On Big Birds and a Bad Omen.

My bird feeding facilities are suddenly being invaded by large numbers of bigger birds coming in from the fields – most notably wood pigeons, jackdaws, jays, magpies, and pheasants. This is a real nuisance because the little birds which roost, nest, and generally live in and around the garden are having their food snaffled by outsiders.

One consequence of this is that it’s costing me a lot of money in peanuts, seed, and rolled oats. A second consequence is that yesterday I witnessed a jay being attacked several times by one, two, or three substantially smaller blackbirds. The blackbirds won every time, and I suspect their adversary might have been guilty of taking an unhealthy interest in one of their nests somewhere nearby (jays are known for taking both eggs and chicks from nests, and blackbirds are tough little beasts and don’t like it.)

One of these days – if and when I’m in a better mood and can be bothered – I might take the trouble to explain my theory that if you live in the countryside and feed the small woodland birds conscientiously, it might result in more avian deaths than would otherwise be the case. (But don’t hold your breath waiting.)

On the subject of bird feeding, I might add that when I went out to top up the feeders at twilight this evening it was rather cold by late May standards. It’s an interesting fact that while I find cold days unpleasant, I find cold twilights more than unpleasant. I find them disturbing. They almost scare me, you know. They do. So now I’m entertaining a theory that my noted gift for precognition (which I never knew I had) might be warning me of an impending nuclear winter. But I can’t think what use a warning would be so I’m probably wrong.

A Rare and Refreshing Surprise.

I did something yesterday which I haven’t done for quite a long time: I painted a door frame while having an album of Beethoven piano sonatas playing quietly in the background. It was surprisingly relaxing, or maybe it’s not so surprising really. (Finding something relaxing is a rare occurrence these days because I’m pretty jaded, so that’s why I was surprised.)

The last time I had such an experience was around eight or nine years ago. On that occasion I painted a window frame in the summer sunshine with one of my favourite Vaughan Williams symphonies playing. I remember writing about it on the blog so it must have been noteworthy on that occasion, too. Life has changed a lot since then, in one way for the better but in most ways for the worse. And that’s how life is and one day it stops.

Growing Up in America.

To those of us on this side of the Atlantic, it appears that American schools are not the safest of places to be. And so I have a question. Are schools over there really as scary as they seem? And if they are, does it mean that kids are scared to go to school every day, or at least a little apprehensive? If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, I wonder what effect it’s having on the emotional development of America’s children.

As I understand it, the response by the Republicans and the gun lobby is not to address the nation’s gun culture at source, but to take steps to make access to schools more secure. Presumably this would mean fences, locked gates, maybe razor wire, and armed guards. In short, turning schools into high security establishments. So what effect would that have on the emotional development of America’s children?

I just wonder, you see, whether the children’s emotional development is being taken into consideration as part of the dialogue between liberals and conservatives over how to handle the gun problem. Maybe it is; maybe I’m getting it wrong. It’s just that America’s obsession with allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to walk around carrying instruments of fast and violent death is a bit of a mystery to us Europeans.

This post could have gone a lot further into other areas, but I have things to do so enough said for now.

To Those Who Can't Meditate Normally.

I can’t meditate normally because my mind is always too insanely active. ‘To correct an overly active mind,’ say the great and the good, ‘you should meditate.’ Sorry, but my overly active mind easily beats the imperative to focus however hard I try.

But tonight I realised that reading Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose is the next best thing, if not equally as good. You have to concentrate, you see, because it’s far too dense if you don’t and then you miss all the wonderful stuff written there. And concentration is a form of focus, right? So why should concentrating on stream-of-consciousness prose be any less efficacious than watching your breath go in and out of your nose?

Forget the Streets of London.

Something I saw on the TV at lunchtime put the words ‘the streets of London’ into my mind. So then the old Ralph McTell song with that very title jumped into my head and, as is usually the case, declined to leave for many a long hour. I heard the refrain over and over again and became more than a little irritated because I realised that whoever wrote it was ignorant of a major issue of human existence, and one which appears to be becoming more prevalent than ever: Depression. The refrain runs:

 

How can you tell me you’re lonely

And say for you that the sun don’t shine

Let me take you by the hand

And lead you through the streets of London

I’ll show you something

To make you change your mind

The song then gives a rundown of the sad and sordid aspects of the dark underbelly of the capital – abuse, poverty, crime, homelessness etc etc. And the point of showing it is to make the sufferer realise that some people have it worse than they do, so they ought to think themselves lucky and cheer up.

This is typical of the attitude taken by most people to real depression. They confuse it with feeling a bit down because the bills they have waiting to be paid amount to more than they can afford. They have to be reminded that some folks are even worse off, so all they need do is shape up and stop being a wimp. That isn’t real depression.

Real depression is a vicious demon living inside a person, waiting for the trigger which will enable it to leap up, grab them by the throat, and pull them into a cold place where all is dark and nothing matters. And sometimes it doesn’t even wait for a trigger. Depressive people are nearly always highly sensitive and often empathic, and so showing them images of suffering is likely to make them more depressed, not less.

Depression isn’t about comparisons and league tables of suffering. It’s much more personal and fundamental than that. So I hope that whoever wrote that stupid bloody song Streets of London has now grown up and realised that life isn’t as simple as they used to think it was.

Walking the Pilgrim Path.

The place I refer to as the Shire consists of two separate areas with two different names. For historical reasons too complex for a mere blog post, the main village is in the southern part (where I live) but the mediaeval Anglican church is over a mile away in the northern part (the village was afforded two chapels for those of the lower orders who subscribed to the nonconformist persuasion, both of which edifices are now private dwellings.)

