and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Sit with us and smile, and we will instruct you in the ways of our masters and the bounty they convey.

Oh what a brave new world will lie before me until the blessed day when the Dark Rider glides alongside and says ‘Hop up, lad. Time to go and walk with your ancestors in the sunlight of reason and relaxation.’

 

*  *  *

 

Incidentally, I spoke to my doctor today and he's not convinced that my problem is angina. One of the pieces doesn't fit, apparently. He wants to get me linked up to an ECG machine and have a listen to my heart. I wonder whether he'll come across my missing sanity down there.

Time Waits for No Old Man.

I saw four handsome horses walking sedately down my lane today. And on each of their backs sat a pretty young maid. And each young maid had a pony tail flowing and swinging seductively from the back of her riding hat. And the pretty young maids laughed and talked while the handsome horses clipped and clopped. They arrived on the in-breath and left on the out.

And I smelt again the foetid stench of the tyrant Time, and tasted the rancid flavour of ever-polluted prospects.

And then, for once, I wished I were a poet.

Something New and an Odd Reprise.

I’ve said a few times that this has been a year of firsts, haven’t I? There was another one today: I saw a hen pheasant walking along the top of one of my boundary hedges. I’ve spent twenty five years of my life living in the countryside and I’ve never seen a pheasant walking along the top of a hedge before. I’ve seen them fly over a hedge to get from one field to another if they can’t find a gap to walk through, and at certain times of the year it’s common to see a cock bird perching in a tree at twilight, declaring his territory in a loud and strident voice. But the hens are strictly ground-dwelling birds.

Yet there she was, walking placidly along the top of the hedge and taking in the view in all directions. Maybe this was a fascinating new experience for her, and maybe she will invite her sisters to join her eventually, and maybe the practice of hedge walking will become a regular habit among hen pheasants. And then maybe I will be able to say that I was the one who saw it first.

*  *  *

On a less optimistic note, I might mention that several times in my life I’ve been close to a bird or animal when it’s died – usually either a wild bird or animal I’ve tried to rescue, or a pet which has had to be euthanized. And I’ve noticed that shortly after death there has always been a slightly sweet and musty smell hanging in the air. I smelt it when I woke up this morning, and I’ve been smelling it in the house all day. I wonder what it means.

Being Out of Step.

There’s a repetitive ad from Sage (I assume Sage Accounting) which keeps appearing in the side panel of my Hotmail inbox. It shows a picture of a woman with built-up orange hair which matches her baggy orange sweater. She looks smug, self-satisfied, graceless, formless, detached. To my perception she appears ugly and utterly unappealing. The headline runs:

Boss Your Cash Flow

…and the button they give you to access the company’s hallowed halls reads:

Boss it now

All that’s missing are the exclamation marks.

The ad doesn’t say ‘we have a product which will assist you with an aspect of your accounting.’ It’s all about confrontation, aggression, power, domination. This is the mainstream modern world declaring its methodology, and speaks volumes for why the mainstream world and I don’t get on.

I want a button which says don’t show me this ad again. There isn’t one.

Squirrel Talk.

I was standing next to one of the big ash trees which border the path at the end of the Harry Potter wood today, admiring the view across the fields to the river valley and on to the hills beyond. I heard a small, indeterminate noise to my right, and turned to see a squirrel clinging to the tree trunk, watching me. I said ‘hello, little friend,’ and the squirrel made a kind of squeaky bark back. And then it ran up the tree and disappeared from view.

Now, you may say that this is an unremarkable occurrence and therefore not worth mentioning. But is it? Apart from the fact that such an encounter has never happened to me before, I’m curious to know what the squeaky bark was all about. The squirrel must have had a reason for doing it, or else why waste the energy?

Did it mean ‘hello back’? Was it a call to the entirety of squirrels and meant ‘hey, there’s a big creature down here that makes a funny noise. Be on your guard.’ Could it have been a threat along the lines of ‘get out of our wood or we’ll throw things at you’? Or maybe it was merely a hiccup brought on by having consumed a surfeit of acorns.

I shall never know, of course, and that makes it today’s mystery.

On Being Used.

I was about twenty two at the time, and was in Winchester for a week on a staff training course. I went into a pub I’d long wanted to visit (because it was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of Lady Lisle who was executed there after the Monmouth Rebellion.)

