The NYE Post, For What It's Worth

This being New Year’s Eve 2022, I naturally feel that I should be making an end of year post. Well, the division of time into years is purely arbitrary with no cosmic significance, but that’s how we humans like to do things so let’s pretend that a calendar year is in some way significant.

The spirit is willing, I think, but where to start and what to say? Let’s keep it short because I’m not didactic by nature and I can’t be bothered to spend all night typing, especially since I know that nothing I say will make any difference.

On a global scale, 2022 has been troublesome, with the war in Ukraine and social upheaval in Iran, Afghanistan, China, and parts of South America. From America we continue to hear the drip, drip, drip of Trump’s inane babbling. Systems are breaking or broken everywhere, including in the UK where the NHS – the cornerstone of good governance and the welfare state for more than seventy years – is under serious threat of collapse. I look around and see politicians following their personal and ideological agendas while the voices of ordinary people are raised in complaint and calls for help and for change.

There is, of course, very much more that could be said, but that will have to do for now. I suppose I should add, however, that no talk of 2022 would be sufficient without noting that nature has become even more insistent in reminding us that we take it for granted at our peril.

So what of my personal affairs? 2022 was notable for all the firsts that came along and which were noted on this blog. It was a year in which I grew closer to my small family, but also saw several stars in the firmament overhead disappear. It seems that’s just the way of things for me and always has been; close family ties and bright but distant stars never did sit easily together in my life.

As for life itself, I’m still observing that one and suppose I might describe the current view as coherently as I’m able. It’s undergone a shift this year as the heart issue has begun to make its presence felt more routinely. The road ahead has assumed the appearance of a narrowing ledge with a steep drop into the abyss on either side. I walk it not knowing whether some small slip will take me down into whatever the abyss holds, but there’s nothing to do but keep tramping on for as long as the ledge holds firm.

And that’s about it. I expect I’ll be back tomorrow and I hope I’ll have something lighter to say. In the meantime, to those who go into 2023 optimistically, I wish that it shouldn’t disappoint. Thanks for your quiet company through a year that’s nearly over. And may we all please spare a thought for those living under repressive regimes everywhere (although I feel an instinctive sense that there are more repressive regimes than we care to admit.)

Not a Prophecy.

 The current ad on my email home page is from UNICEF, and carries the tag line:

Help save a child’s life today

To most of us there are few, if any, greater achievements in this mortal realm than saving a child’s life. But when the issue is reduced to a tag line on an advert it slips into the mind briefly and then slips straight out again because it’s just a slogan on an advert, and adverts are so annoyingly ubiquitous as to be supremely ignorable.

There’s something wrong here, so what is it?

Well, I’m coming to the view that all the charity in the world – for all that it’s worthy and well meant and still worth contributing to – is not ultimately going to make the world a better place. It will help in certain situations, while others crop up elsewhere to perpetuate the endless pressure.

It seems to me that what’s needed is a radical change in the way the world functions. The people in charge who are driven by greed, power mania and inflated ego need to be swept away and a fresh start made based on humanitarian and inclusive values. And the only way I can see that happening is the arrival of some sort of cataclysmic event.

I’ve heard it said often that every culture in the world, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, has its myth of a huge, destructive flood somewhere back in distant history. Maybe it’s time for another one. But wouldn’t it be nice if a less devastating way could be found?

The Recluse After Nightfall.

Do you want to know why I didn’t make a blog post last night? I make most of my posts at night because that’s when I’m usually in the mood, but the long December evenings are proving a little troublesome at the moment.

The days are the same as they’ve been for these many years – walks, shopping , housework, gardening, paperwork, showers, cooking – you know, the normal sort of things which normally occupy the waking moments of normal, well-balanced recluses. But then the darkness falls, the curtains get closed, the meal gets eaten, the dishes get washed, the floor gets its daily vacuum, and I settle down to the fun time.

It starts with an episode of Buffy. I’m now into the final season and it’s becoming unremittingly dark, dangerous and debilitating. Then it’s onto the latest section of the movie Remains of the Day based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Like all Ishiguro’s works – at least the three I’m familiar with – it explores the tragedy of unrealised potential which evokes a frustrating sense of the downbeat and the agonising question of what might have been. Eventually it’s all change again when I invoke the spirit of YouTube and watch a 50-minute episode of Jeeves and Wooster, in which a group of feckless and hopelessly incompetent rich young things become embroiled in romantic and other difficulties which have to be resolved by the erudite and resourceful Jeeves the butler. (Those familiar with The Admirable Crichton will get the general picture.) Fun at last, but frothy fun in stark contrast with what has gone before.

Honestly, I don’t know what world I’m living in at the moment, so how on earth can I apply myself to its issues, injustices and idiosyncrasies?

I think I need a night nurse, but how do I go about acquiring one of those? All the average recluse is likely to attract is a visit from some wandering succubus which would be both unwelcome and ultimately pointless given my lamentable physical condition.

Roll on the balmy summer evenings, I say, when I can replace all this with tea and biscuits on the terrace. If I’m still here, that is.

Heart Matters.

I was thinking about my under-performing left ventricle tonight. It occurred to me that I’ve had my heart broken a few times on the rocky road of life, but it’s never been clinically recognised before.

Maybe that Indian woman some stranger wrote about on my blog in the early hours of this morning will approach me in Sainsbury’s tomorrow. Maybe she will hold me with the chilling and hypnotic stare of a Bengal Tiger and either make me whole or finish me off. In twenty years of shopping in Ashbourne I’ve never seen an Indian woman, but we do have an Indian restaurant and there’s always a first time for everything…

I really don’t know where I get them from, you know, I really don’t. Boredom I expect.

A Prospective Connection.

The universe – or some agent thereof – sent me the most transparent message ever tonight (through my computer, of course, because the universe is sufficiently attuned to my nature to know that my computer is the very best medium for sending messages to one such as me.) It said that I should cultivate a strong connection with an Indian woman.

But of course, it must be the right Indian woman. I regret to suspect that not all Indian women would be fit for purpose, and the matter of how to engage with this task was not made clear. A dating ad would be both sordid and tragically inappropriate, and so further assistance is most devoutly to be wished.

I have the distinct feeling that I will read this post tomorrow and wonder who wrote it.

Failing Amelia.

Back in the days when I worked at the theatre, my manager was a woman who had a young child called Amelia. On one occasion the two of them were sitting in the bar area and I went over and joined them. I talked to Amelia and frowned about something jokingly, but Amelia was evidently a sensitive child and didn’t get the joke. She stood up, pushed her chair to one side and backed away from me looking scared.

I was horrified at my error, of course. I wouldn’t deliberately scare a child if my life depended on it, but all efforts to placate the little girl failed. Eventually the two of them moved to the Czech Republic where her mother came from and I never saw Amelia again. Her mother and I still keep in touch occasionally, however, and today I received an email from her. It included the sentence: ‘Amelia is now nineteen and driving.’

Oh my, there’s that egg timer again. There’s the boat of life taking whatever detours it likes, but always heading downstream. The image of a little blonde girl now has to be re-imagined as a young woman behind the wheel of a car.

I feel a sense of having been denied something. I believe I could have been a good friend to Amelia because I understand sensitivity and would have known how to be careful. But the moving finger has written and moved on, and now I want to know whether the young woman continues to be sensitive as the child was, and whether she still regards me as an ogre.

A Tiny Self-Indulgence.

If I were young again and gave genesis to three daughters, what would I call them?

Simple: Abigail, Emily, Aisling (and Isabella if a fourth came along unexpectedly.)

Abi, Em, Ash, and Bella. I feel there’s a story of some consequence hiding in those four names somewhere, though I doubt it will ever see the light of day. But at least now you know.

On Dark Shops and Dastardly Deceit.

One of the pages on this morning’s BBC News website carried a warning from the motoring organisations. They were wont to advise people venturing out to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales that they should be prepared for heavy traffic congestion because retail outlets would be very busy today.

I decided to pay a rare second visit of the week to Ashbourne, my local town, partly to join in with the merry throng for a change and partly to visit Costa Coffee again. Although once a regular, I hadn’t been into dear old Costa since the beginning of lockdown and had fallen out of the habit. I felt in need of some self-administered tlc and thought that a medium Americano in convivial surroundings might do the trick. (I did say that there wasn’t much out there to interest me, didn’t I?)

Ashbourne was closed.

