Optimism and the Old Ways.

I gather that in the old Celtic calendar, the four seasons began on 1^st February, 1^st May, 1^st August and 1^st November. They were Imbolc (spring), Beltane (summer), Lughnasa (autumn) and Samhain (winter.) They also defined the days as running from sunset to sunset, rather than midnight to midnight as we do now.

It occurred to me earlier, therefore, that if we employ the old Celtic ways, spring began at sunset this evening. Or, looked at another way, tonight’s sunset was the last of the winter. What a pleasant thought, though sadly not very practical. Some of the harshest winter weather I’ve known during my life came in February and early March.

Good news for the confirmed optimist, though, because true optimism doesn’t need a practical base.

By Way of Entertainment.

My ears were regaled in Uttoxeter today by the sound of something vaguely approximating to music. It was very loud – irritatingly so – and so I searched for the source. My eyes eventually lit on a pair of Chinese people, a man and a woman both in middle age. They were facing one another and singing into a microphone held by the man and positioned between their respective mouths. There was an amp standing on the ground with the volume knob no doubt turned to ‘mega.’

How should I describe the resultant cacophony spreading like gloopy syrup through the streets of our little market town? ‘Syrup’ won’t do. It isn’t sweet enough, and neither does it adequately convey the urge to vomit engendered by its presence. Maybe it would suffice to suggest that even Daniel O’Donnell would probably have disowned it. It had that peculiar brand of abject sogginess seemingly beloved of a certain kind of evangelical Christian. I imagined it probably had a Christian message, although I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t catch a single word. It didn’t sound Chinese, so I suppose it was probably English intoned with a strong Chinese accent. But at least its lack of identity seemed a blessing of sorts. Heaven knows the music was bad enough; catching the lyrics would probably have sent me into a paroxysm from which there could have been no escape.

I considered approaching them to ask: ‘Excuse me, but would you mind turning the volume down because it really is very annoying? And do you think you might sing some pretty Chinese songs instead?’

I didn’t, of course. They both had their eyes closed.

Precocious Nature.

The early part of 2022 is being unusually precocious in the plant world. Maybe it’s because the winter has been unusually capricious so far, swinging like a pendulum between cold spells and spells milder than we normally get in January. Yesterday I saw gorse, primroses and even daffodils in bloom, while the bluebells at the bottom of my garden are at least a month ahead of schedule.

And the birds seem to think it’s spring, too. They’re showing signs of pairing up well before the normal start of the mating season in April, and a blue tit is taking a great deal of interest in the newly-refurbished nest box behind the kitchen. Watching it is quite fascinating.

It stands on the entrance hole looking around the inside of the box, as though it’s weighing up the dimensions and working out how much material will be required for the nest. And then it goes into the box before pushing its head in and out of the circular hole. Is it assessing whether the size is just right to prevent invasion by bigger birds and rodents which might be predators? I wish I knew. After that it takes up a position on the edge of the hole again, this time looking around the general location. It appears to be working out how far away the nearest cover is, and how far above the ground the box is situated in case a fledgling should fall.

These actions are truly observed, but the reason for them remains a mystery. Is my imagination running away with me, or are blue tits a lot smarter than we think they are?

Frustrated.

I’ve made it clear in these pages often enough that it’s the little things and the big things which most attract my attention. I’m attracted to the flutter of small wings as a bird takes flight, the sight of a small beetle scurrying across a wide road, being moved by a young girl giving her raincoat to her little dog. I’m also attracted to the mystery of time – the fact that the past has no ending and the future no beginning because there is only a seamless flow from the apparent nature of one to the apparent nature of the other. The fact that moments can’t exist fascinates me and leads me constantly to muse on seemingly unanswerable questions.

The stuff in between – the matters of great import I read in the news – often depresses and irritates me, but I keep trying to convince myself that none of it really matters. Unfortunately, the fact that I’m currently living in a physical body means that they do matter, or at least appear to. That’s why I find the state of the human condition too flawed and underdeveloped to really want to be a part of it.

I wish to rise above this state of being, but I don’t know how. Lots of people try to tell me how to do it, but none of them convince me. Other self-styled sages try to tell me that there is nothing to rise beyond, but they don’t convince me either. I have a strong inner sense that the answer needs to come from inside, but should I trust a strong inner sense?