Anyway, I got myself a pint, took a seat in the lounge bar, and waited for t’ghost to turn up (from one of the Albert monologues made famous by Stanley Holloway.) What actually turned up was a pretty, young blonde who asked whether she could join me. I considered replying: ‘Get thee hence, strumpet. Do I resemble in any way the sort of morally impoverished male who would allow a hussy of your calibre to pollute his sanctified space?’ But I didn’t. I bought her a drink instead, and we spent the next hour or so discussing this and that and getting on very nicely thank you. And then she said:

‘I have to go now. Thanks for the drink.’

‘So soon?’ I replied. I’d begun to get the impression, you see, that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Winchester and all who sail in her.

‘Yes. My boyfriend’s watching me.’ (She pointed him out, scowling at us from the bar around the corner.) ‘We’d had an argument, so I came and sat with you to make him jealous.’ And then she left.

That’s not the only story of similar ilk that I could recount regarding my dealings with the fairer sex. Another happened in the same pub on another trip to Winchester. You’d think they’d put a warning notice on the door, wouldn’t you? And there was my mother fearing I would be led astray by women of dubious intent.

Me and the Slime Mold.

Being something of a loner myself, I couldn’t let a YouTube video entitled Why do loners exist? slip by unwatched. A scientist explained… but it was a long explanation so I’ll skip to the bottom line:

Loners exist to pick up the pieces when the rest of the population get wiped out by forces beyond their control. We’re the failsafe mechanism, apparently. And this encouraging fact was discovered by studying slime mold (which is surprisingly intelligent you might be surprised to hear, as were the scientists.)

So there you have it. It appears I’m a valuable asset to the herd whether I want to be or not. And I have no problem at all with being related to slime mold.

Taking Life Seriously.

I had this video recommended to me recently and I can’t stop watching it:

 

And now the latest question to which I don’t have an answer is: Do I take life too seriously?

I thought about it a lot, and realised that before you can answer that question, you have to answer another one: What does taking life seriously mean?

I thought about it some more, and it soon became apparent that the second question is probably unanswerable. I became lost in a veritable forest of considerations depending on the angle from which you approach it. In the end I gave up after settling on one thought:

People who don’t take life seriously in any way never preach. They might comment – probably frequently – but they don’t preach. That’s the position to which I’ve been aspiring for several years now, and I think the position is very well established. So maybe that answers the first question. Then again, I’m not at all sure that it does…

The Matter of the Late Toad.

I’m at a loose end again. Nothing to do until the DVD of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia arrives from eBay, and still over two hours until my restricted bandwidth permits the nightly YouTube session. Maybe the story of the dead toad will suffice in the absence of anything more notable (with apologies to the toad, of course.)

When I went for a walk this morning I saw a dead toad on the road. (The rhyme was not lost upon me and a ditty did begin to form in my head, but ‘I saw a toad upon the road’ was all I could get, so I stopped bothering.)

It was dead, you see, but showed no sign of injury whatsoever. It was fully plump, all body parts were precisely where they should be, and there was no sign of blood. I thought this a little odd because when toads get run over by vehicles they generally become flattened facsimiles of toads and are sometimes hardly recognisable as toads at all. So what had been the cause of this poor amphibian’s demise?

I could only speculate that maybe one unusual feature of the toad is its habit of suddenly giving up the ghost for no apparent reason. Or maybe toads have heart attacks as we do. Maybe it had choked on a beetle it was trying to eat. I became even more speculative and thought it might have been a witch’s familiar and heard a farmer say ‘Better run the mower over the paddock before it rains.’ (You might need to read Macbeth to get that one.) In any event I wished it well.

And tonight I had a complimentary response to one of my YouTube comments, just for saying that violas make twilight music. (I knew I’d manage to get twilight in somehow.)

High Table Notes.

No proper post from me tonight. I’m too full of soul-searching and general introspection.

It's all on account of the priestess using a very bad word in an email recently. Entrepreneur. The word ‘entrepreneur’ is about as bad a word as words can get to somebody like me. It’s a Trump word, a Branson word, a Murdoch word. It smells of sewers, sanitary requisites and city whizz kids.