The retail park with its big national names was all boarded up and padlocked. The shops in the town centre were shrouded in darkness and deathly quiet. Even the filling station was closed, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen on a Boxing Day before.  It reminded me that Ashbourne is a very traditional sort of place. It’s the sort of place which tends to regard rightness as a function of tradition rather than rational consideration.

But I spotted to my delight that Costa Coffee was the one establishment open in the high street, and so I went in. The queue of people stretched from the service area at the back almost to the front door and most of the tables were occupied, so I turned around and came back out again. I dislike crowded places, you see, preferring quiet corners in the vicinity of windows so I can watch the body language of passers by

And then I discovered one other establishment open as usual – the town centre’s only discount store operating under the name The Yorkshire Trading Company. Every window was plastered with big notices proclaiming:

Everything

Must

Go

75% Off

It surprised me greatly because that’s the language of a business about to fold and needing to dispose of its stock quickly, and this store has only been open for a couple of months. I decided to go in and peruse the massive reductions on offer. I found only one small product lightly discounted. All the others, as far as I could tell, were priced normally. The notices were clearly a dishonest ruse to attract footfall, and there, I thought, lies another casualty of today’s post-truth society.

Remembering San Francisco.

For some reason tonight I felt moved to hear again the old Scott McKenzie pop classic San Francisco, and so I found it on YouTube and watched the video. It’s here and less than three minutes long.

 

 

It seems almost inconceivable in these dark times that once there were thousands of young people coming together in harmony, and all they wanted was peace and love and the freedom to dance gaily in the sunshine. But America wasn’t ready for it. The world wasn’t ready for it; and the all-powerful god of pecuniary principle – for which read ‘the system’ – wouldn’t tolerate it. And so it fell by the wayside never to be seen again.

It seems achingly poignant that the Vietnam War with all its darkest of horrors was happening at the same time. So what does it say of the human condition that we don’t have love-ins any more, but we do still have wars. 

Considering the Real Root of Life.

During my research into the Brontës a few years ago I came across something interesting. When Emily was desperately unhappy in a job she had as a teacher at a private school, Charlotte became so worried that her sister might die that she travelled to the school and brought her home.

Nowadays we would regard Charlotte’s fear as silly, superstitious even. We would consider it preposterous that someone might die just because they were unhappy in their job, for these are more rational times firmly embedded in the bedrock of advanced scientific knowledge.

Science tells us now that the three cornerstones of life are the physical attributes of heartbeat, respiration, and brain function. Take those three away and the person is dead. But there are others, like me, who suspect that there’s a fourth player in the process, something vague, immeasurable, indefinable, yet vital, which we might call ‘the life force.’ And when I read of cases in which the three commonly recognised life signs are absent and yet the patient recovers and comes back to life, I tend to the suspicion that they didn’t come back to life at all. I suspect that the life force never left and so they never died.

If that’s correct, then maybe Charlotte was justified in her concern. I’m sure the Victorians knew about the trinity of heartbeat, respiration and brain function, but also recognised the existence of the life force. For all the massive advances in scientific knowledge over the past couple of centuries, maybe science has been so enslaved to an exclusively physical rationale that important factors lying outside its physical remit have been unfairly dismissed.

And the reason why this has come more to my notice lately is that I’m beginning to feel that my own life force is growing weak. If that is the case, it would be helpful to find the means by which it might be re-energised. Otherwise, I suppose I must resign myself to the tyrant time and await its will with patience.

And I do accept that this whole post might be a load of nonsense.

Navigating the River of the Recluse.

Another Christmas Day, another reason to ruminate on the matter of being alive.

It will have been noticed, no doubt, that I live an unusually narrow lifestyle with hardly any of the normal activities which provide interest and meaning. Visitors to the house number no more than about ten a year at most, there’s hardly anything out there in western culture to attract my interest, and meaningful face-to-face conversations are very rare indeed. It is, therefore, a largely empty life, and I’ve found that as time has gone by I’ve developed more and more routines to add at least a modicum of structure to it.

Today I had a visitor as befits the tradition of Christmas. Mel, my ex, called in on her way to visit her parents in the city. It’s a naturally pleasant experience to see her, but it comes with a problem: it breaks up my routines and forces me out of the structured comfort zone in which I’m used to living. It’s like sailing down the same river every day until a big ship passes by and creates a wave which throws my boat off course. It might seem an odd thing to say, but the disturbance can last for several hours after the visitor has left.

On the other hand, living such a life has made me very much more aware of the minutiae which would otherwise pass by largely unnoticed. Today, for example, I was thrilled to be able to stroke a Leonberger dog. (For those who missed it the first time around, this is a Leonberger):

 

 

 

And today produced the tantalising mystery of what on earth T88 was doing driving down Bag Lane which isn’t its normal territory. Such small things are big to me now. They matter.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I would say it’s a neutral thing. It’s just different from the days of travel, sport, living with different women, walking the dog, engaging with romantic dalliances, attending thespian parties, assailing the sensibilities of fiscal miscreants with a Rule 2 caution, remaining upright on a small ship through a force 11 storm, and so on and so forth. And, taken in its entirety, a life should be about variation, shouldn’t it? Because variation makes you think.

A Sad Omission.

People who’ve been reading these jottings for several years might remember the many posts I made consequent on the night walks I used to take between October and March. Some were humorous, some spooky, and some simply observational. I remember commenting several times on the various displays of Christmas lights which people had installed around their houses at this time of year because the one seasonal pleasure I still relate to is the delight of seeing coloured lights shining in the darkness.

I haven’t taken a night walk since before the operation nearly five years ago, but tonight I did. I took the same old route and delighted in more or less the same coloured light shows, with one exception. There was one missing.

One of the houses in Mill Lane always used to have a cascade of blue pulsating lights wound in corkscrew fashion from top to bottom of a tall fir tree down by the gate. I always thought it the best of them. It was stylish yet unpretentious, and far outweighed the more ostentatious arrangements elsewhere. It was especially effective in misty conditions, and was the only one I would stop and gaze at admiringly. There was even something vaguely pagan about it, though unintentionally I’ve no doubt. It isn’t there this year, and that’s a shame.

On Santa the Changeling.

My daughter always declined to allow her children to believe in Santa Claus. She took the view that children must always be told the truth of all things, and the truth is that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. I understand that view, but others might say that Santa is a myth, and all cultures have their myths so why shouldn’t we have the myth of Santa Claus? It contributes to the magic of Christmas, does it not, at least for the children?

OK, let’s go back to when I was a kid. At that time, in England at least, some people still used what they thought was the old fashioned term – Father Christmas. The thought prevailed that Father Christmas and Santa Claus were interchangeable terms for the same thing, but of course they’re not.

Father Christmas is the true myth going back into antiquity. He represented the spirit of Christmas as the concept of the season used to be viewed. He was the bringer of good cheer, goodwill, and a bountiful table at least once a year. He was personified by the Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol, and the simple peasant venerated Father Christmas just as much as the high-born lord.

But the true myth was banished by the commercial world and replaced with an impostor whose role was to condition people to the view that the magic of Christmas is all about material acquisition. Santa’s sole purpose is to fly around the sky every Christmas Eve delivering bags full of material gifts. And who gets the stress of having to pay for them all? And who really gets the benefit?

Christmas Eve Revisited.

Despite my advancing years and generally pejorative view of Christmas, I still find myself every Christmas Eve remembering the fact that as a child – and again when my daughter was a little girl – Christmas Eve was always the most magical day of the year.

And so my mind wanders back and recalls little fragments of childhood. It remembers that I used to be allowed to stay up later than usual, and used the time watching TV programmes which I found all the more vibrant and interesting for being part of the magical day.

It remembers that I used to go the bedroom window and gaze at the night sky above the wood at the back of the house. I was looking for evidence of unusual activity, and twice I was rewarded. Once there was a very bright star which I thought was probably the one the Wise Men had followed. Another time I saw a light crossing the sky and was very nearly certain that it was Santa Claus performing his annual duty.

It remembers how I used often to think of the archaic term ‘swaddling clothes’ because it fascinated me for some reason, and how I made the effort to discover that the alternative term ‘swathing bands’ was synonymous.

It remembers how restless I felt when I lay down in bed, fearing that I might be too excited to go to sleep, for we all knew that Santa Claus never visited children while they were awake. And sometimes I would remind myself that I mustn’t forget to say happy birthday to Jesus when I woke up. (To my recollection, I only remembered to do so once.)

