September's Final Post (I think.)

I just saved a YouTube video on ‘The spiritual significance of waking up at 3am’ to watch later. I doubt I’ll take it very seriously, and it’s probably pointless in my case anyway because it’s usually close to 3 o’clock when I go to bed. But does that mean I’m being denied something of spiritual significance?

The thing is, you see, that because I go to bed so late I usually wake up (unless there’s a reason to set the alarm) somewhere around 10am. This morning, however, I woke up and looked at the clock to find that it was 11.20. Imagine that. And I recall that the same thing happened a few months ago. It would appear, therefore, that if I’m to receive my due share of spiritual goodies, I need to find a video on ‘The spiritual significance of waking up at 11.20am.’

Thank heaven I’ve finally found something silly to say before September bites the dust.

To the Coming Month.

In approximately two hours it will be October. Goldener Oktober. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. The Shire suffused with the sights and scents of decay. The spectre of winter’s abyss filling the horizon. The prospect of health issues being made more manifest through feeling continually cold.

(I have a new one now, by the way, or rather a recurrence of an old one. The infected toe I had a few years ago is back and it’s giving me a bit of gyp.)

I seem to recall writing something like this last year. Sorry about that, but there is one positive to be taken from it all. I’ve observed that the twin phenomena of cold and health issues form an alliance greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, the symptoms of both become more noticeable. I’ve long suspected that the purpose of life is probably to learn things for future reference, so I suppose I should be gleefully lapping it all up.

On Simulations and Simple Minds.

Today has been a bad one on several fronts. I suppose it had to be in order to balance yesterday’s good one, because that’s how life is. And talking of how life is, I came across an interesting theory last night. I daresay many people will have encountered it already and I’m just running late as usual, but I’ll offer it for the sake of those who haven’t.

When computer games were first invented they were simple affairs consisting of symbols which moved around the screen at the will of the gamer. Since then they have become very much more sophisticated constructions in which real-looking characters operate within a real-looking environment, but they’re still only simulations.

It is now being speculated that with the development of AI, the characters in these simulations will eventually develop a level of sentience which will grow into advanced intelligence as we understand the term. And over a long period of time – maybe even billions of years – they will reach the point where they will be able to create further simulations of their own. The first generation of simulation dwellers will, of course, be convinced that their version of reality is the true one, and the alternative version they’ve created is an artificial one which only ‘exists’ within a machine.

I’m sure it must be obvious where this is going. How do we know that our version of reality is the true one, and that we’re not just one of many progressive simulations? Several spiritual traditions have been telling us for thousands of years that the reality in which we think we’re living is actually an illusion. How do we know they were wrong?

*  *  *

So, let’s go back to the idea that this world really is real, and consider the question of tonight’s celebration in Red Square, Moscow following Putin’s declaration of annexation. It seems to have been a packed event with thousands of people joyously waving Russian flags and chanting ‘Russia! Russia!’ (Or whatever the Russian word for Russia is.)

This is interesting because I wonder what we should make of it. My instinct suggests that either Putin managed to engineer the whole thing in order to dupe the world into thinking he’s hugely popular with the Russian people, or that a large majority of Russians really are as brutal and bestial as western propaganda told us they were during the Cold War. Off hand I can’t think of any other realistic explanation (except, perhaps, that it’s a simple case of mass hysteria driven by nationalistic stupidity), so I think I’ll take refuge in the possibility that life really is just an illusion after all.

On Fowl and Finding Out.

I decided to take a small detour on my walk today, to visit the old stone bridge over the river which is the boundary between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. I wanted to see how much the level had been affected by the warm, dry spring and summer we had this year, and found it to be in fine fettle and pretty much the same as the last time I went there. (Even the mill race about 200yds on the Derbyshire side had running water in it which quite surprised me.)

But before I reached the bridge I heard the sound of a duck quacking to my left, and peered through a gap in the trees and shrubs which line the road at that point. I saw that just beyond the bank of trees lay a large, still pool on which ducks were swimming peacefully while one of their number was preening itself on a rock jutting out of the water. But of course, much as I like ducks, it wasn’t the birds which captured my attention; it was the pool.

It lay in a depression surrounded on all sides by mature trees and had a small island in the middle. Such places draw me to them as a bee is drawn to a flower and set my imagination running. I find them dripping with enchantment; they carry the promise of magic and mystery; they might be the portal between this world and some other. This is the domain of the Lady of the Lake, and the Lady of the Lake has been the figurehead at the forefront of my imagination since childhood. In my one and only novel, a goddess masquerading as the child Annie appears in just such a place to take the protagonist on a journey through time and alternate dimensions.

And yet I’ve lived here for more than sixteen years and didn’t even know it existed. I half imagine I could go there again and find that it doesn’t. I’m even tempted to wonder whether an esteemed lady from a higher plane encouraged a duck to quack today in order to show me something special.