And so I keep hanging on, trying both to care and not to care whether Russia invades Ukraine and how well the England women’s cricket team are faring down in Canberra. And I suppose it’s why I keep on writing stuff like this to a blog which very few people read. Is it of any help to me? I really haven’t a clue.

Today would have been my mother’s birthday if she’d still been alive.

Messages, Messages...

I had another game of chess with the computer tonight. I was playing white. Black must have been at least half asleep because it kept on making injudicious moves and I was committing wholesale slaughter. It came to a point that I’ve never seen before, which was:

I had my king, two queens (because I’d promoted one of my pawns), two rooks, two bishops, one knight and five pawns on the board. Black had only its solitary king. Even a novice like me would manage mate in two moves at most, and black should obviously have resigned. Up comes a flash on the screen:

Drawn game

Drawn game?! Are you kidding?! It’s all over. I’ve won by a landslide. The flash gave me two options, either to accept the draw or go back a move and carry on. I chose, unsurprisingly, to carry on. The board froze. Black didn’t move and the program wouldn’t let me move. The game just died, and I call that cheating.

Or maybe something or someone was trying to tell me something, but I haven’t yet worked out what it was.

*  *  *

And incidentally, T88 has ceased impersonating a London bus and become a veritable leitmotif. Three sightings in the space of five days now. I wonder whether something or somebody is trying to tell me something?

A Pyrrhic Victory.

Having gleefully reported last night that I’d finally drawn a game of chess against the computer (level 1, sub-novice don’t forget), tonight I actually won a game. So do I want to win a game of chess, I ask myself? I’m not entirely sure that I do. You see, during that seemingly interminable succession of losses, I came to the tentative conclusion that chess players must be devious people, and I don’t want to be a devious person. I’m the full frontal assault type, not the clever-but-sneaky Trojan horse type. (I think it must be the Anglo-Saxon side of my ancestry showing itself.)

And then I fell to speculation, as is my wont…

Let’s suppose that on that fateful night when the Greeks left a big statue of a horse outside the gates of Troy and then retired to hide (sneakily) nearby, a Trojan captain had said:

‘Look what we have here, Lord Paris, a fine statue of a noble horse left by the fleeing Greeks in recognition of our valiant defence. Let us take it into the city so that future generations shall forever have a symbol of our great victory.’

‘Not on your life,’ said Paris. ‘I don’t want any Greek trash littering my town, thank you very much. It might frighten the children. Take it to the river and throw it in.’

How different would history have been? The world would never have had moussaka, would it? And there would be an awful lot of empty properties in Soho.

Two Little Misquotes.

Darkness and Decay and the Dolorous state of the human condition are Dominating my consciousness at the moment, and I hope Mr Poe doesn’t mind me putting it that way. But I did have one major success tonight.

I played yet another game of chess against Mr Computer Level 1 (sub-novice) and forced him into a draw. That's one win and two draws now. I imagined I saw a tiny glimmer of light in the distance somewhere, but if I might paraphrase another well known writer: present hopes are less than fond imaginings. (And isn’t it strange that draw and drawer should be homophones?)

A Muse on Time and the Groove.

Let’s go back to that old theory that everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is already in place, and that life is simply a matter our consciousness experiencing it all like a stylus in the groove of a vinyl record. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could pick up the stylus whenever we wanted to and shift it back to a point on the record where the experiences were good?

It would come with complications, of course. For a start, we would eventually become bored with playing the same old bits of our life over and over again. It would be like picking out, say, ten favourite pieces of music and never listening to anything else. We would have to come back to the ‘present’ eventually and carry on getting older in order to hear some new music. And then there’s the fact that we would always know what was coming next so there would be no more surprises, and that would, in certain circumstances, take the edge off the pleasure.

But there’s a bigger problem: we wouldn’t be able to change anything because that would change the ‘future’, and we might never have lived long enough to go back in the first place. Ergo, we would have no control over the circumstances, but could only experience them passively again. And that brings up an interesting question: would our consciousness be totally oblivious to the fact that we’d come back from the future, in which case 1. there would be little point in doing it, and 2. how could we escape the retrograde action and return to ‘real’ time? Or would part of our mind be aware of the fact? The subconscious, perhaps?