And it remembers that Christmas Eve when I was around ten and went out after dark to post a present I’d bought for a school friend through his letter box. It was only a cheap plastic ballpoint pen, but I think I was already aware that the worth of a gift had more to do with intent than pecuniary value. (Times have changed, it seems.) This is particularly poignant because I did the very same thing tonight after all those decades. Twice in one lifetime, and at opposite ends of it to boot.

And here I am now on Christmas Eve 2022, rationalising the fact that I have ‘bah, humbug’ ever on my lips despite being the very antithesis of Scrooge by nature.

A Bit More Observation.

Tonight I was made cognisant of that common and often casually used phrase ‘losing one’s mind.’ That was what it felt like. It seemed as though my mind was verging on panic and trying to escape from the body in which it was trapped because it could no longer tolerate the effect on its equilibrium occasioned by the relentless assault of one debilitating issue after another. I spoke calmly to it and ordered it to return, which it eventually did. I considered the notion that I might be falling prey to some sort of psychosis, and then dismissed it.

You know, learning can be an uncomfortable business at times, but I suppose many of the most valuable lessons are and I continue to suspect it’s what we’re here for (even though I have no idea why.)

On Charity and Mixed Fortunes.

I would have to choose today to go to Uttoxeter, wouldn’t I? Sky as dark as Hades and pouring with rain. All a bit miserable really, but it did produce an interesting thought.

There was a beggar sitting on the cold flagstones in the rain and that’s a sight I find difficult to ignore, so I went over to him and gave him some money.  And then a question came tumbling into my head:

‘Why did you give money to that man?’

‘Because he looked as though he needed it.’

‘But you can’t know that, can you? He might be perfectly well off and taking you for a ride.’

‘That isn’t the point.’

‘So what is the point?’

‘The point is that charity is worthy whether it’s actually needed or not.’

‘So you did it to make yourself feel better. In other words, it could be suggested that you were the real beneficiary. Were you?’

‘Partly, yes, but not entirely.’

‘So what else is there?’

‘Well, as I see it, giving is a function unto itself and is, therefore, abstract. And because it’s flowing from one sentient being to another with helpful intent, it’s positively abstract. I hold to the view that all of life ultimately distils to the abstract, and so a positive action – however small it might appear – contributes something worthwhile to the human condition. That’s why I believe that kindness should not be notable but a universal function of human disposition.’

‘OK, that’ll do for now. You may go.’

‘Thank you.’

But I got my reward anyway (even though I’m inclined to shun the notion that reward should be the natural corollary of doing good.) Tesco had Jacob’s Niblets 6-packs again, and packs of egg and cress sandwiches (now reinstated as my weekly treat), and I got the wall calendar I wanted from one of the charity shops. I even popped into the shoe shop, previously mentioned on this blog, to offer compliments of the season and received smiles in return.

Dame Fortune was absent, however, in the matter of the faulty fridge/freezer. I called the electricians to see whether I could get a new thermostat installed quickly and got a recorded message to say that they were now closed until after New Year. Sometimes you get gateau, and sometimes lemons, and one day you move on.

Avoiding Celebrities.

I had my dinner in front of the TV and caught a few minutes of the game show Pointless (with the sound off, of course.) It was a celebrity version tonight, and I was reminded again of why I never watch celebrity versions of anything.

There they all are, these famous faces, all trying so hard to be so funny, failing miserably, and instead infecting the atmosphere with the rancid stench of overcooked ego. The host, Alexander Armstrong, is bad enough, but add another eight of them and there aren’t enough sick bags to go around.

I assume they must be popular with the general public.

The Power of Music.

Just watched Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss recording a version of The Wexford Carol. After all these decades of life, I’m still surprised by the extent to which music can alter a jaded consciousness. If you’ve a mind to let it, that is.

This is a bigger subject than I feel inclined to address this close to bed time.

A Brief Note for the Solstice.

I had my usual solstice fire today. And, as usual, I wore my old gardening gloves to manipulate the burning fuel. I remembered when I put them on that one of the fingers has a hole at the end of it, but then forgot when it mattered. So I burned my finger. I do it every year.

But the shopping trip to Ashbourne was most eventful. It started with the shortest GP appointment ever – three minutes to have some blood drained for testing. And then there was the woman whose path I kept crossing in different places and at different times until it was verging on creepy. And a man told me how considerate I was because I’d brought all three trolleys from the trolley park instead of just the one I needed (Sainsbury’s has a shortage of the shallow type of trolleys, courtesy of scrap metal thieves.) It was considerate of me actually, but I didn’t agree with him because I don’t do that kind of thing. And finally, a West Highland terrier absolutely insisted I made friends with him whether I wanted to or not. Fortunately for both of us, I did.

Oh, nearly forgot… I spent the extra 50p to buy posh mince pies instead of the peasants’ variety that I usually buy, so now I now have six mince pies with brandy-laced filling and all-butter pastry to savour. (That’s my nod to the Christmas season this year.) I know I shouldn’t have done it because atherosclerosis licks its lips and dances a little jig when it hears the phrase ‘all butter.’ But you know what? I decided to be generous to the old tyrant just this once. And I might not be here this time next year, so what the hell.

Deeds Not Words.

This is nothing to do with the suffragettes. This is to do with Mr Putin’s address to the Russian people in which he said that the war in Ukraine is a tragedy for both nations, that he still regards the people of Ukraine as ‘brothers’, and that fault for the issue lies not with him but with western expansionism.

Well, there is a grain of reason to be seen here. Even we on this side of the divide recognise that western culture, and in particular its economic practices, are far from flawless. And so it’s understandable that Russians would not want to be sucked too far into it.

But does that justify becoming a mass murderer, as Putin has done? Does it justify armed assault on another sovereign country? Does it justify cruelly denying innocent civilians access to heat and light during the cold winter season? They’re the real questions.

And so unless Mr Putin has an extremely low level of intelligence, even he must realise that his words are not what he is being judged by, but his actions. Words uttered by a consummate tyrannical politician should never be taken seriously anyway; it’s the deeds which count.

But maybe we should be wondering whether there is something else behind all this, something which neither the Russian nor western public are being told. Because if there isn’t, the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes very little sense whatever Mr Putin says.

On a Witch and a Wave.

I’m getting well through Buffy now, and my word it’s turning dark. And I’m wondering why they didn’t change the name of the show from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is slightly silly) to Willow the Witch with all the benefit of alliteration thus endowed.

Dear sweet and well balanced Willow is now a very powerful witch with a dark side wondrous to behold. And when she flips from sweet to dark, her hair turns black. I seem to recall the same thing happening to Lucy’s blonde curls in Dracula after she’d flipped from being living to being undead. Maybe this is the good old universe giving me the benefit of its wisdom again: beware dark haired women. I doubt I’ll remember.

Anya, on the other hand, continues to grow more gorgeous by the season. Pity about the spelling.

And talking of dark haired women, I was waved at by the Lady B’s dear mama again today. (Dear mama doesn’t have dark hair but her youngest daughter does.) I still wonder why she does that. I mean, here am I, a nondescript little person living a quiet (and mostly inoffensive) life in his own little world and showing no aspiration to connect with anybody, and I get waved at. Why should I be considered worth a wave? I suppose it’s just habit, or politeness, or something like that.

A Step Too Far.

I read a news report today about a 97-year-old woman in Germany who has been prosecuted for complicity in war crimes. She was a typist in one of the concentration camps apparently, and she was a teenager at the time. The charges were based on the assertion that she must have been fully aware of what she was doing. No doubt she was, but she would have been employed by the Nazi SS, and how should a teenager have responded to orders given by the SS in Nazi Germany?

But of course, I have only the scantiest of information from a brief news report. I don’t know the full details of the story so I’m in no position to judge the validity of the charges.

Nevertheless, it’s evident that this woman’s life is all but over, so why bring her to court now? Is this not one of those situations when reason should prevail and the past be accepted as history? It was nearly eighty years ago after all. Many guilty parties were arraigned and punished in the years following the war, and surely there comes a time when it has to be accepted that enough is enough. I was happy to read that the old lady was given a suspended sentence.

And whether this is relevant I’m not entirely sure, but it did set me wondering again about that most vaguely defined line between justice and revenge.

Becoming Bertie.