The upshot of this is that people from the village who were proper Christians and wanted to attend a proper Christian church had to walk or ride more than a mile to get there, and one of the public footpaths in the area is the route which the walkers would have taken. It’s why I’ve taken to calling it ‘the pilgrim path.’)

It’s a walk I rarely do because it requires striding uncomfortably along ground which is uneven and stony in dry weather, muddy in wet weather, and furnished with two stiles which have seen better days and pass between untrimmed hedges which do so like to scratch you just because they can. But this evening, just for a change, I did.

The second half of the walk, once the uncomfortable part has been negotiated, passes through a narrow wood with a dark, still pool lying seductively off to one side. (I’ve often thought it would be a good place to die so the Lady of the Lake could be on hand to point me in the right direction and advise me as to the ground rules.) But the best bit is, at least at the moment, the final part before reaching a tarmac surface at the junction with Church Lane.

It’s a small meadow currently sown with barley which leads you downhill along an earthen track about three feet wide between the growing crop. And such a crop it is. The barley is now waist high, and as you walk the between the sea of stalks like slaves walking out of Egypt, the heads nod and wave while the whole top ripples lazily in the breeze.

It would be hard to describe the fascination of walking through such an experience, much less explain why. It just is, at least to me it is. The end of the path, where it joins Church Lane, brings you to a venerable – and clearly very old – copper beech tree (a great personal favourite of mine) which is unusual for being substantially wider than it is high. And on the near side of the lane is the gate and stile where I once told the Lady B of my relationship difficulties and she responded with a secret of her own.

And that, for the benefit of those still reading, is all I have to relate today. (Apart from the fact that a young woman in an unfamiliar car waved and smiled at me. I’ve no idea who she was or why she did it.)

More on Changing Times.

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I hate winter. I didn’t mind it when I was younger because it brought two benefits in its train: it was the season to play rugby and the season when Christmas happened. But now the playing of my favourite game and my appreciation of Christmas are both the stuff of distant memory, so winter has become the season to be cold and miserable and nothing else.

But here we are at the lightest time of the year, and approaching the warmest, and I’m still not satisfied. The problem now is that I’m growing ever more impatient for the evening light to fall sufficient to justify closing the curtains. It shuts the world out, you see, and the world is something I’m not overly fond of any more. Is that a sign of me being curmudgeonly, a consequence of advancing age, or a simple case of irony?

*  *  *

I had a strange dream last night in which I flew to Chicago in order to fill some sort of work assignment. I was surprised to note that the air didn’t feel different there than it does here, whereas I’d always thought that the air does feel different when you go to a foreign country. I was lodging in a semi-detached cottage (duplex to Americans, I believe) and there was a ginger cat sitting on the boundary wall next door. It wasn’t friendly.

So why the dream? Why Chicago? Why the familiar air? Why the unfriendly cat?

I wonder whether it was due to the fact that I mentioned Catherine McNabb to Mel last Sunday. Catherine was the attractive and mildly glamorous young woman who was my ‘minder’ when I was sent to Toronto on a photographic assignment for a publisher a long time ago. She was the one who took me to breakfast at a posh restaurant in her black BMW. It was the first time I had ever been offered a choice from a range of teas and the first time I had ever sat in a BMW. (Being from a northern English working class background, I’d always regarded tea as just tea. I opted for English breakfast because I’m a stickler for purity. I imagined the others might have tasted of beef curry or baked fish or something else unimaginably gross. I later discovered a food bar in the shopping mall which sold almond-flavoured coffee. I tried one and it was hideous. I decided that this is what happens when you allow colonials to run amok and experiment.) But Catherine was lovely. She gave me a lift – in her black BMW – to the airport late in the evening of my last day, and threw in a hug for good measure. She’s one of those people I’ll never forget, and my but times do change.

Late Late Post.

Sorry about the previous post. It was a bit serious, wasn’t it? That’s the problem with depression; it encourages you to be serious. So when you look back at what you wrote earlier you hate yourself for having been so serious (which is ironic because hating yourself doesn’t exactly help with depression, but that’s just life and you have to move on.)

On which note, today’s less serious revelation is that I’ve had Santa Claus Is Coming to Town running through my head and getting on my nerves. (God, life is tough sometimes.) I have no idea why because I don’t believe in Santa Claus, I have no interest in Christmas, I haven’t heard the song anywhere, and it isn’t even Christmas anyway.

So that’s today’s mystery. ‘Time for bed,’ said Zebedee (as soon as the music stops.)

On the Scourge of Self-Interest.

My morning routine consists mainly of reading the news while eating my customary breakfast of cereal and a glass of grapefruit juice, doing a few tidying up jobs, replenishing the birds’ feeding tables, and then going for a pre-lunch walk in some of the loveliest scenery in the English countryside. This morning it was dry, mild and bright, yet I spent the whole of it in a deep depression (the sight of a fox ambling lazily down the main road helped a bit, but not much.)

The cause of this state of affairs is my growing sense of despair at the level of self-interest evident in the actions of my fellow humans. I read of the way in which Brazilian miners abuse and murder indigenous people while prosecuting their illegal activity in pursuit of self-interest. (When I hear of men throwing a 3-year-old girl into the river to die by drowning or predatory attack, my mind cannot avoid experiencing some dark and debilitating emotions.) And despite the fact that their activities are illegal and their behaviour even worse, Mr Bolsenaro does nothing about it. No doubt he, too, is driven by self-interest.

I gather the number of men, women and children (not to mention the soldiers) killed in Ukraine is currently unknown, or at least not yet publishable. Whatever the number, it’s all down to the self-interest of one Comrade Putin sitting safely in the Kremlin. I’m no fan of the Philippines’ President Duterte, but I found myself buoyed slightly when he railed at Putin this week, saying ‘I kill drug dealers, not children and the elderly.’