Am I now being unconscionably fanciful? Maybe, but the predilection to be fanciful is driven by imagination, and imagination is surely one of the most rewarding of human faculties.

*  *  *

On a more prosaic note, I had another first today. I saw five cock pheasants flying together over my garden, a sight I’ve never seen before. I sometimes see two or more cock birds walking across the field in close proximity, but pheasants don’t fly all that much and I’ve only ever seen the males fly singly, usually if they’ve been startled or are flying into a tree to roost overnight. A flock of flying pheasants is most unusual, so is this another indicator of change in the offing? I don’t suppose I'll ever find out.

Not a Proper Post.

I haven’t written a post tonight because I received a long email. I don’t get long emails, so I decided to answer it with a long one back. No offence meant.

Besides, nothing much happened today apart from the fact that the card reader at Sainsbury’s kiosk refused to accept my debit card in payment for something. The same happened about a month ago. All the other card readers in the store accept it, and so do card readers in other stores, but not that one. So I complained to the manager. He insisted that there was nothing wrong with the device – ‘or else I would know about it’ – so I can only assume that it’s taken a dislike to me. Electrical and electronic devices quite often do. Lights sometimes go off when I pass them; my audio system sometimes switches itself on when I’ve been close but haven’t touched it; my computer reads my mood and responds to it. That sort of thing. I assume it must have something to do with my electric personality. Or maybe it’s an INFJ thing.

Meanwhile, I’m a little reluctant to go to bed tonight because last night I was woken up several times by the cold. I didn’t like it much, but at least it was a proper sort of cold – the sort that makes your legs and feet and hands and nose cold. Back in the summer when the weather was warm, I got woken up one night with a different sort of cold. It was inside my chest and there was no way of getting rid of it. I wonder whether that sort of thing means something. Is there a doctor in the house? Or a shaman? Or a medium? Or a psychiatrist?

Two Ladies Decades Apart.

I met the Ukrainian woman again today. I mentioned her in a post last summer, shortly after she’d moved here as a refugee. Today she was coming back from fetching her little girl from school, and was notably different from the last time we met. She was more open and communicative; she even smiled at me. The last time I saw her she looked scared of me. Isn’t that awful?

And I discovered what her daughter is called by the simple expedient of asking her mother. I didn’t ask for the mother’s name because here in the UK it’s considered perfectly proper to ask a parent for the child’s name, but verging on an intrusion of privacy to enquire after the parent’s. I do hope she understood that and wasn’t offended. And of course, I did tell her mine even though I doubt very much she’ll remember it, much less care.

*  *  *

I’m over half way through Maddie’s Field Journals now, and have got to that point where I don’t really want it to end. Tonight’s Dig Day report included the finding of a teapot spout, and it brought back an old memory:

When I was seventeen and going through the flat period between ending school and entering the Britannia Royal Naval College as an officer cadet, I took a temporary job labouring for a pottery company called J&G Meakin. They made tableware, and I spent all day carrying heavy piles of unglazed plates from the conveyor belt and giving them to a fettler (to sand off the mould marks and any rough spots.)

And then I went off to college, and at the start of the second term of cadetship I joined a frigate which was part of the Dartmouth Training Squadron. We headed off on the bonny briny, eventually making landfall a week later at St Johns, Newfoundland. There I was taken in hand (voluntarily, I hasten to add) by a young woman who apparently decided I was worth taking home to meet the family and her sisters. ‘Mom, look what I found. It’s called Jeffrey, it’s a sailor, and it’s come all the way from England. Isn’t it cute?’

(I don’t remember what she actually said, but it probably wasn’t that. It was a long time ago.)

Anyway, the point is that the family immediately invited me to dinner, an offer I was delighted to accept so that I could show the colonials how to use table utensils properly – you know, knife in one hand, fork in the other, this finger goes here, the thumb is kept out of sight under there, the fork must be held with the pointy bits facing down, the elbows should be kept close to the chest… That sort of thing (and more.)

But when I’d finished my meal I did something which even colonials might have considered disreputable. I turned the plate over to look at the back stamp, and guess where it had been made. J&G Meakin. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ I said. ‘I just spent six weeks working in the very factory where your dinner service was made.’

I don’t recall any of them replying because I doubt they found it quite as interesting as I did, but the daughter did give me a goodnight kiss when she drove me back to the ship so she couldn’t have been all that embarrassed. And the family took me on a trip in their big Yankee sedan to their holiday cottage at the coast the following day.

I wanted to marry their daughter, you know, because impetuosity has always been one of my most risk-inducing traits. I never did. And I can never decide whether memories actually matter.

Variations on the Theme of Cold.