So what do I do when somebody uses such a word in the hallowed halls of my presence? I send them away, of course. What else is there to do? But priestesses are not that easily despatched because they’re very good at suggesting that maybe you’re being a little unreasonable, even though they don’t actually couch it in those terms. Priestesses are surprisingly difficult to get rid of, and the worst part is that it doesn’t take long to realise that your life would be a whole lot poorer if they weren't.

*  *  *

I have a mushroom left over from the vegetarian chilli I made yesterday, and intend to use it to augment the vegetarian-ravioli-on-toast which I propose having for lunch tomorrow. So there you have it: life’s bounty wrapped up in a single mushroom. How profound is that?

On Dylan and the Dying of the Light.

Many moons ago, when I was in my twenties and thought myself more erudite than I actually was (or still am), I bought an anthology of poetry by Dylan Thomas. I thought erudition important, you see, and I thought that knowing the works of Dylan Thomas would broaden my education. It didn’t because I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Or, to put it another way, I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. (‘Do not go gentle into that goodnight’ was the one exception.)

And ever since then the book has rested uncomplaining on a bookshelf; and every so often I take it up again and try some more; and every time I do I still don’t get it. I tried again tonight. I even tried reading it while listening to Sheila Chandra because she’s a bit weird, too. It didn’t work, so now it will go uncomplaining back onto the bookshelf.

But at least I have ‘Do not go gentle’ to help me in my hour of need. When the hour finally comes – when I’m lying in some horribly uncomfortable hospital bed awaiting the inevitable – I intend to quote the first three lines to the nearest nurse:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And the nearest nurse will ask ‘where does that come from?’ and I will answer ‘it’s Dylan Thomas.’ And the nurse will think me very erudite, and I will leave the earth in a good mood because I finally got a nurse to notice me. I like nurses.

*  *  *

Tonight’s twilight was balmy again, but it was also damp. We’ve had rain today for the first time in a few weeks, and it fell softly as the light did in the gloaming. The casement of my front bedroom window was standing open again, as it was last night, and so I went up to the room and looked out over the far landscape, luxuriating in the tepid, still air and the smell of rain. A little bat flew up close to my face, and then flew away again. I said ‘thank you.’

Breaking Down.

Today has been absolutely bloody awful. It started with being semi-thwarted in my attempt to consult a doctor over my (several) health issues, continued through such matters as more problems with my energy supplier and several internet dropouts, and finished with a startling email which shook me to my boot laces. There was more, but I’m too disoriented to enumerate them.

One upshot of the email was that tomorrow I need to visit the hallowed sanctum of the Lady B’s mother to ask her a question. She probably won’t know the answer, but I can’t think of anybody else who might. The problem is, I don’t know which door I’m supposed to knock on…

That’s if I wake up in the same world tomorrow. I am coming seriously to suspect that my life is a virtual reality game being played in some cosmic computer somewhere, and that it desperately needs a rebuild. Circuits seem to be disintegrating at an alarming rate.

On Twilight and the Girl With Flaxen Hair.

I would say that tonight’s and last night’s twilights were warmer, quieter, and therefore generally balmier, than any we had during the three main months of summer. And there was a hot orange sunset sitting low in the western sky, while the rest of the firmament was unclouded and coloured various shades of wholesome azure.

I looked up at the windows of my west-facing front bedroom where one of the casements was standing open, and it occurred to me that if I were a competent pianist, and if I had a piano resident in the front bedroom, I could sit and play Debussy’s La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin to drift serenely across the landscape.

And, of course, there would at that moment be a lovely young woman with straw blonde hair strolling slowly up the lane which lies beyond my garden. She would stop and watch me with rapt attention, her lips raised in a peaceful and lovely smile. And when the piece was finished she would say ‘thank you for playing my tune’, before continuing her stroll beyond my sight and out of my life. I would never see her again, and would always wonder whether she had been real or only a figment of my imagination. And I would be left to question, as I so often have, what is real and what is not.

Sinking Beneath Samsara.

I just watched the first hour of Ron Fricke’s classic film Samsara. I think it’s my third viewing and I wondered whether I would find it tedious, having already watched it twice. Not so. It seems that every time I watch that film I see new images that I don’t remember ever having seen before. The reason, I’m sure, is that it’s such a rich catalogue of visual experiences that it’s too much to take in with just one, two, or even three attempts.