And then I read that a young man in Texas, just starting out on his life, walked into a school and killed nineteen children and two teachers. He obviously had his own twisted version of self-interest.

Should I write about Mr Xi’s self-interest in the appalling treatment meted out to the Uyghers in northwest China? Or the self-interest of the Taliban and the plight of Afghan women? Suffering, suffering, suffering, wherever you look, and all caused by human self-interest.

You may say that all life forms exercise some level of this troublesome beast, and I have to agree. But we humans pride ourselves on being not only the predominant species, but the one with a singular characteristic: we understand the concept of ethics. So why do so many of us ignore the fact so readily?

I know this is something of a leitmotif of mine, and I dislike regurgitating an old theme ad nauseum. But the older I get the more empathic I’m becoming, and the state of the human condition sometimes drives me to despair. That’s why I spent a lovely walk on a fine May morning feeling nothing but depression and not wanting to be a part of the human race any more.

Maybe I should end this latest rant by admitting that I’m not perfect either. I have been known to cause suffering through the pursuit of selfish ends, but I am trying to see through the instinctive imperative to follow self-interest and aspire to selfless, humanitarian principles. Is that sanctimonious? I hope not. Am I wrong to judge others, no matter what they do? Possibly. Is it too late to make a difference? I don’t know yet.

Mr Garrulous Cometh.

I had a contractor here this afternoon under instruction from the land agent. His job was to sweep the chimney. I’ve told the land agent several times that my chimney doesn’t need sweeping because I no longer have open fires so there’s nothing to sweep, but they still insist it’s necessary for legal purposes.

And so the contractor came, but he didn’t sweep the chimney because I explained that there was no point. He merely fired up a smoke bomb to ascertain that the up-draught on the flue was adequate and then filled in a few forms. And yet he was here for an hour. Why? Because he was joint top of the league in terms of the most garrulous people I have ever met. Only one other person rides as high as this guy did in the garrulous stakes.

He talked and talked and talked. And then he talked some more. In fact, he wouldn’t stop talking. He told me about the house he’d bought in rural Wales somewhere near the Brecon Beacons. He told me how long the track was that led off the road, and how far away the nearest shop was. He told me how the house was constructed and what it had replaced. He told me how old the previous owner was and why he’d wanted to sell it.

I was given a comprehensive rundown on the make and type of generator in use because the house is off-grid, and the difficulties he’d had with it as well as the mistakes the previous owner had made. I learned about the cost of petrol and duty-free diesel and liquid petroleum gas, and was given full details of the incremental progression of such cost over the past few years. And so on and so forth. On and on and on.

As extensive and boring as it all was, it still shouldn’t have taken an hour. It did so because he was one of those people who have to keep shooting off at tangents, explaining every detail to back up the established fact no matter how tedious and irrelevant they mostly were. And he had to constantly repeat himself, telling me everything twice, three times, four times…

Several times I arrived at the point where my mind became too exhausted to keep listening and switched into private thought mode for blessed relief. But that caused a problem because if the necessity arose to respond in some way, I would have had no idea what the last statement was and been left hanging in a state of mild embarrassment. And so I had to tell my poor, beleaguered mind that this couldn’t go on much longer, so be brave and concentrate.

Eventually he made to leave and mentioned that he intended to sit in his van for a while and have a cup of tea from his flask. In normal circumstances I would have offered to make him a cup of fresh tea, but these weren’t normal circumstances and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So then he left and I felt guilty while I prepared to do some gardening. And then it rained.

Scraping the Ashbourne Barrel.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ashbourne on a Wednesday used to be full of things to write blog posts about, but now it’s sadly lacking. I didn’t even see Gimli today. I see him every week, you know, plodding around with his staff and sporting a heavy grey beard which looks as though it ought to have lots of interesting creatures living in it but probably doesn’t. Today he was absent. Maybe he was busy mining whatever Gimlis mine in some remote cave in the Pennines, the southern end of which starts a few miles north of the town. It’s where we get the summer tourist traffic from, filling up Sainsbury’s car park because the parking is free for two hours.

(And talking of Sainsbury’s, I’m reliably informed that their stock of shopping trolleys has dwindled by around 60%. Seems the local ne’er-do-wells are stealing them for the scrap value, which at least adds a hint of notoriety to the dull old place.)

I did see something moderately interesting last week, though. One of the Turkish barbers from the Turkish barbers’ shop was standing outside the salon talking, laughing and gesticulating wildly to somebody who wasn’t there. He didn’t seem to have anything plugged into his ear, so maybe he was just overjoyed at having put some considerable distance between himself and Mr Erdogan. Well, who wouldn’t?

Fragments.

I have no idea why these two lines of a (fairly) well known poem have been running through my head all day: 

 

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now

The only time I ever went to Slough was a very long time ago when I got a job as a merchandiser with a well known confectionery company and had to go there for the training course. It was the most hateful job I ever had but I thought I was over it. The poem was written, incidentally, by John Betjeman, a man generally thought of as a poet for some reason (maybe I’m missing something), two years before the Nazis invaded Poland. I suppose he wasn’t to know (or maybe he did.)

*  *  *

The Shire lambs are now half grown and very sturdy, but they still behave delightfully like children. I, on the other hand, am shrinking, suffering the depletion of strength and energy, and hoping that I’ll soon start feeling free to behave like a child because I won’t give a damn.

*  *  *

This is the list of the people I would like to have put aboard a spaceship and removed to some distant planet where it’s possible to have life, Jim, but not as we know it: Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, al-Assad, and all those who support them or take advantage of their despicable predilections. They, along with London’s Metropolitan Police, are the prime movers of my current contempt for the human animal.