I’ve started watching episodes of an old British TV comedy series called Jeeves and Wooster on YouTube. Jeeves is the infinitely resourceful butler to Bertie Wooster, a doyen of the upper middle class in 1930s England. Bertie is Eton educated, smartly dressed, regaled in a luxurious lifestyle with no need to work, brimful of confidence but hopelessly naïve, and living a life devoid of point or purpose but pleasurable at every turn. Tonight’s episode began with Jeeves entering Bertie’s bedroom to wake him up.

‘What time is it, Jeeves?’ asks Bertie

‘Ten past nine, sir.’

‘Ten past nine?!’ Bertie is clearly outraged at being woken so early. ‘Is the house on fire or something?’

So now I have the clue as to why I feel I don’t belong here. I should really be living in Bertie’s world where the concept of ‘morning’ is a matter of perception, and alarm clocks are instruments of torture. It seems I’m one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind as usual.

(It’s interesting that one of my short stories is called Being Bertie, but  that’s a humorous little tale based on shape shifting.)

On Sky and the Sharpness of Glass.

There’s an ad on my email home page for something called Sky Glass. I have no idea what Sky Glass is and I haven’t the slightest desire to find out, but what interests me is Sky’s way of doing business. The ad reads:

Order yours now for £36 a month.

So here we are with a cost of living crisis going on and many people suffering serious hardship as a result, and Sky still considers it worthwhile trying to sell people something called Sky Glass for the princely sum of £36 a month. (I presume it’s another item of fatuous media drivel, but that’s not the real point of the post.) The real point is this:

They don’t simply set you up with a regular subscription which has always been the standard way in such matters. What they do is loan the subscriber four years worth of subscriptions which the customer has to pay back at the prescribed rate of £36 a month. Do you see where they’re going with this? It isn’t a simple subscription for a service any more. It’s a legally binding credit agreement which keeps the poor benighted customer trapped in their nasty little corporate web for the next four years.

To somebody like me, this smacks of sharp practice, but what political system has the will to rein in the corporate world when the corporate world is the principle god of rampant capitalism and materialistic mania? I assume this is why Sky’s boss has never been consigned to an otherwise uninhabited island where he belongs.

On Puritans, Christmas, and Me.

I was in a shop today and there was Christmas music playing. It irritated me because I consider Christmas to be all a bit pointless, and I found myself thinking that the playing of Christmas music in shops should be banned. ‘There’s seems to be something of the Puritan in you, Jeffrey,’ I told myself. That disturbed me a little because I’d never thought of myself as having something of the Puritan in me.

I remembered that during the Commonwealth in 17th century England, Christmas was effectively banned by the Puritan Establishment under the control of Oliver Cromwell. We find the idea both absurd and despotic in these more liberal times, but the reason for the banning was that people saw Christmas as a time for licentious behaviour. There was much drunkenness and frolicsome behaviour to an extent that would normally be frowned upon. The Lord of Misrule rode over the land and held sway in the minds of the lower orders, threatening the very bedrock of decent and orderly social behaviour even if only temporarily. To the Puritans, of course, this translated into sin being allowed to run rampant, which they naturally thought it entirely right to excise.  And that brought something else to mind.

I well remember that in my younger days, Christmas was the time when the drive to experience something new in the way of female companionship was at its strongest (if you get my drift.) I saw the same in others, and office parties were renowned for being the annual risk to marital fidelity. I expect it’s still the same, in which case the Lord of Misrule seemingly continues to rides forth when the Christmas season is upon us. So here are two questions:

1. Why?

2. Is it true that there is something of the Puritan showing itself in my later years, and might it have a rational foundation?

Epilogue

I’m a curiously complex creature full of contradictions and conflicts. I’m very good at recognising the individual parts of me, but seeing the composite picture has always proved elusive. And that’s why I could well understand a line in the movie Autumn in New York, when the middle aged Richard Gere says to the young Winona Ryder ‘I’m a creep; you’re a kid. You have better things to do with your time than spending it with a guy like me.’ I wish I’d said that to somebody, just once.

2^nd Epilogue

None of the grocery stores I visit has Jacob’s Twiglets on their shelves, and I don’t know why. What’s worse, there’s never anybody to ask these days.

3^rd Epilogue

Another line from Autumn in New York: ‘You carry on like that and you’re going to end up an old man toasting yourself in the mirror with eggnog at Christmas.' Correct. And here we are back to merry old Christmas.

A Frigid Forecast.

Meteorologists occasionally remind us that large cities exist in a micro climate. They’re usually something like 2-3°C warmer than rural areas because of the heat being given off by the buildings.

Ah, but the imperative these days is to insulate, insulate, insulate, both for economic benefit and to address the issue of climate change. So does this mean that the micro climates currently existing in large cities will be greatly reduced? And will it mean that the fabled New York City winters will become even colder?

Jottings on My Evening.

I find it a little odd that a man of my advancing years should spend an hour and a half sitting in a chilly room watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and half the Richard Gere/Winona Ryder movie Autumn in New York. It’s probably because I have nothing better to do, although I’m sure I could find better things to do if only I could be bothered to either think what they might be or do them in the event of coming up with something.

Buffy has no jokes in it at the moment. It’s all deep, dark, disturbing, dramatic stuff. I suppose the sight of knights in mail tunics chasing a camper van along a dusty road like Cherokees riding down a covered wagon was maybe intended to be humorous, but it didn’t fit the general mood and was merely irritating.

As for the film, Mel mentioned it recently for some reason, and since I have a generally good opinion of both Gere and Ryder, and since the plot echoes a couple of episodes my own life, I thought I’d give it a go. Mel didn’t think it would be to my taste, and after watching half of it I’m erring on the side of agreeing with her.

But I did have a visit tonight from Tennessee and wondered whether it was from my old correspondent, Andrea (aka Peanut.) I liked Andrea. She had an engaging personality and gave good advice on how to get into hard drugs (which I never took, much to my shame.) Her husband shot her, you know (with a gun), and so Andrea has the distinction of being the only person I’ve ever known who was shot with a gun (or anything else for that matter.) He didn’t mean to, of course; it was an accident, so I didn’t hold it against him.

I can’t get warm tonight. It might be because the house feels more frigid than ever, or it might be that my heat control system is developing cracks just like everything else in this increasingly dysfunctional world. (Mrs Murphy expressed the opinion to me this morning that the western world is heading for some sort of apocalypse. I didn’t disagree.)

I just had a hot mug of coffee from a freshly opened pack. Coffee is really scrummy when it’s fresh, isn’t it? I’m startlingly apathetic at the moment.

A New Arrival.

I encountered the Shire’s first family on my walk today, the most notable fact of which was that Honourable Sister was accompanied by a new dog. He was another cocker spaniel and a splendidly handsome example of his breed. And he was very friendly, of course, as most of them are. My only regret now is that I never asked his name. Must remember next time.

And in the process of getting to know the new and lovable canine, I was honoured with a smile from Honourable Sister and still managed to remain upright. It always takes effort, but I usually do.

My one sad thought was the suspicion that the new addition to the family might be a replacement for an old and greatly valued member who is no longer with them. I don’t know that, of course, and I didn’t ask. But Honourable Sister did ask me a question:

‘Are you well, Jeff?’ to which I naturally replied:

‘No. Bye.’

I also talked to a horse over a hedge today. I think I need to seek out a few dull moments to help me calm down.

The Harrying of Ukraine.

In the winter of 1069-70, three years after his victory at Hastings, William I (the Conqueror) of England took his army on campaign to the northern shires. The purpose was to wreak a cruel revenge on the peasants following an unsuccessful revolt by the Saxon lords. His army pillaged and burned and slaughtered, leaving the common folk consigned to the terrible twin jaws of death by cold and starvation. And so the ordinary people were made to suffer to serve the lust for vengeance of one man’s power mania. The episode is recorded in the annals of history as The Harrying of the North.

That was nearly a thousand years ago and times have changed greatly, but now we see Mr Putin performing a similar act of vengeance – in principle at least – on the ordinary people of Ukraine. And so I suppose we should conclude, as I’ve long believed, that while the axioms of cultural imperative have grown very much more humane, human nature hasn’t changed at all.

From Far-Flung Places.

According to Blogger stats I had a rare visit from South Korea tonight.

I wonder why somebody from South Korea would choose to read the rantings of an obscure Englishman with a fondness for English words. After all, the creative form most associated with South Korea at the moment is K-pop, and this blog doesn’t belong in the same universe, does it?