I wonder if that’s what déjà-vu is.

On Age and Shame.

When I was younger I paid little heed to old people because they seemed too degraded to be of much use for anything. I paid even less to babies because they could offer nothing useful at all. I could tolerate young children because they could be cute, or at least interesting in one way or another, but I still saw them as a separate species. I’d fallen into that state of mind, you see, which I suspect most of us do – the state of mind where we judge age in egocentric terms:

I am twenty eight years old. I can climb mountains, play rugby, walk thirty miles a day in rugged country, swim for hours against a strong current, and move heavy objects around without breaking a sweat. I know this because I’ve done all these things. So if I see somebody drowning in a fast-moving river, I have the strength and stamina to rescue them. If I see a child run into the road, I can move swiftly enough to retrieve them before the vehicle arrives. If I need to escape from some upper floor of a burning building, I have the agility to climb down a series of knotted sheets with ease. I am at the perfect age to be a fully functional member of the species. It is a proper age and I hold a valid place within that species.

And this carries the inevitable corollary that those who fail these tests don’t have a valid place within it. Dystopian stories and other fantasies have been written around this very theme.

But I see it differently now that I fail them myself. Now I have become endlessly aware of life as a conveyor belt carrying us inexorably from the uselessness of babyhood to the dysfunctional state of old age. (I’m reminded of the eponymous Lucy saying in the film: ‘Without time we can’t exist’, even though I’m not entirely sure exactly how it relates to the fundamental point.) I suppose I’m saying that I have come to regard all ages as being equal in a manner of speaking, which is surely the right way to see it.

But do you know what? I’m still so critically aware of that glorious quarter of a century of life between the mid-teens and end of the thirties that I can’t shake the nagging sense of shame that I can no longer contribute as I once could. I don’t hold with the notion that old people automatically contribute wisdom to the prosecution of life, because I don’t believe it’s wholly true for reasons which I’ve already committed to this blog. And what value does wisdom offer anyway, especially at a time when young people seem to derive most of their guidance from peer groups on social media?

And so the ultimate question remains: Do I still have a place here, and do I have any right to hold the respect of those who are still fully functional members of the species? I think it probably isn’t my place to answer that.

Catching Up.

Since I haven’t made a post for nearly a week I thought I’d recount all the interesting things that I might have written about if I’d been in the mood to write.

1. I saw the Lady B today. She didn’t look well. She waved but didn’t smile, which I’ve never known her do before.

2. I gather something is seriously upsetting the priestess, but I’m not exactly sure what. I think she’s realising that emotion can be stronger than logic when the fire of attraction drives.

3. Yesterday I declined a doctor’s recommendation to start two more medications. That makes four I’ve refused now. Will I regret it? Time will tell, even if I’ll be too dead to find out.

4. The application of experience and logic has led me to the conclusion that, if certain conditions apply, feeding the garden birds in the winter can lead to more deaths from the cold than would otherwise be the case. Maybe I’ll expand on that another time.

5. On the subject of birds, I have a hen pheasant which comes into my garden and exhibits a strange form of behaviour. When she’s walking slowly around pecking for food, she stops suddenly every so often, drops her head to the ground, and takes three or four steps back. I suspect she has mental health issues.

6. I’ve been eating a lot of spinach lately because I thought it was a healthy thing to do. Yesterday I discovered that spinach contains an ingredient which promotes clotting of the blood, thus at least partially negating the efficacy of blood thinning medication (which I’m taking.) You really can’t win in this life, can you?

7. Blogger stats informs me that I’ve had far fewer visits in the past forty eight hours than at any time during the twelve years (almost to the day) that my little opus has been going (even when I’ve gone a whole month without posting.) I’m guessing that there’s either something wrong with the system somewhere, or I’ve become just another piece of rocky flotsam floating unseen through cyberspace.

8. I watched the film I Origins again last night (I did mention it a couple of years ago for those with long memories.) I enjoyed it more the second time around. The denouement is predictable, but it’s nicely done and quite moving. I’m now prepared to recommend it.

