A Little Thought About Russia.

I read a day or two ago that some member of Putin’s oligarchy (I forget his name) has moved his $300million superyacht to a safe haven somewhere in the Gulf States to avoid losing it to sanctions. Is that true or merely an example of western propaganda? I don’t know, but if it is true a thought occurs to me.

Didn’t the Russians once have a revolution to get rid of that sort of thing, or is the story of the Russian Revolution merely propaganda too? I think it reasonable to believe they did because that’s what the adjective ‘red’ is all about in the context of Russia. That being the case, I wonder whether Mr Putin and his mega-wealthy supporters are concerned that they might one day come to be regarded by the Russian proletariat as latter day Romanovs and be subjected to the same sort of remedy.

Maybe they're banking on the belief that perestroika has made two generations of the Russian proletariat so soft that they’ve become immune to the revolutionary imperative. And I expect the Russian security services are rather more powerful than the Cossacks were.

(I sometimes wonder about my thoughts, you know. How many are rational, how many intuitive, and how many simply expressions of wish fulfilment.)  

Virginia's Voice and Bits.

I listened to Virginia Woolf’s voice tonight. There’s an audio track of her talking on the BBC in 1937, accessible from Wiki. It sounds odd to a modern ear, and yet not wholly unfamiliar. It’s how I would expect somebody from the English middle class to talk in the early part of the 20^th century. I tried to put it into a modern context, but all I could manage was that it was a sort of cross between Lady Diana and Margaret Thatcher. It wasn’t a pleasant voice.

*  *  *

I had to do a little remedial work in the garden tonight because of a heavy shower we had this afternoon, and noticed that nettle stings feel sharper when they’re wet. Maybe it’s because they’re cold.

*  *  *

The atmosphere on this little piece of ground where I live has come to feel uncomfortably toxic since I had the argument with the neighbours on Saturday. I gather there are people who don’t feel that sort of thing.

Pondering Pointlessly.

There were no interesting people in Ashbourne today. Even Gimli and his trusty wooden staff were conspicuous by their absence. I did see one person I knew, though: a rich neighbour who lives in a big house nearby. She was walking briskly ahead of me and I didn’t try to catch up with her because I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, not unless it’s somebody I find really interesting (and there weren’t any of those in Ashbourne today.)

When I was walking back to the car I saw her husband coming towards me. I said hello and mentioned that I’d just seen his wife going that way. ‘Oh good,’ he said, ‘because I’m going this way. As long as we’re going in different directions, that’s fine.’

It caused me to wonder yet again about that curious arrangement called marriage. You see, it seems to me that if marriage is to have any value, it must be like going through a door which only unlocks from the outside and then shutting it behind you. I know it’s possible to get divorced, and I know that divorce is easy these days, but since that’s the case I wonder whether there’s any point in getting married in the first place. Not that I would know, of course.

*  *  *

And then I became curious to know what condemned people dream about during their last sleep before execution.

*  *  *

And then I became curious to know whether Virginia Woolf knew when she took her final repose that she was going to commit suicide the next day.

*  *  *

So many imponderables to ponder while the world around us falls slowly apart.

Mixed Fortunes and the Mole Coundrum.

So what denizen of the nether world out there was responsible for today’s maddening frustration? British Telecom. Say no more.

But there was one little bright spot today. The malfunction on my blog, the resolution to which was going to require me to get a degree in computing, put itself right without my stir. I assume somebody on Mount Olympus must have been to the dentist and had his or her toothache dealt with. (I do hope the lady Medeea hasn’t died and been promoted to the God realm. I’ve got an appointment booked with her in October.) Oh, and I managed to find Settings in my new Norton. It didn’t help much.

*  *  *

So now let me report another of this year’s firsts. I saw my first mole today. (Isn’t it odd that somebody can spend many years of their life living in the countryside, occasionally been caused annoyance by molehills, without ever seeing a mole?) It was lying dead by the side of the road near my gate. And therein lies another mystery.

What caused it to die? It wasn’t squashed or mauled, so that more or less rules out a car or a cat, and a predator would have eaten it. And what makes the circumstance even odder is the fact that when I saw it on my way out for a walk it was facing one way, but when I came back it was facing the opposite way. All of which brooks the question yet again: is some agent of the universe trying to tell me something? If so, I wish they’d be more explicit.

Failures and Another Little Mystery.

He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch, not reading or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

That’s a line from Ms Woolf. It’s the kind of thing I feed on. The phrase ‘gorged with existence’ represents the kind of skill I always tried to cultivate, but never quite managed.

*  *  *

I had a dream a couple of nights ago in which the erstwhile priestess came to visit me, and then tagged me along on her travels in which she talked to people but always at a distance from me. She spent the whole dream ignoring me while I watched her go about her business. The psychological root of this dream is probably patently obvious, but I can’t quite see through the mist to identify it. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter.

*  *  *

I’m getting a regular and mysterious visitor to my blog lately who uses Chrome browser with Windows. The mystery component is the fact that his or her geographical location is never revealed by Blogger stats. All other visitors are shown as coming from a particular country or some general location such as ‘Asia/Pacific region’ or ‘EU’, but this one is only ever shown as ‘other.’ I resist the temptation to imagine that it’s either an alien or some mischievous spirit.

No Solutions, No Respite.

Another day full of frustrations fit to make my brain implode. They were mostly to do with the computer this time, such as:

My blog isn’t functioning properly at the moment, so I took my problem to the Blogger forum. It turns out that meddling techies at Firefox are to blame, and I was pointed to a site which told me how to override the meddling. Well now, my predilections are largely in fields such as history, the arts, music, philosophy and writing. Tech junky I’m not, and so the page to which I was directed might as well have been written in mandarin for all the sense it made to me. It seems I have two options: put up with the problem or give up blogging. For now, I’ll try soldiering on.