*  *  *

I was going to tell the story of last night’s dream, but I’m scared it might prove a temptation to something I wouldn’t want to tempt.

*  *  *

One of the few true delights still available to me is to stand in the garden on a warm, still evening when all is silence save the singing of small birds. I know I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again because it’s one of the few things truly worth saying.

*  *  *

I’m now going to have another session of wading through Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style. I think I’m getting used to it.

Walks, Woods and Sundry Things.

Having done one of the tougher trimming jobs in the garden this afternoon, I decided – unusually given the nature of my diurnal routines – to go for an evening walk, first to the Harry Potter wood to pay my respects to the little people, and then to the smaller wood at the top of the lane where I could talk to the sheep in the adjoining field.

I stood leaning on the field gate in the cool, damp air (we had a couple of hours of welcome and persistent rain this afternoon; it started just as I was finishing the tough trimming job), musing on the state of life and mine in particular, and realised three things:

1. Conversations tend to be a bit one-sided when little people and sheep are all you have to talk to.

2. The ‘feel’ of the landscape changes noticeably as the day progresses. I usually see my local landscape around lunchtime, but sometimes I need the excitement of variety.

3. The perception of how light relates to the passage of the seasons must be different for woodland dwellers than it is for the rest of us. We think of summer as the light time and winter the dark, but woods are different. They’re at their lightest during the winter when the trees are bare, and then become delightfully dappled when the leaves begin to form in the spring, and then grow much darker when the canopy is fully formed. I decided this must indicate something very profound about the state of being, but I couldn’t think what it was.

*  *  *

A swallow has finally arrived in Mill Lane. Just one. This is a strange state of affairs since the whole purpose of making the 5,000-mile trip from South Africa is to breed, and even swallows can’t breed on their own. I wondered whether it was an ageing male which had been stood up in favour of a younger bird, and sympathised. I’ve been there.

*  *  *

It occurs to me that if I go through life with my tongue stuck firmly in my cheek, it might one day decline to come back. Then I wouldn’t be able to talk to little people, sheep, or anything else.

Classy Talk.

I was thinking today about the fact that I still retain some of the colloquial modes of speech which I grew up with in a northern industrial town. Top of the list was ‘have you got..?’ Speakers of more eloquent English don’t use that form. The Lady B’s dear mama (who is the most eloquent speaker I know personally), for example, would never ask ‘Have you got an hour or so to spare to take tea with me?

(I do realise at this juncture that the Lady B’s mother would never ask that question because I’m not the sort of person to whom she would ever proffer such an invitation, but that isn’t the point.)

The point is that she would use a different form of the interrogative. She would ask ‘do you have an hour or so to spare…’ It’s what separates the classy people like her from the denizens of society’s dark underbelly like me. Mel came up with another one. She works in a coffee shop and admits to asking ‘do you want cream with your coffee?’ when a more refined version would be ‘would you like…’

I expect it’s a Normans and Saxons thing. When the Normans took over the role of Most Important People in 1066 they came bearing a version of French, and French is a Romance language largely derived from Latin. I think the notion already held sway that anything which could claim its origin in the late-lamented Roman Empire was inherently more refined and sophisticated than anything the backward and bestial Germanic peoples (of which the English are an example) could offer. It’s all poppycock, of course, and largely based on Roman propaganda, but we English still tend to grudgingly acknowledge that there is a difference between the posh folks and the rest. And it shows in the way we speak.

On Being Boring and Alone.

When I went for a walk this morning it occurred to me that I’ve probably become one of those terribly boring people who talk about terribly boring things because they don’t realise how boring those things are to normal people. (I recall there being a TV comedy once in which a man called Eric Outhwaite was enthusiastically telling his mother about a friend of his who had bought a new shovel: ‘And do you know where he keeps it? Next to th’old one.’ The basis of the humour was that Eric was the most boring man alive.)

The point is this, you see: I have observed that most people want to talk about the current contestants on Strictly Come Dancing, or who’s the latest person to be murdered in East Enders, or which football team is likely to win the Premier League.

I, on the other hand, want to talk about the fact that horse chestnuts are the first of the standard trees to fully leaf in the spring, or the fact that council workmen have mowed the verges in Church Lane thereby destroying this year’s mass of delightfully-scented meadowsweet plants, or the fact that one of the farmers is growing broad beans this year instead of maize.

And that, I’m constrained to say, is why it’s fortunate that I walk alone.

A Tory and a Tale of Blame.

Much of the British media output at the moment is about the alarming rise in the cost of living. Story after story is being told about people on low incomes having to choose between eating and heating because they can’t afford both. One addle-headed Tory MP (whose name I don’t know and wouldn’t want to know anyway) responded to this by suggesting that the poor should stop whinging, since they’re partly to blame for their plight. Why? Because they don’t know how to cook simple, inexpensive meals, and they don’t know how to budget. OK, let’s take these one at a time.

Cooking.

TV adverts are riddled with food manufacturers peddling a simple message: ‘Don’t bother to waste time cooking, buy these processed ready meals instead. They’re absolutely delicious, as evidenced by these pictures we’re showing you of delirious family groups dancing around the kitchen in delight.’ I remember it starting when I was a kid and Cadburys frequently ran a TV ad for their instant mashed potato. It showed a group of animated aliens falling about laughing at stupid humans who still peel potatoes, and then boil them for ‘twenty of their minutes’, and then mash them with a special tool, when all they have to do is pour some of this powder into a basin, add boiling water, stir it with a fork, and voila! Instant mashed potato. Grow up and get modern you silly humans. Instant is the name of the game now.

Budgeting.

Ever since Mrs Thatcher converted dear old Blighty to an economic system based on the principles of monetarism, the system has constantly ingratiated into the minds of the masses another simple message: ‘Spend, spend, spend! Happiness is having every one of the latest gadgets the clever people put before you. Contentment is to be found in lifestyle obsession. Shop ‘til you drop if you want to belong. It’s Christmas, so now’s the season to be shopping. Have you not heard of retail therapy? Well there you are, then. Buying things even cures depression. So get out there and spend money now!’

These have been two of the principal commercial imperatives for several decades, and several generations of people have been brainwashed by them. So maybe the addle-headed Tory MP might question why people don’t know how to cook simple meals and why they don’t know how to budget. I doubt he would be inclined to bother, however, because most Tory MPs are sufficiently well off to soak up the rise in the cost of living without even noticing the difference.

Notes and Discoveries.

The swallows have finally arrived. I saw two at the top of my lane yesterday in a place where I would have seen twenty a few years ago. Their other main haunt in Mill Lane is still sans swallows, and I haven’t seen a single house martin yet. Seems the world is changing. The swifts that used to hunt flies along the river disappeared years ago.

The golden yellow flowers on the oilseed crop have almost gone now and been replaced by long green things that look like French beans. I presume they're the seed pods, and that the seeds are what get pressed to provide the cooking oil. Never knew that, but I suppose it should have been obvious.

The blue tit parents are now feeding the chicks in the nest box behind my kitchen. There’s such an air of urgency and diligence about them that they bumped into each other today while trying to get through the same small hole at the same time. I’ve been watching them for sixteen years and never seen that before. Whether through bad timing, over zealousness, or just plain clumsiness, you have to admire their effort.

Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing style is proving difficult, but the characterisations are fascinatingly drawn if you can manage to wade through the mire of random clauses laid out in seemingly endless strings.

I didn’t get Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun from Sainsbury’s this week because it wasn’t there. I made enquiries and was informed that the stock is changed every week according to the sales figures. (I did notice the previous week that it was on the bottom shelf at the far end.) I was disappointed but reasoned that supermarkets and quality literature don’t sit easily together. Please refer to Mrs Thatcher’s dictum quoted in an earlier post.

A little moth spent the whole of yesterday asleep on a worktop in my kitchen. That sort of thing only happens in the summer, so I decided it was a Good Thing and left the little guy in peace.

I came across a website tonight which told me just what I wanted to know about a certain person. People change (or at least take a very long time to reveal their predominant priorities.)

On Warmongers and Pawns.

A 21-year-old Russian called Vadim Shishimarin sits alone in a Ukrainian court house surrounded by the energy of hostile intent. He stands accused of a war crime on the basis that he shot dead an unarmed Ukrainian civilian, a charge he admits. I see his picture every day on the BBC world news pages, and now I have to explain to myself and anybody who cares to listen why I feel sorry for him.

The reason is simple enough: when I see that forlorn and friendless figure staring sadly into space I see another victim of war. You may say that he is not an innocent victim because he committed murder, and I can’t disagree. But he says he was acting under orders from a superior officer, which seems entirely plausible. And a guiding principle of military training (for which read indoctrination) is that in order for a military unit to be effective, a pre-eminent principle is that commands given by senior personnel must always be obeyed without question and without regard for the consequences. It’s a principle which came under intense scrutiny at Nuremberg, but it’s a grey area so dense that it fails the test of exactitude. It’s the sort of thing which holds when it suits and falls when it doesn’t.

And so if this young man is found guilty – which is a foregone conclusion – he will be sentenced to life imprisonment. His future, with all the hopes and plans and dreams you have as a 21-year-old, will have been snuffed out by the violent machinations of the man in the Kremlin. And that’s where the finger should be pointed: at the men throughout history – be it Alexander, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, George W Bush, Tony Blair – who started wars without the reasonable and honest justification of defence. They’re the ones the human race should refuse to tolerate. They’re the ones who should be taken out of human society because they’ve forfeited the right to belong.

I’m not saying that soldiers who commit atrocities in times of war should not be brought to account. I believe they should, but in the final analysis they are the dogs of war, let slip by the territorial and personal ambitions of men who often slip through the judicial net because it isn’t strong enough to catch them. The pawns, as ever, are expendable.

(And on that note, and in the matter of the wider context of war crime culpability, the question of whether the United Nations will continue to have any credibility when the dust settles on the Ukraine issue remains open.)

A Curiously Cognizant Computer.

Just lately I’ve been getting a number of adverts and YouTube recommendations which are suspiciously apposite to my current state of mind and suspected health issues. It can’t be algorithms at work because they’re things I haven’t mentioned on the blog, in emails, anywhere else online, or even expressed verbally to anybody in any circumstance whatsoever. And there are too many of them to countenance the possibility that’s it’s all down to coincidence.

So how does my computer know what I’m thinking and should I be disturbed by the fact? No, let’s re-phrase that: I find this not only mysterious, but actually quite disturbing.

Adrift and Uncomfortable.

There’s something about being constantly alone that seeps into your body until every twitch or grind of nerve, muscle, sinew or organ becomes magnified. And then all you want to do is go to sleep, so that the twitching and grinding will slumber too and leave you in peace for a few hours.

*  *  *

This blog is floating in the cold of the cosmos at the moment. Hardly anyone reads it now (with good reason, no doubt.) And it really doesn’t matter because I’ve always said that the purpose of the blog is to let off steam and steam doesn’t have to go anywhere in particular, just as long as it moves away and leaves an empty vessel behind.

