Mists of Confusion.

I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to make posts for most of this week – mostly to do with medical matters. There’s been a lot of confusion around dealings with doctors, practice nurses and the front-of-house staff who field enquiries. Today I bought a blood pressure monitor, and tomorrow I begin the regime of using it twice a day. The long and short of it is that I still don’t know whether I have reason to be worried or not.

On top of that, the corporate world has been strutting its dysfunctional stuff as usual, and I’ve been presented with more evidence of their conniving little tricks to force us to live our lives as they want us to, rather than as we would wish it to be. And the politicians, at least in the form of government ministers, are becoming ever more irrational and mentally disorganised. I’m truly beginning to wonder whether Bedlam is beckoning or the matrix crumbling beyond repair.

And the world of nature is behaving oddly too. This evening I witnessed a hen pheasant running frantically about my garden for no apparent reason. She calmed down eventually and began looking up into the trees, and then took flight and perched in one of them, a practice to which hens are not generally given. Then the noise began – countless pheasant’s voices raised in cacophonous squawking fit to raise the dead in the churchyard. Was there a predator prowling around which I couldn’t see? I’ve no idea.

But what of the midges dancing profusely in the near-winter chill, behaving as though it were a balmy summer twilight? Did they know something I didn’t?

Or is it me? Is everything just fine and dandy and I’m the one who’s cracking up? Well, two other people have remarked to me recently that more and more things are malfunctioning and the prosecution of life is becoming more difficult. Covid doesn’t explain all of it, so is this a change in the winds of time, perhaps, another approaching ice age or antediluvian flood? As the congenitally nervous Horace Femm remarks in the classic 1932 movie, The Old Dark House: ‘I don’t wish to alarm you, Mrs Waverton, but I don’t quite know what we should do.’

But back in the trusty old world... I’ve watched the first two episodes of Wallander and it’s more depressing than I remember, being refreshingly awash with wholesome Swedish glumness. I expect I’ll persevere, and it is rather nice to hear Emily’s soulful voice singing soulfully at the beginning of every episode. I had a brief chat with her once on YouTube, you know. Did I say?