Then there was the business of my new Norton antivirus program which I was forced to have by my ISP because that’s where I get my antivirus from (it’s half price that way, but you have to have the program of their choice because that’s who they have a contract with.) Problems have been legion, but let’s just mention the latest. I wanted to go to settings, so I clicked ‘settings’ and settings was what I expected to get because settings was what I got with my good old simple-and-clear-as-a-bell McAfee program. I didn’t. What I got was page after page of ‘take a look at this’, ‘see what we’ve got for you here’, ‘this is really good’, ‘aren’t we wonderful and aren’t you lucky?’, and so on and so forth. The final page had a button which said ‘done.’ There was no other option, so ‘done’ was what I pressed. No settings.

Then there was my latest phone conversation with my ISP over the very bad but intermittent issues with my internet connection …

…but enough.

Do you think it would help if I got very drunk? I don’t.

Mystery and Coincidence.

I made a post back in 2011 about a curious incident in which my mobile phone took it upon itself to call my landline number. Both phones were on my office desk at the time, while I was in another room. Nobody has ever been able to explain to me how that can happen.

Today I was taking a call on my landline phone when I heard a man’s voice leaving a message on my mobile. I glanced at the screen and it showed an incoming call from ‘Doc.’ That’s the number for my doctor’s surgery, so when the landline call finished I checked my mobile voicemails. Nothing since April. I called the surgery to enquire whether a doctor was trying to get in touch with me and was told there was no record of such a call on their system.

And I just noticed an interesting coincidence. I have two medical appointments booked in July, one on the 4^th and one on the 14^th. 4^th July is a celebration in America commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, effectively starting the American Revolution. 14^th July is a celebration in France of the storming of the Bastille, which is seen as the start of the French Revolution.

Is somebody out there in the ether trying to tell me something, and does my mobile phone know something I don’t?

On Virginia's Apparent X-Ray Vision.

Since I have nothing else to post about tonight, I feel I ought to mention what I feel to be a startling revelation in the matter of Virginia Woolf’s writing.

I’m coming quite close to the end of To the Lighthouse now and a trip to the eponymous structure is finally happening. Mr Ramsay is sitting in the boat being his usual demanding, controlling, yet essentially insecure self. Sitting in the bow are his two youngest children, Cam and James, who are now teenagers.

We hear the flow of thoughts in the minds of all three at different points, just as earlier we heard the flow of thoughts in Lily Briscoe’s mind, and before that the flow of thoughts in Mrs Ramsay’s mind and the minds of several relatively minor characters. And what’s particularly interesting is that a good many of these thoughts represent the kind of odd things which go through people’s minds but which they never externalise into speech. And they all seem perfectly credible to me, which is what makes the book so insightful.

I am left, therefore, to consider the conclusion that Virginia Woolf must have had a most remarkable faculty. She must have had some sort of preternatural ability to pick up not only what people said and what they revealed with the various aspects of body language, but also what was going on in the privacy of their minds. This is both impressive and a little scary in equal measure, and even allowing for the fact that the Ramsay’s and their entourage were based closely on Woolf’s own family and friends, it’s a most extraordinary skill.

Memory Mayhem.

I sometimes suffer strange lapses of memory, you know. My daughter’s birthday is approaching, but a few days ago I couldn’t remember what date it was. Was it 21^st or 22^nd July? They both seemed equally correct and I couldn’t decide which to go for. Today I knew it was 22^nd and couldn’t understand how I had ever doubted it.

I also recall – it must have been around ten years ago – I had to go somewhere on Christmas Day and knew that I would need to get cash from an ATM. I woke up that morning with the disturbing realisation that I couldn’t remember my PIN. I thought and thought, and ran several permutations around in my head, but the final solution remained doggedly out of reach. As soon as I reached the ATM it came back as though it had never been away.

Maybe everybody has this problem occasionally. Must remember to ask somebody the next time there’s somebody to ask. (I expect I’ll forget.)

The Issues Issue

This week has been another difficult one. Issues, issues, issues, every day without exception. And all I find when I step out of my inner world and into the one out there to deal with them is ineptitude, injustice and lack of consideration. Today’s issue was a superheated altercation with the neighbours, the details of which would be too tedious to relate.

(Interestingly, I kept waking up over the last couple of hours before rising this morning, certain that something bad was in the offing. When I looked out of the window I saw what it was.)

At this point I should take the post in the direction of a salient but general direction because that’s what blogs of this sort are supposed to do. All I’ve done so far is let off steam, and why should that be of interest to anybody but me? But I’m growing very tired of it all because it’s been going on for a long time, so I can’t be bothered.

Except, perhaps, to mention that I have a problem which I’m sure is not exclusive to me. I get angry easily, and when I get angry I become aggressive, and when I become aggressive my mind doesn’t work as coherently as it does when I’m not angry. When that happens I don’t argue my points as coolly and rationally as I should, and that only leads to frustration later when the air has cooled a little. Seems like something else I need to take over into my next life.

(Yes, I know there’s advice available on anger management, but I think I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. And I couldn’t afford it, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.)

Off to have an extended session with To the Lighthouse now. Maybe that will cool the air a little. The fascinating Mrs Ramsay has died and the main female lead is now the younger Lily Briscoe. She’s described as having ‘a small, crumpled face and Chinese eyes.’ Sounds like my kind of woman.

Selective Memory.

I had a dream last night in which an attractive young woman asked me to go holiday with her. When we got there she suddenly decided that I wasn’t worth knowing and dropped me. That wasn’t nice, but it was familiar. And then I found myself sitting in an armchair opposite the Queen discussing random matters. When I woke up I tried to remember what those matters had been, but they’d all been swallowed up in the mists of Morpheus.

*  *  *

Tonight’s twilight was cool with a heavy cloud cover and a breeze persuading the tree branches to wave gently and whisper in a language unfamiliar to me, while all the rest was silence. The experience was both pleasant and mysterious, as though I were being reminded of an old memory. I had no idea what it was.

Asda and the Bag Issue.

I went into the Asda store in Uttoxeter this morning to pick up a couple of things I’d forgotten to get in Sainsbury’s on Wednesday. I took them to a self service till and pressed ‘Start.’

Now, ever since the government brought in a charge for plastic bags a few years ago (in a perfectly laudable attempt to reduce plastic waste), the self service screens everywhere have a page which asks how many bags you’re buying. I always use my own bags and so I pressed ‘None.’ Usually that’s the end of the bag issue, but not in Asda.