But that’s obviously being too narrow-minded. No doubt South Korea has as much variation in its cultural awareness as anywhere else, and one of my favourite psychological/horror films – A Tale of Two Sisters – comes from there.

In any event, welcome South Korea and thanks for visiting. I do hope your very own No Man’s Land up north is peaceful at the moment. We have a popular phrase in England: 'It's grim up north.' Maybe you should adopt it.

Avoiding New York.

I thought I might mention that I’ve suspended my reading of JP Donleavy’s A Fairytale of New York. (I made a few references to it on the blog recently.)

The reason is simple enough. When you become engrossed in a story you enter a different world – the world of the plot – and the early part of this novel is set in New York City during a bitterly cold winter spell. Given the discomfort I’m feeling in this (mostly unheated) house in a moderately cold English version of the season, I couldn’t face any more for the time being.

April, maybe…

Kindness and the INFJ.

Somebody once told me that I was kind. I rejected the notion then and I reject it even more firmly now. And my reason for saying so is in no way self-deprecating, and certainly not sanctimonious by proxy. The way I see it is this 

Kindness should not be recognised as a notable quality; rather it should be a natural and universal component of human disposition. We should take it for granted, since we regard ourselves – probably correctly in my view – as being the singularly superior species among those which walk the earth. Only the lack of kindness should be notable.

So when I’m told that I’m kind, I have to search the memory banks to find examples of times when I displayed the opposite characteristic. (And there have been many.) Only then can I arrive at a sense of balance, and we INFJs do so need balance.

Forecasting a Different Pandemic.

Today I completed a tax return online for a self-employed motor mechanic. I’ve been doing it for some years on behalf of a couple of people, and so I’m familiar with the system. Today I was reminded of the cumbersome, overly complicated, and sometimes irrational way in which the process is designed. And there was another problem: today the Inland Revenue’s tax return program had glitches, adding difficulty and frustration to the irritations which have been increasingly evident ever since the online revolution got underway.

Coming on top of the troubles I’ve been experiencing lately with BT, EON, HSBC Bank and others, it’s led me to a near-certain conclusion: cracks are appearing everywhere in the systems by which the bureaucracies, the banks, and the corporate world expect us to toe their lines of control. Everything is broken or breaking, and I’m far from being the only one to say so.

And so I’m tempted to predict that the next pandemic to seep into the so-called developed world will be less easy to treat than Covid. It will be a growing raft of mental health issues as people struggle to make sense of how they’re expected to conduct their affairs. No doubt it will be noticed and reported on by the media, but will those in control understand the cause and do anything to heal it? I’m not optimistic.

A Stranger in the Shire.

On several occasions now I’ve seen a young woman, probably late teens or early twenties, walking north along Mill Lane and turning left into Meadow Lane. She doesn’t appear to be out for a recreational walk because I’ve sometimes seen her carrying things as though she’s walking from one specific place to another. And I always say ‘hello’, but all I’ve ever had in return is the smallest of smiles. (Thinks: probably either introverted or shy, but not an INFJ.)

So who is she? After sixteen years of living here I’m familiar with most of the people who live in the Shire, but this woman is a mystery. Where does she come from; where does she go? Is she a figment of my overwrought imagination? (Recluses are much given to imagination.) Is she a projection of my psychic faculty? Is she a ghost? Does she cross from one alternate reality into this one and back again just because she can?

Maybe I’ll accost her one day and ask the direct question, or maybe I won’t because I’m rather fond of mysteries. In any event it’s of little consequence because she’s never accompanied by a dog.

Walking a Fine Line.

Having written the last post (and having nothing better to do as usual) I decided to take a Wiki peek at the real Benson, Arizona, and in so doing I discovered an interesting fact.

Apparently, the USA is split almost exactly down the middle between those areas to the west of the line which have a high degree of diurnal temperature variation, and those to the east where it’s very low.

This is one of those facts to be kept in the mind’s filing system and brought out to make an impression when the moment is conducive. The problem with following this method of demonstrating one’s erudition, however, is that if you misjudge the moment you just sound stupid. That’s the bit I’m trying to learn.

After Dark Star.

It just occurred to me that sitting in this office is a bit like travelling through space in a tiny spaceship. This is the one room I try to keep tolerable in terms of temperature, you see, and so going anywhere else in the house – the kitchen, the living room, upstairs – is like taking a space walk in the vastness of the frigid cosmos, only less fun. Maybe I should learn the lyrics to Benson, Arizona and sing them every time I go to the bathroom. It would help if I had an insulated suit.

 

Another Little Buffy Post.

I just watched the episode of Buffy in which her mother has died and been buried. The rest of the team have all done their duty by way of support and the matter is now closed – except to Buffy’s kid sister, Donna. Donna wants her mommy back, and contrives to find a resurrection spell in furtherance of her wishes. Some of the team know this and try to dissuade her in half-hearted manner, but Donna is nothing if not determined. And so she completes the spell.

Fortunately, just as mommy’s animated corpse is about to appear, Buffy’s emotional outburst with regard to the strain engendered by her familial responsibilities convinces Donna that the exercise was unnecessary after all and she reverses the spell. End of tonight’s story.

I was becoming increasingly irritated through the whole thing because I couldn’t understand why nobody – not even Giles who is at least an intelligent and erudite Englishman – didn’t just tell dopey Donna to read The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs, and then they could have saved the cost of a whole episode.

(The Monkey’s Paw is a classic, by the way, and well worth the read if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Oh, and Anya's odds in the desirability stakes continue to shorten.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Simply Mad.

Remember me writing this in a blog post recently:

Meanwhile, I’m developing quite the urge to approach Emily and ask: ‘Are you an INFJ by any chance?’ I’m very nearly certain that I won’t.

Today I did. I went through her till at the checkout, and when she’d finished ringing the goods through I was feeling bold so I asked her a question:

‘Are you familiar with the MBTI system for assessing personality types?’

Her eyes sparked with interest and she nodded. I continued:

‘Would you be an INFJ by any chance?’

‘I am, yes. How did you know?’

I told her it was because she had an air about her which suggested the fact. I said it was an air of affability, courtesy and helpfulness, but with an obvious hint of distance. She smiled.

And you know what? I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a smile from an Emily. (My lovely dog, Emily, used to smile at me all the time, but I don’t recall knowing any human bearers of the name.)

*  *  *

And on the subject of dogs, I had a rare dog fix today. He was a yellow lab with an impressive harness (to make him feel important) and an injured eye all sown up and out of commission. I asked the accompanying human how it had happened.

‘We got him from a rescue centre,’ she said. ‘They thought he’d been hit with a spade or something because his teeth are missing on that side, too. But he’s spoiled to bits now.’

I was very glad to hear it, and the dog – I didn’t get his name – seemed glad of a lot of petting from me. He wagged his tail throughout, and matters don’t come much better than that.

*  *  *

The rest of the day was awful. I made my fourth attempt to speak to somebody at HSBC bank to make my simple enquiry, and after about twenty minutes of answering security questions I was put through to an Indian call centre. I was already fuming, and it didn’t help that the woman I spoke to had an accent so strong that I had to keep stopping her to ask ‘would you mind repeating all that, slowly.’

And then I was asked the security questions again. She wanted to know this number, and that number, and my date of birth, and my telephone security number. I didn’t even know I had a telephone security number, much less needed one. It seems I did, so I was transferred to an automated system to get one, and that meant answering the security questions again. Finally I had the required piece of information and was put through to somebody who could address my query.

Something was wrong with the phone system because it was breaking up so badly that I was only catching the odd syllable here and there. And then my phone went beep-beep-beep and the call was terminated. I gave up and put the previous forty five minutes down to experience. All I wanted to know was whether they’d received the cheque I sent on 3^rd December.

*  *  *

So then I got the email from my energy supplier informing me that my charges are going to rise again from 1^st January. We had a big hike last April, and then another one in October. This is the third, and just when the house is continuing to grow colder and I’m having to accept a degree of suffering in order to economise.

*  *  *

And then I read of the shortage of antibiotics to treat the outbreak of strep A which has killed several children in the UK and is happening around the world. It seems the shortage is partly being caused by Big Pharma who are hiking the prices in response to increased demand. That’s just the free market economy at work, of course, where only money matters.