9. Remember my undertaking to try to gain some modicum of proficiency in the matter of playing chess? My current score against the computer at level 1 is: won 1, drawn 1, lost 22. The question must now be addressed: should I persevere or accept that I’m just too much of a nice guy to be a chess player? I think I’ll persevere for at least a little while longer. I said on this blog a long time ago that when things get difficult I’m the first person to want to give up and the last to actually do so. Why change the habit of a lifetime?

Being Mr Jonathon.

When the world outside is still and dark, and a hint of frost is falling from the frigid mist, and there are no immediate pleasures or diversions to be found in a house just a little too cold to be called comfortable, my thoughts creep back to summer days of old when a very special young woman and her dog brought me sunshine whatever the weather.

I felt a longing then for something I could never fathom. I still do and I still can’t. Eventually she found her feet and made the most of her prospects, at which point I became redundant. It was perfectly right and proper that I should, so I can have no complaint or reason to feel aggrieved. And so I don’t; but the light of connection which I felt so strongly continues to haunt my consciousness sometimes.

Maybe that was why I wrote that wistful little story, Coming Full Circle. Maybe I was trying to release some negative energy, or redress the balance in some way, or maintain the illusion of continued connectedness. I really don’t know. I hardly ever do.

On Being No Kind of Strategist.

I could never quite fathom why I was so hopeless at chess. After losing to my daughter when she was aged twelve, I decided that I just wasn’t blessed with a chess mind and so didn’t bother playing again. I came to the conclusion that being informed by MENSA that I had a brain the size of a planet was no guarantee of being any better than grade one at the game of kings, and thanked my lucky stars that I’d never tried to become a general in the army because I would probably have been court martialled, convicted of gross incompetence, and sentenced to some unspeakable fate. But still I wondered why…

So, all these years down the line, and being afflicted with a state of extreme tedium, I decided to see whether my trusty Windows 7 had a chess facility in its cyber store so I could try again. It did and so off I went. I lost the first game, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. I asked myself whether it would be a good idea to continue, since the surface of the dark swamp in which I’ve been standing lately was starting to rise and suffocation seemed imminent. I’d already come to the conclusion that the game of chess is not so much about the kind of intelligence I possess, but more about the ability to see an overall, complex picture of trap and counter-trap. That’s not me; I’m much too straight a person. I don’t deal in things like deviousness, subterfuge and trap-setting. I deal in openness, honesty, high principles and straight lines. Call me a wimp, but there you are.

Nevertheless, I asked myself, should I give in or should I persevere and see whether I might get the hang of it and improve? I searched the settings and discovered I was currently on level 2 out of 10. OK, let’s go down to level 1. If you’re going to be a novice hoping to improve, there’s no shame in starting at the bottom. It worked. The computer began making the same stupid mistakes I’d been making and I won the game. I think it’s the first game of chess I’ve ever won.

So did this make me feel good, you might ask? Not really because now I have another issue to deal with, namely whether I should continue. Suppose I should lose to this imbecile of a computer program. What on earth would that do to my self-esteem? I swear that when I chose to come here, nobody told me just how difficult life can be.

A Bus Called T88.

T88 has taken to impersonating a London bus.

(I was a big fan of The Magic Roundabout as a kid. One of the characters was a cow called Ermintrude who was more than a little loopy. In one episode she was engaged in giving orders to the others: ‘Ding-ding,’ she intoned brightly. ‘Move along please. I’m a bus. Ding-ding.’ Hence the relevance of this note-in-parenthesis to T88. My other favourite character was Dougal, the dog, who was mostly engaged in complaining about things. Between them they seemed to encapsulate most of my nature. But to continue…)

The thing that’s most commonly said about London buses is: ‘You wait half an hour for a London bus, and then three come along at the same time.’ And so it is with T88. Having not seen it for a month or more, I saw it yesterday in Ashbourne, and again today driving down my lane (which should strictly read ‘being driven down my lane’ but why be fastidious?’) And as it passed me the driver waved, so I assumed it was probably the Lady B. Whether she was waving at me or an earthworm crawling slowly across the snow I have no way of knowing. I suspect the latter might be the more likely.