The computer in the Asda till doesn’t take your word for it; it tells you to ‘place your bag in the bagging area.’ I had a mental picture of its eyes narrowing with suspicion, but managed to ride that one and dutifully placed my backpack in the bagging area as instructed. I assumed that I would now be allowed to pay for the three items I was buying. (Any reasonable person would think so, wouldn’t they?) But the computer still wasn’t convinced and I was told to ‘wait while your bag is validated.’ One of the store lackeys eventually came to validate my bag, and I’m sorry to say that I was a little short with her. I know I shouldn’t have been; I know I should have apologised because it wasn’t her fault, but I was a bit miffed that a bloody computer playing nanny while presumably being attired in the uniform of a Vogon space ship captain should have the audacity to treat me this way. (Why it didn’t intone ‘resistance is useless’ I really can’t imagine.)

But this is how things are now in the UK. This is yet another example of the risk-avoidance mania currently creeping into so many aspects of life, in this case the risk that some dastardly ne’er-do-well might try to evade the law by sneaking off with a 5p carrier bag. Abject silliness is becoming a major infestation and I’m really not amused.

Today's Twilight Epiphany.

I want to make a blog post but don’t know how to do it. The words are the problem; for once I can’t find the right ones to express something profound because it seems to be inexpressible. The basics, however, go like this:

I was regarding one of my favourite plants this evening – a Japanese maple which I planted myself and have long regarded as queen of the garden. I looked at the shape of the leaves which I find particularly attractive, I looked at the variegated colours of red and green contained therein, and I felt suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the immeasurable richness of the natural world – the infinite variation in the size and shape of trees, and the size and shape of the leaves which grow on them, and the size, shape and colour of the flowers which grace the growing things. And that’s only the start of it. This can be extended to the animals and the birds and the insects and the fish, and every other living creature down to the slimy things which crawl with legs upon a slimy sea.

It went further into a sense of privilege that my consciousness, be it a function of my brain or something merely using it as a vehicle, should have the opportunity to witness it all. It even made me think about God and His Works, but the attitude held firm that if there is a God, It is infinitely greater, deeper, more all-encompassing than the feeble concept handed to us by the Judaic religious tradition. And let’s leave the notion of God there because I simply don’t know, as I’m fairly sure nobody does.

What did occur to me later, however, was that if I’d led a different life, a life bound up with the concept of success which the western world expects us to adopt, a life in which I climbed the property ladder and surrounded myself with all the latest accoutrements, a life in which I changed my car for the newest version of some prestigious marque every two years, a life in which I basked on sunlit beaches in foreign parts surrounded by all the best expressions of material advancement which the world of human endeavour has laid before us, a life in which I never went short of anything which money could buy, tonight’s epiphany would probably never have happened.

So thanks to whoever or whatever it might be that I was granted the fortune of remaining a nondescript peasant with a mind to see what matters. Or does it? Take it from there if you want to, but I’m content for the time being with my version.

A Midsummer Night's Note.

Today was as good a Midsummer’s Day as anyone could have dreamed of or prayed for, especially late in the day when I went for an uncharacteristic evening walk. There was a purpose behind it: I wanted to take an apple and a carrot to a dear little white pony who lives in a very small paddock at the far end of Mill Lane. It’s nearly a week since I last took her such a treat and I thought it was about time I did.

I’d almost forgotten what a delight it is to walk along an English country lane on a warm, sunny, still evening in June. I’m sure it’s true that country lanes all over Europe are just as delightful in such circumstances, and yet I have heard even foreigners express the view that there is something uniquely rich, peaceful and serene about the lanes and landscapes of middle England. I remembered while I was walking that the Battle of Britain began in June 1940, and it seemed almost painfully poignant that such a cacophony of noise, pain, fear and death should have been played out daily above the stage of rural England in this most life-affirming of months.

None of that this evening, though. The hedgerows are looking a little ragged now as the different species of shrub grow at different rates, but their most notable feature is the colour contained within them – the creamy elder blossom, the pinks of dog rose and honeysuckle, the purple of wild sweet peas, the sharp white umbrellas topping the hogweed plants contrasting with the little blue periwinkles beneath their canopies. And the brambles have started to bloom in profusion now, carrying the promise of countless sweet and succulent blackberries in August.

And so tonight I lit my customary Midsummer fire, partly in honour of the goddess Aine’s feast day (must be my Irish heritage), partly to wish the other-worldly denizens of our earthly realm a good celebration, and partly to thank the sun for being there and to request an unwavering return. Fanciful I may be, but it’s better than what the human race usually serves up. And if Titania should grace me with her presence, I hope the meeting will not go ill.

(And even if I don’t encounter the redoubtable T, at least I had the pleasure of being smiled and waved at by the Lady B’s dear mama. I swear she looks younger every time I see her, and the garden around her cottage is as delightful as ever.)

Like Daughter Like Dad and Other Bits.

I’m not in the best of moods at the moment because I’m having big problems with my internet connection, and my internet connection is of paramount importance to me. I’m also having big problems with the bookkeeping work I do for a friend, which is causing a certain amount of anxiety. And then there’s the matter of the odd correspondence from the hospital which suggests they might know something unpalatable but aren’t telling me yet.

Still, I did receive a lovely and most unexpected Fathers Day card from my daughter this morning. I’m not sure whether it’s the first time she’s ever sent me one. She might have sent one or two when she was very young, but by the time she reached her mid-late teens she’d decided that greetings cards were a waste of time and money and only existed to fill the already burgeoning maws of the corporate world. I wonder where she got that idea from.

*  *  *

I’m becoming more aware of the fact that as a person falls in thrall to the loner gene and develops their reclusive tendency, the world in which they live grows smaller and more private. It gets to a point where the outside world seems increasingly toxic, and so any invasion by the denizens of that world, or any intrusion by its systems, control mechanisms or vested interests becomes maddeningly unwelcome. Such a process has a tendency to encourage depression and anxiety, so this is a lesson I could do with taking with me just in case there really is a next life.

Vicar Mind.

Mel came over today and we took the longer of the two walks to the mediaeval church. She likes our local church and wants to take photographs of it at the four quarters of the year. (Correction: she wants me to take the photographs.)