And as I watched it serve up ever more meaningful messages, there came into my mind so many things to say about it on the blog. Eventually I decided not to bother. It was all too much. Instead, I’ll confine myself to one impression that seemed to rise out of the rich tapestry of material existence here presented:

How deep the developed world of mankind has fallen in its ignorant drive to deny connectedness with the natural mechanisms of material reality.  I wonder whether we will ever see the light and go back to a simpler, more respectful, more caring way of living en route to one day rising above it. The sand mandala was a most potent pointer, but will we ever follow it?

I’ve felt ill for most of today. Feeling ill has become the new way of being and I wonder whether the terminus is only a little way beyond the next bend in the road. Maybe not. Maybe I have more to do yet. And please believe me when I say that this is not negative thinking.

Odd Things on Sunday.

Tonight’s twilight was truly balmy. I don’t recall there having been any balmy twilights in August, and we didn’t have many during high summer. I feel ambivalent towards balmy twilights at this time of year. They’re lovely in themselves, but I’m suspicious of the possibility that their tails might contain barbs of one sort or another.

*  *  *

There was one fallen conker on Church Lane at the point where several horse chestnut trees overhang the road. There used to be hundreds at this time of year.

*  *  *

I have a health issue which I assume to be angina, although it hasn’t been formally diagnosed yet. It’s suddenly become worse over the past few weeks – unpredictable, more persistent and more debilitating. It’s making my little life even littler, which is a bit irritating. Mel wants me to see a doctor in case I overdo the strenuous stuff and have a heart attack. To quote Mr Bogle’s No Man’s Land: 

Well I hope you died quick

And I hope you died clean

Or, young Willie McBride,

Was it slow and obscene?

 Food for thought.

*  *  *

According to my Blogger stats, somebody in Russia is taking an extended interest in what I was saying in August ten years ago. That’s weird, but welcome nonetheless.

*  *  *

The electric kettle I bought six months ago has gone on the blink and will need to be returned. It seems the Russell Hobbs brand is not as reliable as it was when its manufacturing base was domiciled in my home town. I expect their products are made in Chinese gulags now to help underpin Mr Xi’s dictatorship. And it’s only when you’re devoid of a properly functioning kettle that you realise just how indispensable they are. Oddly, I have it on good authority – several actually – that most Americans don’t use electric kettles. (I knew an American once who’d never heard of them. ‘What’s a kettle?’ she asked. She really did. Mind you, she was from Montana.) But then, I can’t help entertaining the suspicion that most Americans are mostly odd in most ways, so maybe it isn’t surprising that they make tea in a microwave.

Poetic and Other Mumbles.

I’d just finished reading a short biography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson when I came across a reply I made to a comment on an old blog post. It read:

 It’s windy down in Devon

And wet as hell in Wales

So neither’s much like heaven

Unless you’re fond of gales

What does one have to do to become Poet Laureate?

And then I was browsing through my pictures file when I came across this:

 

 

As soon as I saw it some words dropped into my head from the usual mysterious source:

 

The church wherein a match was made 

Which closed a door and held the spade

Which dug…

I didn’t get any further. I think I probably didn’t want to.

I’m bored tonight, and I feel a little ill, and I’m chilled. I need some watchable DVDs and a giant box of good news (the unopened box of chocolates won’t do.) And a young Filipina nurse to stroke my arm again. And a body that functions like it used to.

I read some of my new Shirley Jackson novel late last night, and then fell asleep in front of the computer. When I woke up I felt so utterly weak and disoriented that I had no interest whatsoever in watching fresh ladies’ legs shuffle dancing on YouTube (which is unusual for me.) ‘If this is death,’ I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I want to go there.’ And all I had to look forward to when I woke up this morning was today.

Turnings.

I noticed today that the final field of wheat has been harvested. All that remains are a few straw bales awaiting removal to the barn, and then the process will be complete. The long strip of land which separates Mill Lane from Church Lane is now an inland sea of golden stubble. It’s actually very attractive, but it won’t remain that way for very long. Soon it will be time for muck spreading and ploughing, and then the land will be brown and smelly and a sure precursor of the cold, dark winter season.

I still wonder why the turning of states so fascinates me – the change from light to dark at twilight, and the change from vibrant to torpid at the start of autumn. I suppose it evokes the sense that nothing lasts beyond its appointed time, and that the puny creatures which exist within the womb of the material mother are ultimately powerless to deny her will.

This is all so obvious, isn’t it, and yet still I find myself wondering why the turning of states so fascinates my mortal perceptions.

*  *  *

I read one of my old stories earlier, and it occurred to me that my stories are about the only thing which gives me any sense of having achieved anything worthwhile. I don’t know why they should, since none of them will change the world or the changing states of anybody in it. Maybe it’s the sense that I created something which wasn’t there before I made the effort. Maybe it allows the view that I made a small contribution to the turning principle. Does that make sense? I’m not sure that it does, and I don’t suppose it matters in the real scheme of things anyway.

*  *  *

I got trolled this morning for a comment I left on a YouTube video. The instinct to strike back is still strong in me and I wish it weren’t. I’d like to think I’m turning into a better person who is happy to simply ignore it. And maybe I will be strong enough to do just that.

Blocked.

I want to write something to the blog, but every attempt seems to be laboured and unsatisfactory at the moment. That’s a problem for me because writing has been the main conduit to my tenuous connection with life for quite a long time.

Maybe I’ve written too much. If you add the blatherings on the blog to the more carefully crafted fiction, the result is the equivalent of around ten large novels. Maybe the conduit is becoming as constricted as my arteries appear to be and I’m suffering from literary atherosclerosis.

Today was a dull day. I met no dogs with furry ears or women with nice names. I received no mail – paper or electronic – worth reading. I felt scared to get out of bed this morning as I do every morning. Night is my time; mornings are scary. The signs of autumn are showing early in the Shire. The ambient temperature was a little low for early September.

Tomorrow might be better.

Upsetting the Lady Courier.

I had two parcels delivered by a courier today, each weighing 28lbs. I heard the first being dropped in the porch, and when I went out she was coming up the path with the second and breathing heavily. She’s a regular on this route – been coming here for twelve years – and she’s usually a model of affability. Not so today.

‘This is the worst bloody drop I ever get,’ she began, panting, frowning and looking decidedly irritated. ‘This is a job for a man, or at least they should give me a power trolley. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was on the flat; it’s that path that does it.’

I apologised, of course. The path is around 70ft long and quite steep, and even I would find the job difficult now that this damned angina (or whatever it is) has started. It doesn’t take much physical effort to set it off. I mentioned, purely as a point of interest, that the last courier – a man – who delivered two equivalent parcels had carried them both at the same time. She seemed to assume that I meant an affront to her weak and feeble woman-ness, which I didn’t.

‘Well he’s a lot bigger than me!’ she said, giving me that sideways, accusatory glance that certain women do well when their weak and feeble woman-ness is being subjected to affront. And then she stomped off without another word.

It occurred to me that when I was in the navy I spent half a day carrying 56lb bags of potatoes up the gangway and tipping them into the hold. Not only did I find it easy, I even enjoyed the exercise. I didn’t mention it, of course, and I was seventeen at the time.

When I got the email from the company confirming delivery there was a box to tick which said ‘Rate you courier.’ I gave her five out of five stars. I do hope they tell her.

Shirley and the Oddballs.

I now have another Shirley Jackson novel to read. It’s called Hangsaman, and I chose it because the synopsis appealed to me. What other basis is there to choose to buy and read an unfamiliar book?

Well, the problem is that synopses offer little other than an outline of the plot, and plot isn’t necessarily all that important to me, especially where Shirley Jackson is concerned. What I most like about Shirley Jackson is the nature of her characters, and most especially with the contrast most perceptively – and often humorously – observed between the typical, mid-twentieth century, all-American box dwellers, and the less conventional characters – often the main ones – whose odd mannerisms, perceptions and aspirations fall strictly and fascinatingly outside the box.

They’re the ones I identify with. They’re the outsiders who would struggle to negotiate the comfortable and conformist pathways of mainstream culture so they don’t bother. They live in a world of one, and the fun comes with watching how they relate to the world of the many when they come into contact with it. They might even be described as insane, and probably would be by most box dwellers and those literary critics who feel they’re providing a valuable service to conventional society by explaining oddness in conventional terms.

But then, the line which divides the sane from the insane is a broad one with indistinct edges which sway and fluctuate from culture to culture and time to time. For my own part, I prefer to see oddness as an expression of walking alone in no man’s land with no way back to the world of the many. That’s pretty much how I see myself, and you’ve no idea how difficult this short post was to write. I don’t even know why I bothered. Happy September.