Three Disparate Notes...

…that are not entirely unconnected.

I’m in no mood for writing posts at the moment for reasons too tedious to explain, and yet I feel the need to write something to relieve my own tedium. So here goes with apologies:

I saw T88 in one of the parent-and-child bays in Sainsbury’s car park today. I remembered that the last time I saw T88 parked there was well over a year ago, and that it was notable for the fact that it was the only time I ever saw the Lady B’s legs. It was warm, you see, and she was wearing shorts.

It was brought to my attention today that one effect of becoming a recluse is that it greatly heightens your awareness of every little circumstance in your immediate environment. This includes having unwanted noise feeling like being repeatedly hit on the head with a mallet, and finding every little malfunction a sure sign that the bedrock of your life is crumbling irreversibly to dust.

It also occurred to me today that the fish which slip the hook and evade capture are always fatter than those you manage to bring onto the bank.

A Troubled Night.

I had another of my typically confusing dreams last night. I was at the theatre where I used to work, being taught some kind of lesson by the Theatre Director who died ten years ago. I wasn’t fully understanding the lessons, and when it came time to take the test I wanted to ask the woman sitting next to me whether I could copy her notes. She beat me to it by asking whether she could copy mine. I’ve no idea who she was.

I woke into the darkness of my bedroom and felt uneasy because I was sure there was somebody else in the house. I heard an unfamiliar noise, but tried to shrug it off and go back to sleep. And then I heard another unfamiliar noise. I turned the bedside lamp on: twenty past six, less than four hours since I’d gone to bed. The sense that there was an intruder grew stronger and I decided to go downstairs to investigate. There was nothing untoward, so I made a cup of tea and booted up the computer to see whether there had been any activity on the blog. Nothing. I drank the tea, turned all the downstairs lights off and went back to bed. It was colder than when I’d left it, but I managed to get back to sleep eventually.

I was back at the theatre, this time doing my old job. I was faced with a mess that needed to be cleared up, but the actors kept getting in the way. And then I was outside and facing a huge ladder which climbed all the way up to the roof. It looked a daunting prospect because I’m mildly acrophobic, and it was made worse by the fact that each section of ladder was placed inside the previous one, so the ladder became narrower the higher it got. I knew I had to climb it because there was something I needed to hang on a hook at roof level, which would mean taking my hands away and balancing on the top rung. I felt I needed to be positive and fearless, so I climbed the ladder quickly and got the job done.

But then I saw an identical ladder set up a little way away, also fully extended to the roof. Two cats were fighting on top of it and I feared they would fall and be killed. They did fall, but managed to land on something lower down and carried on fighting.

I was back in the theatre, this time explaining to the assembled actors that I was about to go on holiday. A woman who looked like my high school English teacher sidled up and asked whether she could come with me. I knew she wanted to start a romantic relationship which I found onerous, so I declined her request.

And then I arrived at my holiday destination, only to find the unwelcome woman coming alongside and smiling lasciviously. She’d followed me there and I knew there was no escape. I woke up to find sunlight shining through the window, and the wall clock opposite the bed showed me it was ten past ten.

What on earth am I to make of me?

Milking the Itch.

Some time ago I made a relatively nondescript post to the effect that I occasionally suffer the irritation of an itch half way up my back in a place which is difficult to scratch without some kind of tool. I made light of the fact by referring to it as ‘the fairy-with-a-feather spot.’

Can you imagine my delight, therefore, when I discovered last night that this phenomenon is not only quite common, but even has a clinical name? It’s called Notalgia Parasthetica, and an opportunity now presents itself.

The next time someone asks me ‘how are you, Jeff?’ I can lay forth a description of my various health issues, as I usually do, but go on to augment it with a final, dramatic revelation:

‘I am now afflicted with a condition known as Notalgia Parasthetica.’

‘You poor old thing; that sounds awful. Does it inconvenience you greatly? Is there a cure?’

‘On the first count, yes. As to the second, I regret to say that the cause is little understood and so there is no cure. I manage it as best I can, and I’m assured that it’s rarely fatal. More than that I should prefer not to say.’