So anyway, there’s a notice on the gate which says: The church is open so you may have a quiet place in which to contemplate the Ukraine crisis. Mel asked ‘Why would I need a quiet place? And why only the Ukraine crisis?’ Quite; that’s vicars for you.

So then we went and sat on a bench by the church door and were engaged in conversation when a middle aged woman came out and regarded us with evident curiosity. I assume she was the vicar because she said ‘hello’ with an authoritative air which suggested the presumption that she had the right to question unfamiliar interlopers invading her hallowed ground. I said ‘hello’ back and then she asked the strangest question: She waved her arm in the general direction of the gravestones and asked ‘Do you have people in here?’ I expect my expression was quizzical when I replied ‘No.’ As I said: that’s vicars for you.

We were rescued from her attention by the arrival of two forty-somethings and two little girls, each with a beagle on a lead. The grown ups were conducted into the body of the church while the little girls remained outside with the dogs which they didn’t introduce to me. That was today’s only disappointment.

Virginia's Words.

I’m about two thirds of the way through To the Lighthouse now, and I decided tonight that it’s more of a writer’s book than a reader’s, given over as it is to the almost primal flow of words for their own sake, mostly making perfect sense but not always unless you concentrate very, very hard. This is not a complaint because for the past thirty years or so I’ve been more attracted to the flow of words than the flow of plot.

And then I moved on to thinking that I generally prefer good female writers to good male ones. I’ve found that they’re more inclined to look inwards rather than outwards, to reveal impressions with perfectly honed lyrical expression, to see perception as the guiding light of living, and to deal more in terms of consideration than certainty.

I suppose my fondness for such virtues stems from the fact that they echo my own aspirations in the matter of living. Then again, when I consider how I wrote my own fiction it seems I wrote like a man, so maybe it’s a matter of seeking balance. Occasionally I think that I should really be happily married like Virginia’s Mr Ramsey, and what a shame it is that I never came close to being suited to such a state.

On Walking Alone.

I read this morning that Covid infections have increased by 40% in Britain in the last week, and the rise is being ascribed to the multitude of Queen’s Jubilee celebrations which took place over last weekend. I did wonder at the time whether the events were a bit premature because Covid was already showing signs of increasing, but I thought no more about it because I don’t take part in group activities. So today I asked myself why so many people do.

I suppose it’s simply an expression of the herd mentality. The human animal does naturally aspire to the process of belonging to communities, clubs and shared interest groups, no doubt because it provides a ready-made support mechanism when trouble comes calling or the weight of numbers helps to achieve a desired result.  And that’s fine; I’m not criticising it as far as it goes. The fact that I don’t personally subscribe to the herd mentality, and therefore enjoy no ready-made support mechanism, is my choice.

Interestingly, though, the one group activity I did engage with at one time was playing for sports teams. It was common at half time for the captain to give a pep talk, and I could see that the other players were sometimes inspired by it. I could never understand why because I didn’t see why one person’s rambling – however well meant and well constructed – should have any influence on my own aims and efforts. Allowing myself to be emotionally influenced by such a thing seemed unforgivably weak minded, and therein lies the clue to a major danger inherent in the herd mentality. Sometimes it steps over the mark between light and dark and becomes the mob mentality.

Probably the most obvious example was what happened in Germany in the 1930s when decent, upright, civilised people were inspired by Hitler’s rhetoric to behave abysmally towards innocent Jews. And that isn’t an indictment of Germans. It can happen anywhere, and examples can be seen in the news nearly every week and from all parts of the globe, usually engendered these days by hard line religious leaders or scurrilous rumours circulating on social media. The herd mentality switches track and produces a ravening mob insanely bent on satiating their blood lust, and the effect can be terrifying.

So how do we stop the herd becoming a mob? I don’t suppose we can because they’re both endemic in the human condition. People in the developed world are prone to imagining that such things only happen far away. ‘It couldn’t happen here,’ they say. Couldn’t it? What about the Capitol riots? Seems to me that we’re stuck with it until and unless human evolution takes us beyond it. It won’t happen in my lifetime so I’ll continue to be out of step and stay well away from the herd.

On Being Creeped as a Kid.

The part of To the Lighthouse which I’m currently reading reminds me of Mrs MacMurdo’s bed and breakfast establishment in which we stayed for four consecutive years during our holidays to Paignton in Devon.

I was a child then, of course, and children were sent to bed early in those days. My bedroom was at the back of the house, and one night, while my parents and Mrs MacMurdo were still downstairs, I heard the rocking chair in the front bedroom creaking rhythmically. The front bedroom was the one occupied by my parents.

The following day my mother told me that our little dog (a black miniature Pomeranian which always came on holiday with us and was allowed to sleep in my parents’ room) jumped onto the bed and burrowed under the bed clothes, apparently in fear. I don’t remember whether I told my mother about the creaking rocking chair. I probably did because I could be a little thoughtless when I had something interesting to communicate.

On another occasion I heard a lion roar beneath my bedroom window. Having always had a serious fear of lions which I would now guess amounted to a neurosis (I wouldn’t even walk past a concrete one which stood impassively on the portico of a pub called the Red Lion close to where I lived), I went downstairs and told the assemblage of parents and Mrs MacMurdo: ‘There’s a lion in the back garden.’ ‘No, no, dear,’ said Mrs Mac, ‘don’t you worry about that. The sound is coming from the zoo across the fields. It does that when the wind is blowing in this direction.’

I didn’t believe her, of course. That lion was definitely in the back garden, and the only comfort I could take when I was ordered back to bed was that it probably couldn’t get into the house. I made sure the bedroom window and door were securely shut and went to sleep eventually.

On Bats, Accents, and the Angevin Influence.

It’s good to report that tonight’s twilight was the warmest of the year so far and the bats were in fine form, flying around the house like Jeff Juke with a turbocharger between his legs.

