Late Learning and an Ungrateful Bird.

I was thinking about one of my ditties earlier, and realised that it consists of four quatrain stanzas in iambic pentameter with the conventional rhyming pattern A-B-A-B. Now, here’s the thing: I couldn’t have said that a few days ago before I read an extensive article on Thomas Gray‘s much-loved poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Isn’t it good when you discover, just when it’s too late to really matter very much, that you’re actually cleverer than you thought you were?

And here’s another one:

I remember that when I was a child, my friends and I believed that the condition we referred to as ‘yellow jaundice’ was an illness. ‘Where’s Charley today?’ somebody would ask. ‘He’s got yellow jaundice.’ ‘What’s yellow jaundice?’ ‘It’s a disease that turns you yellow, and you have to stay at home so nobody else catches it.’

It took a teacher, somewhere in later childhood, to explain to us that it was not an illness in itself, but an indicator of several possible illnesses connected with a malfunctioning liver. This I have long known, but what I only just realised (me being a writer of sorts and a deeply thinking person) is that the term ‘yellow jaundice’ is effectively a tautology, since I think it reasonable to assume that the word ‘jaundice’ derives from jaune, the French for yellow.

Lifelong learning is indeed a wonderful thing, if generally rather pointless in the end.

And I had something else to say but I’ve forgotten what it was.

I suppose I could mention that my sinuses are suggesting a change in the weather. I hope it’s going to be a warm change because it’s been depressingly cold and dull for the past few days and cold weather makes me dull and miserable. 

And on that note I might also mention that I failed to rescue a little bird today, but not for want of trying. I was in the process of cooking my dinner when I saw a nuthatch lying on one of the feeding tables and looking near-lifeless. Assuming the likelihood that it had either flown into a window or been struck by a vehicle, I took the pan off the hob, donned my coat, and went out to hold it gently under my warm armpit until it recovered. (I’ve done it several times over the years and it’s always worked.) As I approached the table the bird came to full attention and flew away in a panic. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed.