Matters for a Cold Spring Day.

When I was wondering what to say on the blog today, my first thought went straight to the matter of how wrecked and useless and uncomfortable I’m feeling these days, both physically and mentally. But that seemed unconscionably whingey, and I’ve done quite enough whingeing over the past four years as it is. So I thought I’d move onto the matter of Ukraine.

It didn’t help. The problem here, you see, is that when I read about the atrocities being committed by the Russian troops I wasn’t in the least surprised. The dogs of war have always had a tendency to turn feral and rabid whatever colours they were wearing, and so I’ve been expecting it all along. (When I was researching Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish military genius, I came across a reference to the fact that after a successful campaign, one of the decisions he had to make was whether to allow his troops to have some soldiery fun with the local civilians. It all came down to political exigency, apparently. This is the nature of war, as any political leader would know.)

So I wasn’t surprised, but I was still shocked and sickened. And the problem with me nowadays is that such feelings no longer stay on the outside of my consciousness; they go deep into the core of me until I feel like one of the victims. It isn’t pleasant, but that’s the nature of empathy.

(Let me side-step onto a completely different track here and suggest that the Belarusians might consider being a little more circumspect in their support for Russia. If the hyena in the Kremlin goes off his head and escalates the war into direct conflict with NATO, Belarus will be in the unenviable position of providing the hyena with his very own human shield. I suppose that’s why he’s keeping the junior hyena close by his side.)

*  *  *

And now let’s move onto a prettier and more wholesome matter. I saw the first lambs of the year today, in the field at the top of my lane. There were seven of them to raise a smile on my jaundiced visage, but one of them was lying by a fence on the far side of the field and looked dead. That was sad, but I reasoned that the little guy might well have been hale and hearty and merely resting after a long frolic. My mind does tend to wander so easily into dark imaginings these days.