Here I must point out that Jeff Juke was the first sporting superhero I remember being mentioned when I was a little boy, and it was a long time before I discovered that his real name wasn’t Jeff Juke at all, but Geoff Duke. The error came about firstly because I didn’t know that there was a different – and commoner at that time – spelling of Jeff, and secondly because the local accent where I grew up did not recognise the letter ‘D’ when followed by one of those funny ‘U’s we have in English. You know, the ones that start with a hidden ‘y’ sound which is missing from words like dumb and dunderhead but present in duke and duel. (I expect it has an arcane name which people like me never learn because we’re not clever enough.) So where I came from, insulting a posh person was likely to get you challenged to a jewel, if you see what I mean. Geoff Duke, by the way, was a champion motorbike racer.

And I do realise that all this is very boring, which is why I haven’t rambled on about the fact that the German name Gottfried became Geoffroi in France and Godfrey in England, so Geoffrey is an Anglicization of a French name. I’m glad my brother never discovered that fact because he didn’t realise that the 100 Years War was over and considered the building of the Channel Tunnel a Very Bad Idea. He was eleven years older than me and would probably have deposited my little baby body in the nearest canal as soon as our mother told him what my name was.

What is perhaps a little less boring is the fact that I was perusing the display of newspapers in Sainsbury’s yesterday when a woman walked up alongside and selected a Daily Mail. That was scary.

But I’ll tell you what I find most interesting of all. This post was going to be about something completely different, but by the time I’d finished typing the above I’d forgotten what it was.

Depressingly Short Rhapsody in D

I just watched a YouTube video which included footage of dolphins dancing. Seeing dolphins dancing in the deep blue sea was quite delightful, and tomorrow I might find something interesting to say as long as I’m not as depressed as I was today.

On Being an Inattentive Writer.

I really must stop writing blog posts in the wee small hours of the morning when the first of the nightly scotches is taking effect and I’ve just been taken to pre-dynastic Egypt by Jahanna James (she makes YouTube videos about ancient technologies.)

The problem with doing so becomes manifest the following day when my brain is beginning to get functional again and I decide to proofread the previous night’s ramblings. I find typos, and misspelled words, and badly constructed sentences. Worst of all, I find words missing altogether, which renders the sentence from which they’re absent entirely incomprehensible. And by that time, the few people who read this blog will already have read the post and be asking themselves why I bother to write if I’m such a bad writer.

So if your scalp is bleeding from having been scratched too much while doing a Gallic shrug and asking ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ please accept my apologies.

Ladies of Middle Earth.

It’s odd how days have themes. On Saturday it was water. On Saturday I had a shower, washed the car, washed the dishes, did the week’s laundry, watered the house plants, watered the garden. All water.

Tonight it’s the three female leads from Lord of the Rings. I’ve encountered them by accident several times today. (That’s Eowyn, Arwen and Galadriel, just in case anybody isn’t sure.) So I got to thinking about them.

First of all I have to admit that my experience is limited to the Peter Jackson movies which I’ve seen several times, including the very long extended version. I’ve never read the books so my knowledge of them is filtered through actors’ performances, but they’re vivid enough to be memorable.

 

 

Eowyn is the pretty, flaxen-haired Saxon maiden. Earthy, worldly, determined, courageous. Arwen is the intuitive, sensitive, highly emotional elfin beauty. Galadriel is the goddess made manifest, radiant in appearance and possessed of great knowledge and wisdom. All delectable and desirable. So how would a gentleman of discernment choose between them if he were privileged enough to have the opportunity?

Simple, really. Galadriel is the only one with a dark side. That’s what gives her the edge.

(Then again, given that I’m in thrall to the three women motif, I’d want all of them. Sweet dreams are made of this. And if you think this is a bit over the top, do bear in mind that I have to find things to make blog posts about.)

Bedtime.

Been on a nostalgia trip tonight, aided and abetted by Enya’s album Caribbean Blue.

1995: A special year in so many ways. So many memories. Marijuana and time shifts. Night rides in shabby trains. Wind and rain and a rare sense of connection. Spring snow and cratered ice. Big gains and a major loss. Coincidences little short of astonishing. Emotions as high as the flag in July. A girl called Sue and a guy called Stefan.

And what are memories but faded photographs in fractured frames?

On Fate's Dirty Tricks.

When I was in sixteen and in high school I was part of the troupe which produced that year’s school play. It was an adaptation of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and I had two big parts in it (because some cowardly fat kid whose name I recall very well but won’t reveal out of a sense of decency) cried off a week before the performance. The two characters never appeared in the same scene so I got the job of taking over his role as well as my own. They were both major ones.

Come the big night and there was a scene in which I, as the King, was interrogating two supplicants, a boy and a girl. I asked a question and the girl (whose name I also recall, but decency must always prevail) was supposed to reply, but she didn’t because she’d forgotten her line (we had no prompt for some reason known only to the drama mistress.) There was a pregnant, fever-inducing silence; a falling feather would have clattered to the floor as the whole auditorium held its breath and squirmed with evident embarrassment. I felt it was up to me to save the day (because that’s what I do; it’s one of my most irritating and inconvenient habits.) I mentally scrolled down the script until I found a line of my own which would provide the necessary prompt to move the production on. It worked and I was very proud of myself.

And then somebody told me later that because I’d been the first to speak after what had seemed like an eternity of silence, they thought it was I who had forgotten my lines.

Move forward to the school orchestra playing on the occasion of the annual Speech Night. The music master (Ken Whieldon by name – lovely bloke and a true educationalist) had compiled a selection of American folk sings into a piece called Americana, which ended with a loud coda in which the whole orchestra blasted out the final big chord for several long seconds. But here’s the rub: the final four notes (you know, the classic ba-ba-ba-bom) was to be played only by me on my trombone.

It was a nerve-wracking prospect, I can tell you. Only four notes it might have been, but to be suddenly exposed as the soloist responsible for getting those notes right can make the mind tremble a little more than slightly. But I did it. Perfectly. Dear old Ken lowered his baton and cast a smile of congratulation my way, and the world was fine and dandy again.

And then somebody told me later that the audience thought I’d made a serious mistake because I’d carried on playing after the orchestra had finished.

The Fates really can be a nasty bunch of goblins when they’ve got it in for you, can’t they?

End of Week Notes.