*  *  *

They’ve all gone, you know: the old readers, the Lady B, the priestess, and the rest. My daughter seems disinclined to communicate with me at the moment and I talk to my ex by phone once a week. That’s about it, apart from the invaders of my space who are not entirely welcome there. And writing stuff like this is probably the reason why, but what should I write about when the view from the window is just one distant star after another?

*  *  *

I find it a little mysterious that the news from Ukraine has suddenly disappeared from the BBC online news pages, and instead we’re being regaled with the complexities of the Northern Ireland protocol. I suppose it’s all to do with proper priorities in the world of aliens back on the planet where I used to live.

*  *  *

Isn’t it odd how you can hear a piece of music hundreds of times, and then one day you hear a bit of some melody or bass line you’ve never heard before? Getting used to singing Benson, Arizona in my sleep.

Discovering Virginia.

(I hope nobody from Virginia reads this post and expects a travelogue. Sorry to disappoint.)

I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog that I cannot live entirely in the ‘now’ for its own sake. My thoughts and moods are almost wholly dominated by future prospects, and my personal ‘now’ almost wholly coloured by them. So read what Virginia Woolf says about a six-year-old boy, a character in To the Lighthouse who is based, I believe, on her own little brother (and maybe, to some extent, on herself):

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn of the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests…

I gather that Virginia Woolf is lauded by some for her creativity, while derided by others for her self-indulgence. I wonder whether I might come to understand her, and even sympathise with her troubles, by reading one of her books.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Would it be worth mentioning that today brought another end-of-my-tether trouble to keep the trend of troubled times going? OK, move on then.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is an old Irish rebel song. I liked it a lot when I was a teenager much taken by the plentiful canon of such songs, and I even included it in my own repertoire when the gang and I went camping on the banks of some river in rural Wales. It was a bit sad, but I liked it for the sense of place it engendered.

It was quite windy when I went for my walk this morning, and several fields in Church Lane have been sown with barley this year instead of the usual wheat. The crop has grown well and the lightweight fronds, or beards, that grow upwards from the top of the plant are already well formed, but the seed heads are yet to develop. This makes the top of the plant very light so they move easily in the breeze while the stems remain relatively still and upright. The effect of all this is to turn the fields into so many inland seas with gentle, pale green waves constantly rising and falling as the wind moves across them. I find that quite mesmerising.

But on the west side of the Shire a different farmer has sown his fields with an oilseed crop topped with golden yellow flowers, and today I was downwind of them and discovered for the first time that they have a scent. A city dweller once asked me why on earth I would want to live ‘this far out.’ Well, I think the reason should now be obvious.

On Stories and Scents.

I just read another of my old stories (blogger stats tells me that somebody in America read a lot of them today.) I always have mixed feelings when I read things I wrote between eleven and twenty years ago. On the one hand I’m pleased to discover that I wrote reasonably well for a novice, but I also find that they need a little editing here and there. It can be a naïve piece of sentence construction, or a lack of balance in the arrangement of clauses, or a staccato style that makes it less comfortable to read than it should be. And I wouldn’t use punctuation now as I did back then.

So should I edit them? Hardly, since I don’t see there would be any point. Nobody is going to offer to publish an anthology now, and if they should get ‘discovered’ after I’m dead, the discoverer can do the editing. I doubt I would care very much. Caring for a reputation is something I feel is only pertinent to the physical manifestation of a life, and the physical manifestation will have ceased to exist.

*  *  *

Tonight brought another bout of unaccountable nausea and light-headedness. And I’m still smelling things that have no right to be there. I gather it’s officially called phantosmia, and can have various causes ranging from temporary stress to a ticket for a box seat in the knackers’ yard. This morning it was fried bacon which has had no place in my house for twenty five years. I ignored it, just as I ignore the frequent smell of jasmine. What else is there to do, and why do I never smell my two favourite scents – frankincense and sandalwood? There’s the mystery. I’m happy to say, however, that the sickly stench of pheasant crap on the bird tables has a perfectly rational explanation.

Going Under.

There’s something rotten in the state of JJ’s world. For nearly two weeks now I’ve been getting difficulties thrust upon me on an almost daily basis, and sometimes multiple times a day. They’ve been caused either by inept individuals, faulty goods, flaws in administrative or technical systems, or an unholy alliance of two or more of the above. My mind is threatening to slip out of gear, stretched to near-breaking point by the constant question: why do I have to keep fighting nearly every day for things I shouldn’t have to fight for?

So what’s going on here? Is there something in the air? Are the planets out of propitious alignment? Am I (as has been suggested) somehow inviting this mayhem into my orbit? Or is this just the way things are in the developed world these days? I wish I knew because I’ve been losing my hair for quite a few years now and I swear that if this continues much longer there won’t be any of it left by the next full moon.

*  *  *

But I did receive my copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the mail today. I hope it’s as good as it’s supposed to be or I might be following dear Ginny into the river. (From what I’ve read of her life and attitudes, it seems she regarded suicide as a noble act. Thankfully, I don’t.)

A Review Before Reading.

I’ve decided that I want to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun. (I saw it in Sainsbury’s today priced at a very modest £4.) I just looked it up on Wiki and read one of the reviews published in the Guardian newspaper. I appreciated the following small snippet:

‘…it enacts the way we learn how to love. Klara and the Sun is wise like a child who decides, just for a little while, to love their doll. “What can children know about genuine love?” Klara asks. The answer, of course, is everything.’

Maybe this answers one of my lifelong questions.

Night and Day.

Tonight I had a yen to write myself as a character in a new short story. The words began to flow in my mind and they were good words, full of lyrical expression while telling the plain truth with all its downbeat connotations.