*  *  *

I’m hearing the term ‘the system is broken’ much more often these days and I’m using it myself a lot. Thank God for Emilys and yellow labs, I say.

A Little Post-Truth Generation Note.

How many times recently have I tried to call a bank or denizen of the corporate world and had my ear regaled with that tired old bleat:

We are currently experiencing a higher volume of calls than usual, so there may be a delay in connecting you with one of our advisors (or some, but only slight, variation.)

We’ve been hearing it for years and it’s downright dishonest. We all know that the true version would be something like:

We do not employ sufficient call centre staff to deal with your enquiry in a reasonably prompt manner. This is a deliberate policy so that we may have more profit to pay to our shareholders and senior executives. The interests of our customers come third on our list of priorities, so get used to it because it’s the same everywhere and you have no choice. Meanwhile, we’ll at least have the goodness to keep you entertained with endless and pointless recorded announcements, along with mindless, repetitive and utterly tedious musak, because we want you to believe that we’re here for you.

And so we wait and wait for half an hour (as I did today) before giving up. Isn’t it time we rebelled?

A Bad Day to Die.

Ever since that mysterious incident this afternoon I’ve had a sense that I’m about to die any minute.

Well, that’s not so bad in itself, but what is bad is that it’s been a day of grinding frustrations and other negative issues which have left me both depressed and in a bad mood (they’re not the same thing.) And I’ve heard it said by more than one source that dying in a bad mood can damage a person’s future prospects.

So what do I do? The house continues to grow colder by the day, and now even the expensive supplementary heating is struggling to bring the temperature in here up to tolerable. All attempts to contact HSBC bank over a missing credit card repayment have failed miserably and I could be in line for a late payment charge even though I made the payment by post ten days ago. And tonight’s episode of Buffy was about as miserable as an episode of anything can get.

So is there anything good to say about today? Erm…

I read earlier that Jacinda Arden, Prime Minister of New Zealand, was overheard calling a member of the opposition ‘an arrogant pr**k.’ She subsequently apologised, but I don’t know why. Reading that went some way to reinforcing my favourable opinion of Ms Arden. Unlike most senior politicians, she’s genuine. I like genuine. I doubt it will be enough to advance my future prospects, though.

A Couple of Realisations.

I woke up this morning curled into the foetal position and wondrously warm under the heavy bed linen and 17 tog duvet. I looked at the clock and went back to sleep. Half an hour later I woke up again and decided it was time to get up, but I didn’t want to do so because I knew the bedroom would be a little too cold for comfort. I did anyway, but then something occurred to me.

This is how it must be for babies in the womb. No wonder they scream the place down when they come out.

*  *  *

Something else I realised today: I saw a picture on an advert for a man who is the commercial director for some company or other. It was an ad for the London Business School. He looked alien to me and caused me to wonder why I tend to avoid people who are driven by the need to ‘succeed’ and then do so.

It’s because such people are the ones least likely to spend their valuable time pondering the meaning of life. We wouldn’t have much to talk about, would we?

Becoming the Ancient Mariner.

I’m going to quote Coleridge again: 

 

Day after day

Day after day

We struck nor breath nor motion

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean

 

That’s a pretty apt description of me sitting in my office these dark winter nights. Trying to think of something to write to the blog. Trying to think of something to investigate via Wiki. Asking whether I dare risk another visit to the BBC News website, or whether its woeful content will grab me as a terrier grabs a rat.

Checking the stats to see whether Chrome with Linux is still feeding ravenously on my old posts. Watching the monitor screen for the email which never arrives. Wondering whether there is any point in being alive apart from the simple fact of having grown used to it. Is that enough? I suppose it probably is.

I used to be in the habit of taking night walks during the winter, but I’ve lost my taste for the cold and the darkness and the shining dots adorning the bowl of night. And I lack the energy, both mental and physical. And Mill Lane is no longer a fit place to disturb the residents with a rendition of Raglan Road. And there’s no longer a coal fire to greet me on my return because I decided some years ago that the meagre benefit no longer justified the expense.

The house is growing a little colder as each day passes, and I’ve started the habit of donning a woolly hat when I need to go upstairs to the frigid bathroom. It helps a little and maybe I’ll get used to it. It occurs to me that I might consider shooting the next wood pigeon I see and hanging it around my neck by way of penance.

Please excuse the joke in bad taste.

Reacting to Tragedy.

The main headline on today’s BBC News website is about a group of children who fell through the ice on a lake. Three of them are dead.

I haven’t read the piece because the headline is painful enough without knowing the details. There’s nothing I can do about it, is there, so why go further into the intense darkness in which some families must be buried tonight, especially with Christmas coming on. (My daughter was badly scalded on 20^th December when she was seventeen months old and spent Christmas in a specialised burns unit. Christmas didn’t exist in my house that year.)

I might remark, however, that the story is the most-read piece on the site, but I won’t judge those who did read it. Only they can know their various reasons.

On Bingeing and a Bad Moon Lifting.

According to Blogger stats, somebody from somewhere in America is bingeing on lots of my old blog posts at the moment. I really, really can’t imagine why, but it’s enjoyable (and complimentary) all the same because I get to read them myself and am reminded of how much more meaningful my life was in the good old days.

And it isn’t just the posts I read; I also get to read the comments that several people used to leave back then. There was quite a retinue, you know, and I miss them (some more than others, of course.) I even came across one tonight from the priestess, although that wasn’t the handle (is that the right term?) she used in her comments so her identity remains a mystery as it should.

It should also come as no surprise – nor should it discomfit the other special ones – that I miss her most of all. I do allow myself to suspect, however, that she hasn’t actually gone. I entertain the feeling that she’s still hanging around in the ether somewhere and keeping an eye on me. Then again…

Tonight’s particular pleasure was coming across a post in which I included Credence Clearwater Revival singing Bad Moon Rising, so I took a listen as I had nothing better to do. And what a lift it gave me, which is a little ironic but I like irony. It’s one of those characteristics which afford credibility to one’s oddnesses.

Declining Seer Status.

It was the big football match tonight: England vs France in the quarter final of the World Cup.The media had been hyping it up for days because sporting events of that magnitude take precedence over nearly everything else these days. At least in the mind of the media it does.

I had an uneasy feeling about it long before the match started. My inner eye saw the score line: England 1 France 2. And guess what the final score was. England 1 France 2.

So am I becoming psychic? I hope not because I see goblins and grizzly things around every corner as it is. If I thought I was seeing things that were really there, I don’t think I’d want to carry on.

The French Connection.

When I was walking through the village today I saw the French woman with whom I have the occasional conversation (in English, I’m ashamed to admit.) She called out to me and told me to be careful of the ice on the roads (also in English, to her credit.) Four thoughts occurred to me:

1. There was no ice on the roads. After several days of very low temperatures but very bright sunshine, the roads were dry.

2. She must be at least twenty years younger than me, so I probably have more experience of walking on roads than she does.

3. She comes from the south-east of France, down by the Mediterranean, so she probably has less experience of ice than I do.

4. She isn’t my mother, my big sister, or my nurse.

I smiled benignly back, as any English gentleman would be expected to do upon being accosted by a French woman in his own language. (I have mentioned that I have a bit of a soft spot for French women, haven’t I? There’s some evidence that my dad spent some time in France after the war, so it’s probably encoded in my genes.)

Anxiety or Some Such.

I can’t settle to anything today. Everything I try to engage with is partially blocked by a sense that there’s something out there in the cold and darkness beyond the walls of my office or my house, or maybe even closer – something malevolent polluting my world with ill will and menace.

With any luck it’s just a routine mental health issue that will disappear with the next bright encounter or a piece of good news. Maybe it will only last for a day and then disappear with tomorrow’s daylight. Or maybe it’s my profound dislike of the winter season and will pick up with the coming of spring.

Whatever it is, it’s all I can make a post about tonight. I had several ideas carried over from yesterday and waiting in the wings, but I’ve forgotten them all. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

Laying the Blame and a Plot Hole.

I read tonight that the ice-laden polar airflow which is currently turning my house into a very big refrigerator (and is likely to last for at least another week, and is driving me a league or two below the comfort zone, and is loading further worries onto the heads of poorer people who couldn’t afford the greatly inflated cost of fuel even before the villain arrived) is being caused by a high pressure system sitting over Russia and refusing to move. I wonder how Putin managed to engineer that one.