It’s been noted on this blog that I’ve had a lot of firsts this year. Today it was seeing a male Great Spotted Woodpecker feeding his chick with bits of peanut from the peanut feeder. That might seem an experience of little consequence to most people, but not to me it isn’t. Thrills are so rare these days that small ones matter 

Our dear old National Health Service seems to be in a crisis of communication since the battering it took from Covid. I’ve had dealings with them twice this week and became very irritated by people either giving me inadequate information or not knowing what they should have known. The NHS is one of the biggest jewels in the crown of Britishness, but its admin sometimes doesn’t do it full justice.

I went to Uttoxeter today and didn’t see a single other person wearing a mask (I do because Covid is apparently on the rise again.) I went into one of the stores and found that people kept staring at me, and one woman was particularly prolific. Eventually she smiled… mysteriously. I didn’t reciprocate. My usual response to being stared at is to stare back if I’m in a combative mood, or ignore them if I’m not. However, there’s a video on YouTube which says that if a person stares at you, you should look at their feet. I've no idea why and I keep forgetting anyway.

I learned today that there are two different interpretations of the term ‘stream of consciousness’, depending on whether it’s used in a spiritual/psychological context or a literary one. If I could be bothered to explain I would, but I can’t.

And mention of the word ‘psychological’ reminds me that I’m still on the lookout for something academic and persuasive which explains my oddnesses. Last night I watched a YouTube documentary on the subject of Associative Personality Disorder. It was a bad match, so I’m still looking.

Inconspicuous Rambles.

I started to write a post tonight, but realised even before I’d finished the first sentence that it was unforgivably boring. So I deleted it.

The only thing of note which happened to me over the past twenty four hours was that I had my hair cut. I dislike having my hair cut because it makes my head look a funny shape and that’s disturbing. It occurs to me that somebody needs to invent a pill which stops your hair growing so you never need to have it cut, and then your head would never be a funny shape.

I did ruminate a little on the YouTube respondent who said of me: ‘This dude is a time traveler.’ (Note the American spelling. Word doesn’t like me typing it and insists on putting a second ‘l’ in. I have to keep slapping its hand and correcting its correction.)

So, it took me back to my childhood when I had a picture book with several illustrated stories in it. One was about a man wearing a Homburg hat who played the trumpet quietly on rain-drenched city streets in the middle of the night, and while he did so he wept. He was a time traveller, and the image has remained with me all my life.

Off to luxuriate in more of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose whilst eating a spinach and mayo sandwich now. Life is generally kinder at night than it is during the day.

Commendations.

Somebody stopped my way in The Hollow last weekend and asked me how I was. I said ‘I have seven health issues ranging from the uncomfortable and inconvenient to the potentially life-threatening. Otherwise…’ He replied ‘Oh. You look a picture of health.’ What else could I say?

And then I saw my daughter this week for the first time in three years. She also said ‘you look really well.’ I told her it was a false impression gained through the taking of walks and giving attention to the garden in the sunshine. It’s all to do with the face, you see. At the moment mine is tanned, which a nice contrast to how it looked after that terrible bladder spasm I experienced in hospital four years ago which kept me incarcerated therein for two days. One of the nurses pointed to the white pillow case and said ‘ten minutes ago your face was that colour.’ On that occasion the colour was an accurate guide to the way I was feeling, but it isn’t always thus.

And on a totally different tack, I received a response tonight to a comment I put on a YouTube track. It said ‘This dude is a time traveler.’ I’m tempted to suspect that we all are in a manner of speaking, but I chose to enjoy interpreting it as a compliment. It’s an INFJ thing.

Getting to the Lighthouse.

You know, I almost gave up reading To the Lighthouse after about the first ten pages. I found it such hard going because I’d never read anything like it before. The stream-of-consciousness writing style and the almost total lack of plot made the beginnings of the journey rocky and uncomfortable.

But gradually I got used to it and the rocks gave way to soft, warm sand, welcoming to the feet and a delight to walk upon. The characters revealed by their thoughts and mannerisms are wholly engaging in a way I hardly thought possible. At the moment they’re all taking dinner by candlelight and I have the most unusual sense of sitting off to one side, watching and smiling as this group of oddball people reveal their natures with their thoughts, their protestations, their concurrences, and their insecurities. And all revealed with more than a little subtle, quirky humour. Virginia Woolf now joins the Brontë sisters as the people I would most like to meet if I could go back in time.

And then I read a sentence which caught my step and arrested my progress for a second. It said: He was not ‘in love’ of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many. It took me back to a time when my life was made sunnier by the occasional presence of a certain important person. And it said what I tried to say then, using more words but achieving less clarity.

I’ve also come to realise that Mr Ramsey, with his unconventional ways, his tetchiness over seemingly trivial matters, his innocent fondness for the company of young women, and the sense that he stands a little off centre and aloof from the company, reminds me rather a lot of me.

Talking Trivia.

Following on from the previous post, I watched a video once in which an astrophysicist explained that if all the stars out there in the night sky were visible to us, the earth would never get fully dark because the light emitted or reflected by them would prevent it. The reason this doesn’t happen is because most of the suns and planets out there are too far away for their light to have reached us yet. And that fact caused me to presume that the early dinosaurs which they say lived between 245 and 66 million years ago would have seen fewer stars than we do.

Why on earth this mind, swilling pointlessly about in what passes for my brain, should concern itself with such matters remains a mystery.

Giving a Name to Nothing.

It interests me that we take what is effectively an abstract concept – in this case the space above us when we’re outside – and give it a name. We call it ‘the sky.’ And because we give it a name we perceive it as something that actually exists in some sort of material form. Omar Kayyam, for example, in his Rubaiyat refers to the night sky as ‘the bowl of night.’

And so we say ‘the sky is cloudy’ or ‘the sky is blue.’ And despite being in full knowledge of the reality involved, our brains go even further and perceive it as something two-dimensional. Whether the sky is cloudy or clear, whether the clouds are moving or still, whether the colour is blue, white, grey, or splashed with fire at sunset, we still perceive it as a backdrop, a two-dimensional phenomenon.