I decided against it because it seemed unforgivably self-indulgent and I felt it would be viewed by all as merely the sad ramblings of a sad old mind. And so I read some ancient correspondence with the woman who was the subject of my story The Seeing of Sheona McCormack. And then I read the story itself and was disturbed by how much editing it needed. And then I listened to Enya’s Caribbean Blue because it reminded me of how Sheona had provided me with probably the strangest night of my life. Hey ho…

Today was another woeful one. The trend continues. And tomorrow is a day to be dreaded, which is leading me to block any thoughts regarding what the following days might bring. I have no confidence, you see, in the likelihood of there being any following days. This is becoming a common condition.

It was very wet in Shire and town alike today. No dogs, horses or donkeys came forth to greet me, nor any people for that matter. Although two middle aged women did irritate me with their unwonted and unwelcome closeness at the checkout in Sainsbury’s.

And now I realise that I found a way to give vent to the sad ramblings of a sad old mind after all. I think I might be a genius.

Contrast Joined in Quality.

I was listening earlier to one of my favourite Frank Sinatra songs: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. I’ve been a fan of Sinatra for a long time, and also of his contemporary, Nat ‘King’ Cole. My appreciation of them is purely musical, but it strikes me as interesting that, notwithstanding their relative and considerable merits as singers, much of Cole’s popularity derived from his having been a loving and lovely person. Sinatra, on the other hand, owed at least some of his popularity to the fact of having been a lovable rogue.

On Books that Suit.

The kind of books which most attract me tend to be those at the more rarefied end of what is usually referred to as literary fiction (as opposed to speculative fiction.) By ‘more rarefied’ I mean those in which the plot is of only passing interest, being largely a framework on which to hang the more important aspect of the novel – an examination of how humans relate to one another and to life itself.

People have occasionally asked me ‘what are you reading?’ and when I’ve told them the title, they almost invariably follow it up with ‘what’s it about?’ What they usually want me to give them is a brief outline of the plot so as to know whether they would find it engaging, but if the plot is of only passing interest I feel there would be little point in telling them. In many cases I feel inclined to say ‘you wouldn’t understand’, but that would be unconscionably arrogant and dismissive, and so an inner struggle ensues. I have to make a rapid assessment of whether the person really wants to know what the book is really about. If my assessment is in the negative, I have to come up with an answer which is polite but perfunctory and hope that no offence has been given. It isn’t always easy.

And then there’s the other side of the issue. Someone to whom I once felt reasonably close gave me a celebrated novel as a Christmas present. She apparently thought that because it was one of her favourite works, I would be greatly taken with it, too. But she and I, though close on a surface personal level, had very different natures. She was highly pragmatic in both temperament and outlook, whereas I’m more inclined to search for the workings of the inner being.

I found the book readable, but only just. It was all plot, you see. There was nothing in the way of rich or idiosyncratic writing style, hardly any evocation of a sense of place, few subtle and strange nuances of character, and little attempt at deep examination of the more distant aspects of mind. I finished the book mostly out of a sense of duty, and it was fortunate that she never asked me what I thought of it.

(And I’ve just remembered Mrs Thatcher’s infamous dictum: ‘There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t.’ Now, if only she’d said ‘There is no such thing as universal fiction because there is no such thing as the universal being. There are books that suit and books that don’t’, I might have thought her worth listening to for once.)

A Note on Me and Mortality.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that intimations of mortality have taken root in my consciousness ever since the operation to remove a cancerous kidney four years ago. The notion sits there now like a permanent hum which I’m sometimes aware of and sometimes not, but never a day goes by when it remains entirely unheard.

Some might think this a morbid preoccupation, but mostly it isn’t. When life has been casting stress-inducing circumstances at me over a protracted period – as it has for the past eight days – and as the irritation of health issues grows ever more inflated, the notion that there is only so much longer to go is actually quite comforting.

I used to face stress with the presumption that one day the clouds would clear and life would get better again, but I’ve reached the stage at which such a presumption is hardly practicable. That being the case, intimations of mortality have become the new optimism. There’s no death wish involved, just the pleasant prospect of rest when the time is right.

Ever rational, you see, even in the midst of madness.

A Chicken and Egg Issue.

Vis-à-vis the last post about my obsession with the number three, it occurs to me that the real problem isn’t so much the number itself but the fact that I have an unnatural habit of counting things. I’m trying to quit, you know, I really am.

‘Jeffrey,’ I say to myself, ‘for heaven’s sake stop counting things.’

‘Why should I?’ replies my OCD half indignantly.

‘Because if you don’t it’ll drive you mad.’

‘But I must be mad to keep on counting things, so what difference would it make?’

And I really don’t know what else to say on the matter.

On Being a Three Man.

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that three is my favourite number, but I suppose I should really confess (because a confessional facility is much to be desired when you have only the wall to talk to) that my interest in the number three has a distinctly obsessive-compulsive hue to it. I’m often conscious of trying to do everything in threes or multiples thereof (although sometimes I will aim, where more practicable, for sevens which probably proves that I’m not as mad as I think I am.) And this is why I was particularly interested in, and impressed by, the final paragraph of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.

He talks about several of the unusual obsessions (should I now consider whether some obsessions are, in fact, entirely usual?) to which humans are prey. The final and most poignant one concerns an obsession with the number three. I quote:

Well known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife ‘goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’

I quote this exactly as printed in the Penguin paperback version. I would have put three more items of punctuation in there, but who’s counting?

Women in Harmony.