*  *  *

Tonight’s episode of Buffy was highly emotional: she and her big beau Riley have separated and they’re both very unhappy about it. That’s fair enough, but what wasn’t fair enough was Zander’s sudden intrusion onto the stage of Buffy’s angst. It was far and away the most contrived and irrational piece of plot so far, and Zander’s lecture to our heroine contained statements which he had no rational way of making because he wasn’t privy to the private conversation between the two protagonists.

Shame on the writer. I didn’t catch his name.

The Brain Being Selective.

Here in the UK we’re getting the first properly low winter temperatures this week (first ice on the birds’ water bowls this morning, and tonight the temperature has dipped further.) And so those rooms in my house which have no regular heat – which is nearly all of them – feel uncomfortably frigid.

It surprises me that it comes as a shock every year to walk into a room that feels icy, even though I know I’ve experienced the same thing every winter since I’ve lived here. It seems the brain is capable of remembering the fact of a situation, but not the sensory experience itself. I’ve heard the same thing said of physical pain, and I know it to be true from personal experience. I wonder what that says about the reality of sensory experience.

So then I turned my attention to the experience of pleasure and questioned whether that can be remembered. The answer was: yes it can, and here’s how I know.

When I was a teenager I watched the film El Cid three or four times, and it remained my favourite until at least into my early twenties. I derived enormous pleasure from all aspects of it – the glory, the romance, the valour, the environment, the ultimate victory, and even the colours and the modes of dress, both courtly and martial. And then it faded as I grew older (and wiser?) until it became a mere memory of a long distant fact.

Until last night when I discovered in my YouTube recommendations a short excerpt of the music from the film, composed by Miklós Rózsa. The pleasure I felt on first seeing it came flooding back into my memory, fleetingly perhaps, but it was there.

So why is the brain incapable of remembering an actual sensory experience like cold or pain, but can recall something as abstract as pleasure? In this case it was music which triggered the phenomenon – because music is an immensely powerful trigger to abstract experiences – but it doesn’t explain the mechanics. Or does it? Maybe somebody will tell me one day.

A Consequence of Braving the Cold.

I’m sitting here in my office, snuffling in the chilly air and rubbing my thighs vigorously. I have a woollen jacket on, which is almost sufficient to provide adequate relief, but not quite.

(This room is actually an oasis of warmth because the rest of the house is colder, but I have scant tolerance for anything less than temperate these days.)

It wasn’t always thus. When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend called Pauline McNichol, and one night in December she caught the bus and came over to my house for a visit. I suggested we take a walk to a pub located in a village about a mile away beyond the suburban estate where I lived. It had snowed that day and she complained of being cold shortly after we left the house, so I took my coat off and draped it around her shoulders. My naïve young self thought it the proper act of a proper gentleman, and she seemed to appreciate the gesture. For my part, I felt cold but happily accepted the fact as a small price to pay for doing the gentlemanly thing.

A couple of weeks later – it was Boxing Day as I recall – I went over to her house in the car (even though I hadn’t yet got my driving licence, but the risk was another small price to pay for the pleasure of visiting Pauline.) She asked if we could drive somewhere quiet because she had something to tell me, and so I drove to the same village and parked up in the dark and deathly-quiet square close to the pub.

I waited patiently to hear what she wanted to tell me and turned to look at her face, dimly lit by the spill light from the illuminated pub wall. She looked a little reluctant, but then told me that she was ending the relationship. She said I was too nice, too considerate, and she’d met another boy who treated her a little roughly and liked to tell her what she was and wasn’t allowed to do. She preferred it that way, she said. I accepted her decision graciously, drove her home, and never saw her again.

And never again did I have the opportunity to give my coat to a woman to protect her from the cold, so I can’t honestly say whether it taught me any kind of a lesson. I suppose it must have done, but lessons like that tend to mingle with countless others and disappear in the muddy waters of a life spent fielding them from all quarters. Occasionally I wonder whether Pauline eventually moved on from the domineering new boyfriend having learned a lesson of her own. I expect she probably did, but I have no reason to care.

On Language and Light.

I’ve noticed an odd little communication curio creeping into the language over past few years. It seems that whenever you have dealings with a young person, almost whatever the situation, they nearly always say ‘see you later’ when the dealings are concluded. Rarely do they say ‘goodbye’, even when the chances of having further dealings are most unlikely and they’re never going to see you again.

I wonder why this habit should have developed and can’t readily come up with an answer. But I also wonder whether young French people say ‘au revoir’ when ‘bonjour’ would be more appropriate. And the same question applies to all other languages. (I suspect it might only apply to English, however, because I’m inclined to guess that it’s been borrowed from America.)

*  *  *

We had a power cut this evening just as I was reading something on the computer screen, and it occurred to me that we never get used to the impact a power cut has. There you are taking the sights and sounds all around you for granted, when everything stops without warning. The world is suddenly plunged into complete darkness and silence. I wonder whether this is what happens for some length of time after we die, until some celestial power raises the light level again on a wholly different world.

Today Being Nearly Tedious.

The second most interesting thing that happened today was that I discovered some new animal inhabitants in the Shire. Goats, young ones, in a field owned by a big house about half a mile away. I like goats a lot, so I went over to say hello to them. They ran away.

I’m beginning to think that animals are sensing something in me which they don’t particularly relish.

The most interesting thing, however, was more ethereal. I was sitting at my desk after dinner and felt tired, so I laid my head on my hands resting on the desk and closed my eyes. Long before I fell asleep – which I did eventually for about ten minutes – I began to see people as clearly as though they were standing in front of me.

Now, it isn’t so unusual for me to see still pictures of unfamiliar people on the back of my eyelids when I close my eyes; that’s been happening for many years. But this was different; these people were moving, and in full colour, and sharp as a new pin. Real high definition stuff. I’ve no idea who they were, why I was seeing them, or what it all means. And as usual, I don’t suppose I ever shall.

Apart from those two little gems, at the moment I’m feeling like Sherlock Holmes when he hasn’t had a case to solve for six months and is hitting the opium.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, back at the Buffy Stakes, the current betting is as follows:

Anya: 4-6

Willow: Evens

Buffy: 2-1

Place your bets now.

Being Disappointed By a Classic.

As someone who relishes and responds to the power of the written word, I often feel that I should read more poetry. Well, I’ve tried, but most of it leaves me either cold or confused. Tonight, however, I decided to read – and really try to read objectively – one of the longest and most highly regarded narrative poems in the canon of English poetry (or so I’m told) – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I’ve quoted some of it quite a lot down the years, you know. A few of the stanzas I can recite accurately (although how, why and when I learned them is a mystery):

‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’ ‘Yea slimy things did crawl with legs upon a slimy sea.’ ‘Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink.’ ‘Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread.’ I know the stanzas from which those lines are taken by heart; they’re stanzas which flow elegantly and enrich my perceptions as language should and often does.

But therein lies the problem. In my naïve little way I expect all poetry to flow elegantly, and too much of Rime doesn’t. It totters about most inelegantly like Old Mother Hubbard after a night spent draining the gin bottle. Metrical horrors abound. Stresses are often in the wrong places. Many of the words are ill-conceived, being so ludicrously contrived and beyond the defence of artistic licence as to be seriously disturbing. The narrative in ‘narrative poetry’ is fine; it’s a damn good story. But the poetry part is bloody awful, or so it seems to me.

And now somebody will probably tell me what a Philistine I am. And they might well be right.

On Fictions and Fancy Terms.

It’s often said of the INFJ type that their inner worlds are more real to them than the outer one, and so it often is with me. So many scenarios projected onto an imaginary screen before my inner eye, all replete with observations, conversations, sharp impressions, meaningful moments… some to my liking and some not. I realised only recently that I can be just as emotionally moved by the progress of these fictions as I am by the hard facts of a harsh outside world. I suppose it’s why I took to writing fiction shortly after I moved out of the city to the countryside and began the process of becoming a recluse. I’d be curious to know how many fiction writers exhibit a reclusive tendency and how many of them are INFJs 

*  *  *

Meanwhile, back in New York City, Mr Christian is beginning his first day at the funeral parlour. Mr Vane, the proprietor, instructs him to attend the Sourpusses who are not exactly pining for the deceased. He expresses it as ‘no one’s getting their feet wet with tears.’