And that’s why I like seeing what I saw this evening. There were small patches of low, grey, wispy cloud moving northwards on the evening breeze, but above and beyond their level the predominant colour was blue, and the high, orange-tipped clouds were still. And such a view reveals what ‘the sky’ really is – a three-dimensional space, empty but for the few interlopers like dust and water vapour which nature chooses to hang in it. We all know this, but we so rarely get the chance to see it that way.

Oliver's Surprise.

It seems Oliver the undersized cock pheasant has more vim and vigour than I credited him with. You might remember that I was concerned that if he couldn’t make the four foot leap onto the bird table, he would be easy prey for prowling foxes.

I saw him again this evening. He was heading for the garden and I fully expected to do the feeding duty again, but he changed his mind and flew from the road into one of the big sycamore trees to roost instead. Much relief all round, and he knows where he can get food if he needs it.

(I assume cock pheasants do have minds. They’re not known for being particularly intelligent.)

Wondering About the Wages of Sin.

I find the idea of death quite scary, you know, simply because I don’t know whether anything comes after it and, if it does, what form it takes. I think part of this stems from having been a keen churchgoer as a kid, in which occupation I was constantly reminded that sinners go to hell when they die and spend eternity burning in an everlasting fire.

It seems to me a little cruel and unnecessary to pump this sort of stuff into the heads of children, in part because nobody can expect to go through a life without sinning in one form or another as defined by the various Judaic religions. I gather the Church itself recognises this fact and takes the view that there’s only ever been one man who never sinned, and that was Jesus.

(Ah, but wait a minute. According to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus killed a boy with his supernatural powers when he was himself a child. But I suppose that’s OK because Jesus was a part of God, and if Boris Johnson can break his own rules with impunity, why shouldn’t God?)

The Church does give us a get-out clause, of course. If we can be lucky enough to be given absolution placed conveniently between committing our last sin and taking our last breath, everything gets washed away and we spend the afterlife fortified by a cornucopia of milk and honey and surrounded by feathery beings singing everlasting hymns. Not a very reliable prospect, is it? Nor even a particularly endearing one.

I think I’ll take solace from the notion that God loveth a sinner that repenteth. I do quite a lot of that most days.

An Unusual Tribute

You might recall me complaining about the amount of union flag detritus littering the Shire in obeisance (carefully chosen word) to the Queen and her Jubilee. Mostly it takes the standard form – whole flags, bunting, flags with pictures of the Queen in the middle, and so on. But today I saw the most unusual one and couldn’t help admitting a modicum of approval.

A woman up the lane had hung a union flag bikini on her gate, positioned approximately in accordance with its normal positioning when functioning in the manner one would expect of a bikini. I considered knocking on the door and asking whether she’d done this to serve the requirements of economy in these troubled times, whether it was an attempt to do something out of the ordinary, or whether it was meant to make some sort of statement (the exact nature of which would be open to conjecture and lead the mostly conservative denizens of the Shire to scratch their heads in bemusement.)

I didn’t, of course, because a gentleman wouldn’t do that sort of thing. I simply walked on wondering whether her acquaintance might be worth making. I’ve only ever spoken to her once and gained the impression that she likes cats, so thank heaven Matthew Hopkins is long gone. The liking of cats was enough to get a woman executed in his day, so imagine what effect the public display of a bikini might have occasioned.

Baby Blue Tit Day.

I saw the first baby blue tit of the season today (I chose to presume that it was from the nest box behind my kitchen, even though I had no direct evidence on which to base such a presumption.)

I was standing by my little pear tree when it flew onto a branch a foot or so from my head and rested there without paying me any attention whatsoever. An adult blue tit flew onto an adjoining branch and held out a morsel of food, but declined to let the baby eat it. (Back to that old getting-them-out-of-the-nest ruse again, I suppose.) The adult then flew off to the nearby plumb tree and waited. Baby followed and also waited. Parent nudged baby in the back, flew to the top of the garden, and baby followed as you might expect (because that’s what babies do.)

It’s all about training I assume, and all rather life-affirming. Whether you agree or not is up to you, but I do so like that sort of thing.

A few minutes later I saw a second one on the feeding table at the side of my house – plumper, less ragged, and possessed of much yellower plumage when compared with the adults. They’re very handsome and a lot more naïve than the grown ups when approached by big creatures walking on two legs. I got almost to within touching distance before instinct took proper control and the little guy rushed off to the cover of the nearby hedge. (The adults are not so accommodating, being mad, feisty, and prepared to fight anything smaller than a sparrow hawk.)

So there you have it: today was Baby Blue Tit Day, and such days come close to encouraging the belief that life on this benighted planet is not so bad after all as long as you steer well clear of humans.

The Worrier.

So this is me. I worry about things, lots of things, and the latest worry concerns Oliver the little cock pheasant.

I wrote him into a post on Thursday night; about how he approached me asking for food, and how he got food, and how he was smaller than the other cock pheasants and therefore probably less able to compete for natural food. It could be that the bigger birds bully him out in the fields because birds sometimes do that sort of thing.

And so this evening it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him for three days. I asked myself whether the food I gave him on Thursday would be sufficient for three days. I can’t know whether it would or not, can I, because I’m not familiar with a pheasant’s dietary needs.

Perhaps, I thought, he’s been into the garden hoping to be fed again, but I wasn’t there so he left hungry. I’d never seen him fly onto either of the feeding tables, you see, as the other pheasants do, and I wonder whether he doesn’t have the strength. Pheasants are poor flyers at the best of times, and it takes some evident effort for even the big fit ones to make the flight-cum-leap from the ground up to a four foot high perch. And if Oliver is too weak to do that, what chance would he have of escaping a prowling fox?

So herein lies the lesson: it’s a bad idea to become attached to a wild creature because the wild is a hazardous place, and Mother Nature is implacably pragmatic and impervious to the needs of the singular individual.

Stream-of-Consciousness With Punctuation.

Bad day today. Too much despair at the badness in the human condition; too much anxiety over matters identified and unidentified; too much reluctance to carry on walking into whatever future I have left; too much discomfort from the cold east wind at twilight in what used to be referred to as ‘flaming June’ in dear old Blighty; too much eagerness to close the curtains so as to shut the world out. Taking refuge in reading old correspondence from once-valued people now gone.