I’m currently listening to an album by the Hebridean singer, Julie Fowlis. My favourite song includes a backing track of female voices in harmony, and I’ve noticed many times in my life that female voices raised in harmony cause a curious ripple of pleasure somewhere in a deep part of my mind. Whether it be Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, my favourite chorus from the Polovtsian Dances, or a trio of Scottish lassies singing in Gaelic, the effect is always the same. I find it uplifting and even empowering.

So why is this? Could it be because my mother was a reasonably accomplished soprano who sang around the house when I was a child? I doubt it because it takes more than one voice to produce harmony, and it’s the harmony which produces the effect. I really have no idea. Maybe I’ll find out when the day of the big debrief finally arrives.

On This World and Imagination.

What a woeful week it has been. Trouble after trouble after trouble. Today was the worst of all (and it’s still only Friday.) I won’t offer any details; if I have to whinge, best keep it brief for the sake of self-respect.

And so tonight, sitting alone in my beleaguered abode and feeling physical symptoms which seemed to echo the mental degradation invoked by a week of woes, I decided to read one of my old stories again.

It was one of the earliest and not one of the best, but doing so reminded me that they were flights of fantasy which turned into remarkably realistic journeys. Walking again the ghosts of old pathways led to a sense that I did go somewhere in this life after all. And then it struck me that maybe imagination gives access to the best of many realities, and is thus a consummation most devoutly to be wished.

A Muse on the Theme of Late.

I was reading an old post earlier, written seven years ago at the end of April, in which I referred to the arrival of the swallows and referenced one of Frederic Delius’s loveliest pieces called Late Swallows. The title refers to the end of summer when the last of the birds are gathering to leave our shores and head south again, but this year they appear to be late in a different sense: I haven’t seen any yet.

I’ve said often enough that of all the truly wild birds – as opposed to those which share our human spaces in gardens and manicured parks – the swallow is my favourite. Their grace, speed and power, allied to their habit of sometimes flying disturbingly close in their relentless hunt for food, makes them impossible to miss or ignore. Hence they are the most potent icon of summer and greatly valued as such (at least by me.)

I’ve also mentioned that Delius is one of my favourite composers, and I’m often struck by the fact that appreciation of his music is an unusually singular attribute. You either get Delius or you don’t; there appears to be no middle way. If you do, the way in which the music evokes a deep and subtle sense of life and the natural world is quite extraordinary and profoundly moving. The three words which spring most readily to mind in describing it are rich, wistful and melancholy.

And Delius himself was an interesting character whose later life was characterised by much suffering. I sometimes wonder how he managed to carry on through it all, but it seems he did because when he was blind and unable to write his music down, he employed an amanuensis to do the job for him. Maybe the fact embodies the ultimate cause for optimism: whatever the suffering, we can live in the certain knowledge that one day it will end.

It’s been an awful week so far, replete with frustration, disturbance, loss, and health anxiety, and it’s still only Wednesday. I imagine it’s all to do with lateness.

Pondering the Question of Now.

I had a phone call from the doctor’s receptionist today: ‘The doctor needs to talk to you about your latest urine sample. Can we arrange a time for him to give you a call?’

And so I begin to wonder what he needs to talk to me about. Doctors deal with health issues, don’t they, and so his need to talk to me is naturally a matter of concern. If it’s simply a matter of telling me that I have a persistent UTI and he’s prescribed a different antibiotic to be picked up, I don’t see the need of a conversation. The receptionist could have told me that, or he could have sent an email. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that there’s more to it.

Or is it reasonable? Here’s the problem:

I’ve often heard people say that we shouldn’t look ahead and imagine currently unknown scenarios. We should live entirely in the current moment and let the future unfold as it will. That’s a difficult one for me because, as I see it, every ‘now’ is both an ending and a beginning. ‘Now’ never stops moving, and I’m a congenitally impatient person. Consequently, my eyes have always been turned to the future and its possibilities, which I know is ultimately a futile exercise because the future is essentially unpredictable.

But I can’t help it and I doubt I will ever change. It seems to me to be a rational way of going through life, trapped as we are by the tyranny of temporal flow. I know it causes stress because it always has, but since ‘now’ is in a constant state of disappearing in our wake, I find it impossible to live in.

Things That Change and Things That Don't.

A good many of my attitudes and preferences have changed considerably as I’ve gone through life, but a small number of things have remained immutable.  

 

One of them is my fondness for bluebells, especially large gatherings of them. I remember being taken on a spring nature ramble from my primary school when I was a young boy, and being captivated by a carpet of bluebells in a local wood. It’s never left me, and I’ve been pleased to see that they’re running rampant in the wood at the top of my lane this year. They’re springing up on the roadside verges too, in places where I’ve never seen them before. And so, as much as we have good cause to worry about climate change, I’m wondering whether my friends the bluebells actually like it.

 

 

 

 Another comes back to my old obsession with twilight, that magical time when the diurnal pendulum swings through the change from the life of light to the mystery of darkness. I first felt it when I was fifteen and on a school field study trip to Swaledale in North Yorkshire. The first night there I sat on a low wall through a cool, damp, still twilight, looking over the river valley and having my first experience of something unseen and unheard, yet strongly felt. And so it was in my cool, damp, still garden this evening. The two sycamores, now heavy with leaf and standing as natural pillars to delineate the view, looked fixed in time while I stood in thrall to the experience.

But some things do change, like the view which slopes gently down to our own river valley on the west side of the Shire. What was once a vista of pale green provided by young barley shoots is now a sea of glorious gold, courtesy of the flowers topping some form of oilseed crop. On a practical note, we’re told that the crisis in Ukraine is causing a severe shortage of sunflower oil for cooking purposes, so maybe the change is meant to help address the problem. But the crop was sown last autumn, so is it mere coincidence or did somebody know that a crisis was in the offing? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?