I like that kind of expression with its nod to metaphor (and probably has a name that’s impossible to remember. Flann O’Brien was quite the expert at knowing the obscure technical terms for figures of speech, so maybe it’s an Irish thing.) What I want to know now is whether the expression came out of Donleavy’s head, or whether it’s a common component of New York City speech. I don’t suppose anybody will tell me.

*  *  *

Today’s twilight was more to my liking. The clammy dark mist was gone and the evening sky was bright and draped in pale grey and pink. It was a twilight given to standing and observing and musing, which is what I do.

Splashing Out.

Should I allow myself to believe that I spent a whopping £23.99 on a shirt today? I suppose I’d better because it’s currently lying in a bag waiting to be placed on a hanger, thence to be conveyed to its appointed place in the wardrobe.

I’m short of heavy winter shirts, you see, and in this house I need them between December and March. Accordingly, I’ve been scouring the charity shops ever since last spring hoping to find one or two at the sort of price I normally pay for shirts from charity shops (that’s usually between £5.99 and £8.99.) No luck; not a winter weight shirt in sight, at least not in my size.

So today I went into one of the specialist outdoor shops in Ashbourne to see what they had to offer. (Interesting that we have two specialist outdoor shops in such a small town. It’s because Ashbourne gets lots of seasonal visitors taking a town break from the rigours of mooching around the rugged Peak District, which starts just north of the town and is full of rocky outcrops, blooming heather, and long distance walkers on their way to Northumberland.)

What they had to offer was a small variety of heavy winter shirts at various prices, but all reduced because the Peak District mooching season contracts quite considerably between November and March. I chose the grey and black version of the best of them, and the one saving grace of paying an almost unprecedented £23.99 for a shirt was that it was originally priced at £44.

That made me feel better, and it’s not the first time. My super-splendid £250 walking coat cost me £99.99, and I paid £75 for my top notch raincoat instead of £150, both because I waited for the season to be advantageous. I embrace the virtue of patience very readily when it comes to spending money.

Winter Constraint.

The early chapters of JP Donleavy’s A Fairytale of New York, follows the MC as he arranges and attends the funeral of his wife who died on the crossing from Europe.

The day of the funeral is a hard one in a typical New York City winter. There’s much cold and wind and snow and rubbing of hands and stamping of feet, but everyone involved in the proceedings works through the conditions as though they don’t exist.

That’s what I find so difficult to do these days. The cold and wind and rain and ice and relative darkness and damnable white stuff wrap me in a frigid straightjacket, suppressing both normal physical abilities and effective brain function. Everything I know I need to do requires the harnessing of a most reluctant will, or else it doesn’t get done at all.

It wasn’t always like this, so whether it’s due to the effects of ageing, the softening of resolve, or my ever increasing sensitivity to ambient conditions, I really don’t know. But it’s a nuisance.

Tonight's Disparate Oddments.

I feel the urge to write something deep and meaningful – something to stir up foam-crested waves on the placid waters of routine perception – but I can’t think of anything. You know how it is when you feel hungry but you can’t think of anything you want to eat? It’s a bit like that.

*  *  *

I was going to write a post predicting that the public lending institutions will exacerbate a looming debt crisis in the developed world over the next year or two, largely because the politicians will hide from the inevitable and do nothing to prevent it. But that would be boring, so that’s why I didn’t.

*  *  *

Buffy’s kid sister is irritating me. I’m hoping she’ll change into a demon or something, then maybe she won’t. And I do wish they’d stop pronouncing Anya as Onya, and Tara as Taira (Giles excepted, of course.) It feels disrespectful to my ancestors and my muse.

*  *  *

My office has grown colder than usual tonight, which means I’m being persuaded to use electricity that I don’t want to have to pay for. The onset of winter is worrying me more than ever this year, not just for my own sake but also for the sake of those animals kept captive in fields, the people of Ukraine whose means of producing warmth has been brutally snatched away by the wretched tyrant Putin, the homeless trying to survive in hard and draughty places, and the children of those at the bottom of a hideously divisive capitalist system forced to choose between warmth and food.

*  *  *

All the commentaries on the INFJ type I see on YouTube are unanimous in one particular aspect: we’re the ones most desirous of meaningful connections with other humans, but also the ones least likely to find them. Getting by without them can sometimes prove irksome.

A Walk in Late November.

The day dull and silent under heavy mist. Fingers tingling in cold damp air. Skeletal trees standing stark in half tone against a pallid grey void. No movement save a single squirrel seeking anonymity behind a torpid tree.

In the style of JP Donleavy

(I sometimes wonder whether the time of year into which we are born has a deeply ingrained effect on our perceptions of reality.)

But one lighted vehicle stopped beside me on Green Lane. The driver asked for directions to Home Farm, which were freely and easily given. He continued on his way alone, as did I.

Birthday Update.

Just in case anybody’s wondering, I didn’t die before midnight so I opened the card and present – a pack of three miniature scotches and a box of vegan truffles. They’re extremely yummy and don’t have any palm oil in them (which is a good thing, apparently.)

And this morning I got a wave from the Lady B’s dear mama. And then I saw a big horse galloping madly around dear mama’s field, which is always a fine sight but on this occasion entirely unexpected because I’ve never seen a horse that big in dear mama’s field before. There was also an unfamiliar Shetland pony in evidence, so now I’m intrigued.

This is really interesting, isn’t it, but that’s about it for my birthday news so far. Apart from the fact that the weather today was just how I remember it being on my birthdays as a child – cool, calm, dull, and misty. It brought back memories. (And I really must get off this ‘when I was a kid’ thing because it’s irritating me.)

The only other notable fact to report today is that in Episode One of Season 5 of Buffy (the one in which she defeats Count Dracula) she looks pregnant. I have an eye for that kind of thing and am rarely wrong. I remember that day in April 2018… but I won’t go on.

The New Read.

Just a quick note about my new reading matter – JP Donleavy’s A Fairytale of New York (I gather The Pogues got the title for their near-legendary Christmas song from it, so I suppose I sort of got the title of my own story, A Fairytale of Philadelphia, from the same source, albeit second hand.)

I read the first chapter tonight and was much impressed. His observation of the New York docks was extremely keen, and his further observation of lowbrow New Yorkers highly amusing. But here’s what’s odd:

I picked the book up because I’d heard of JP Donleavy, was aware of his reputation, but had never read anything he'd written. But when I mentioned it to Mel she’d never heard of him, even though she’s got a Masters degree in English Literature. Makes you wonder about the standard of tertiary education, doesn’t it? (But then I did anyway, so nothing new there.)

Entering Hades With a Clean Sheet.

I received a small package in the mail a few days ago. It turned out to be a gift-wrapped something-or-other and a card from Mel, presumably for my birthday which is on Monday. No doubt she sent it early because of the postal strikes which are going on at the moment. And so, of course, I haven’t opened it because the relevant day hasn’t arrived yet. So should that matter or am I being pedantic? Well, to me it does matter, and here’s why:

Suppose I were to die before midnight on Sunday. In that case, the birthday for which the gift and card were intended would never come to pass because birthdays are only applicable as long as you’re alive. Ergo, the opening of a card and gift intended for a now non-existent birthday would amount to fraud, and then I would have to go to the next world with a criminal indictment sitting on my shoulder. What chance of a seat at the top table then?

A Birthday and Buffy's Bronze.

I have another birthday coming up on Monday (if I’m still here.)

I recall how much I used to like birthdays as a boy. I suppose it was partly because I felt a bit special on my birthday, but I think it had more to do with the fact I never felt comfortable as a child. I couldn’t wait to grow up, and each birthday was the attainment of another rung on the ladder of aspiration.

I was given a second hand bike one year – my eighth, I think – and the following year I arrived home from school to find that my brother had sent me a set of lights for it. I was very proud of them and made haste to go out riding in the dark just because I could.

These days, of course, I try to ignore birthdays because I’ve had a few too many. And I still think that memories are both precious and pointless in equal measure.

*  *  *

But now it’s time for tonight’s episode of Buffy, and so I suppose I should add another comment about the gang of intrepid warriors to celebrate the fact. So here it is:

The race to determine JJ’s favourite female character is coming to an interesting stage. Anya has moved up on the rails and is now neck and neck with Willow. (It’s her smile, you know. Anya’s smile is something wondrous to behold.) Buffy, I regret to say, is still running a length behind and I suspect is destined to receive whatever the horseracing equivalent of a bronze medal is.

But there’s a long way to go yet, which is more than can be said for my birthdays.