Minor matters:

I found it ironic that the President of Russia should have responded to America’s promise to send longer range artillery to Ukraine with such a seemingly inept statement. He is reported to have said: ‘this will only fan the flames of war.’ Has he forgotten already that Russians have been sent to prison for calling it a war? And has he also forgotten who lit the fire in the first place?

Virginia Woolf’s description of Mrs Ramsey’s thoughts, responses, inclinations and desires in her novel To the Lighthouse are illuminating and make compelling reading. Mrs Ramsey is turning out to be the main character so far, and I gather she is closely based on Woolf’s own mother. If so, I would have loved to meet her. This book is a veritable cornucopia of insights, but it gives me a problem. The stream-of-consciousness writing style requires that every clause be read with full attention if the panoply of delights is to be extracted to the full. During the day my mind is too active for such a discipline, and late at night I’m simply too tired. It has to be read, therefore, in short bursts at carefully chosen times, and so I think it will be occupying the designated place next to my desk for a long time yet.

A Sort of Harry Potter Post.

I had a response today to a comment I put on YouTube a few years ago. I’d made the point, very briefly in keeping with the nature of the medium, that some of the incidents in the Harry Potter movies failed the test of logic and were effectively glaring plot holes. After all these years, some poor lad came back to me with:

Stop ruining Harry Potter pls (sic.)

And then I noticed another comment on the same thread which said:

They say Harry Potter isn’t real but they can’t prove it.

Well now, where could this post go in considering the nature of belief? I suspect it would require the holding of Harry Potter in one hand and religion in the other, and then discussing their similarities and differences. I don’t think I’ll bother.

(Interestingly, however, I did find myself comparing Vladimir Putin to Voldermort this morning, and wondering whether the level of hatred aimed in his direction might have some effect on his (allegedly non-existent) health issue. But that was before I stood enthralled as usual by the local village’s best cottage garden, at which point my sense of priorities became properly re-aligned.)

On Royal Indisposition and Avian Connections.

I spent three hours today doing some moderately strenuous garden work with very little in the way of the usual deleterious physical consequences. That made a refreshing change.

The same cannot be said of our dear old Queen (or queer old Dean, as Dr Spooner would have it.) Today was the first day of the Jubilee celebrations and she has already pulled out of the memorial service (or whatever it’s called) in her honour because of ‘experiencing some discomfort.’ Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The sort of discomfort commonly experienced by ninety-six-year-olds is not something one generally associates with royalty.

But the big news of today concerns the birds.

Firstly, I’ve noticed over the past couple of days that the blue tits have been bringing food to the nest box but not taking it in. Instead, they appeared to be only showing it to the chicks, which suggested that they were tempting the brood to come out. Today I saw the two parents come to the box without food, take a quick look around the inside, and then fly away. I didn’t see them come back. I think it reasonable to assume, therefore, that the babies are now experiencing their first day in the big, bad world. (And it’s heartening to think that the parents bothered to come back to make sure they hadn’t left any of the kids behind.)

Secondly: remember me mentioning in a post a moth or two ago that a strikingly marked and coloured cock pheasant had appeared in my garden? I hadn’t seen him again until today, but as I was walking up the lawn I saw him approaching me with apparent purpose. And then he began to make a strange sound. Now, the usual form of vocal expression from a cock pheasant is either an ear-piercing shriek when they’re declaring their territory or warning the hens of possible danger, or a mellifluous (and rather irritating) clucking sound when they’re eating. This was different; this was a sort of squeak with a distinctly pleading tone. And the same pleading tone was evident in his eyes as he looked up at me.

I studied him and decided he looked underfed. He was a little smaller and less rotund than the average cock pheasant, and it seemed to me that he would have been quite unable to compete with the bigger males for food, mating rights or anything else. I beckoned him to follow me and he did. I put a handful of bird seed on the lawn, which he devoured quickly before giving me the pleading look again. ‘May I have some more, please?’ was the obvious message, so more was what he got – a substantial amount in a bowl, most of which he ate before wandering off without so much as a ‘thank you.’ And that’s why he has now been christened Oliver after young Master Twist.

Connections and Goodbyes.

I finally did it yesterday; I finally said goodbye to my old but broken Spanish guitar which has been with me all my adult life. It now lies forlorn but not forgotten in a large skip marked ‘non-recyclable waste’ in Ashbourne’s municipal tip. And it has company in the form of my old woollen jacket which kept a little of the cold out through many a stark winter’s night in my office. (That was in the days when I couldn’t afford supplementary heating in here, and I suspect they might be about to come again.)

When you live alone and rarely speak to anybody, it’s easy to invest near-anthropomorphic qualities in inanimate things. Or maybe it isn’t quite that simple. Maybe something of our personal energy does become infused into things we’ve been close to, and so the sense of saying a sad goodbye to them isn’t quite as silly as it might seem.

I saw Gimli in Ashbourne again, trundling along with his trusty staff as usual. He has no hair now, and appearances would suggest that it must have favoured warmer climes and migrated south to his voluminous grey beard.

Ashbourne, and Sainsbury’s in particular, was unusually busy for a Wednesday, and the smaller shopping trolleys which I use are becoming scarcer and scarcer. I had to wait for the trolley man to bring in what few were standing in the storage bays before I could do my shopping. I wonder how many more ways the world will find to change in these increasingly challenging times. And will I say the final big goodbye before they become intolerable?

The Scruffiness of Jubilee Mania.

The Shire is currently littered with Jubilee detritus. Union flags, bunting, and pictures of our dear old Queen are everywhere – draped across the front of houses, slung between walls and gateposts, hung scruffily on fences, and so on and so forth. There’s even a union flag stuck in one of the farmer’s fields, and several public footpath posts in Church Lane have mini union flag pennants tied to them. To my eye it makes the natural beauty of the Shire landscape look cheap and tawdry, but I suppose it helps people to feel reverence for something in a world turning darker.

What I find amusing is the bunting adorning the village hall. Much of it isn’t composed of union flags at all, but individual pennants of red, white and blue which, taken together, recall the French tricolour. As someone who feels more reverence for Amelie and M. Hulot than I do for the royal family, I can’t say that I disapprove.