September hasn’t really felt like September this year. There have been too many days stuck in a cold airflow and too many nights with condensation on the upstairs windows. When I went for my evening stroll today – mainly to see how the hedge trimmers were getting on because one of them waved to me from the cab of his tractor earlier – I got caught in a sudden flurry of strong wind and cold rain. It didn’t feel much like a typical September evening.

And do you know what I really dislike about sitting in front of a computer in a cold house?  It’s the constant awareness of cold air on the inside of my nose (because my mouth happens to be closed and there’s only one other way to breathe. And if I didn’t breathe I’d be dead and then I’d be even colder, especially if I was lying on a cold slab in a cold room and nobody ever offered me a hot drink or a bowl of porridge. And I think I’m probably the only person in the world who finds that funny, so I think I’ll shut up and finish my coffee. It stopped being hot ten minutes ago.)

Spotting the Sigma Sheep.

When I went into my bathroom this morning, I looked out of the window at the rising ground behind my house and saw eight sheep walking in line astern down the middle of the field. (Yes, I am one of those strange people who count everything.) ‘Here comes the Clanton gang,’ I thought, much impressed at such drollness so early in the morning. And when the sheep at the front changed course to head towards the trees in the bottom corner of the field, the rest dutifully followed.

But then there was another one about fifty yards behind, seemingly uninterested in its fellow ovines and more inclined to be taking a solitary and relaxing walk on a relatively fine morning in early autumn.

‘Aha, I thought, an INFJ sheep. Welcome, brother.’

(Of course, it might simply have been the one the flock rejected, but that would be sad so I chose not to countenance the idea.)

Not Quite Absolute Zero.

I’m growing tired of sitting in front of the computer for several hours in my unheated house. My body core feels relatively comfortable with four layers on – which is the important bit – but my nose, hands, legs and feet are uncomfortably chilled.

I tell myself that Captain Scott must have been colder than me when he was trying to beat that bounder Amundsen to the South Pole. And I don’t suppose Shackleton was breaking a sweat when his ship got stuck in pack ice while trying to find the north-west passage. And a bunch of mad people went skinny dipping in the cold North Sea today. And then there was that night when I lived in another country cottage many moons ago. My wife and I came home from work during a massive blizzard to find the water pipes frozen, so there was no hot drink to be had until I’d borrowed a fan heater from the neighbour. There was ice in the toilet and bathtub, and when my wife went to bed with a glass of water, ice formed on it within half an hour. It isn’t that cold here at the moment, but it is September and there’s no heating on in the house so it still feels colder than I like to feel.

The thing is, you see, I made a rule for myself by way of managing the insane rise in the price of electricity. ‘You will not use electrical heating appliances until 1^st October,’ I told myself. I’m the first to balk at orders given by other people, but I’m a stickler for obeying my own. So here I am writing another boring blog post with cold fingers.

And while I was sitting here silently bemoaning my cold fingers, nose, legs and feet, the term ‘absolute zero’ occurred to me. This is the point, out there in the cosmos, at which cold is at its maximum. Except it isn’t really because cold doesn’t exist as an objective phenomenon, but is simply a term we use to express a perceived lack of acceptable heat. And so absolute zero is actually a point at which there is no heat whatsoever. It seemed strange to me that heat could be finite in that way, but apparently it is so I must be wrong. It happens.

And after I’d considered the concept of absolute zero, the phrase ‘a damson in distress’ kept running through my head, probably because I have an abiding fondness for malapropisms, and a chap needs something in which to take refuge (which I originally mis-typed as ‘refuse’) when he’s feeling cold and irritated.

On Being Robbed and Being the Amen Bit.

I’m watching the thermometer in my office fall slowly but inexorably day by day until the last syllable of recorded time as autumn begins to assert its presence. In other words, my house is getting colder.

I’m resisting the urge to introduce any form of heating into the old place, you see, because all forms of heating in here require electricity, and electricity is insanely expensive these days. Pressing a switch to engage with the flow is a little scary, so maybe I should briefly give the back story to explain my predicament.

Thirteen years ago I was horribly insolvent – through no fault of my own I hasten to add, but that didn’t alter the fundamental fact. For some years I’d been economising to the hilt in order to subsist and declining to declare myself bankrupt because that sort of thing is anathema to me. And then my situation improved a little and I was able to begin the long climb back into the black, which involved continuing to economise to the hilt so as the keep the process moving forward. Eventually the black was reached and I carried on economising in order to build up a meagre amount of savings (the extent of which would probably have my better-off neighbours chuckling with derision, but at least it’s something and at least its mine.)

And now I’m faced with the prospect of losing those savings – or at least a substantial part of them – through having to pay exorbitant prices to my energy supplier who say they have to charge them because the wholesale suppliers are good capitalists who like to celebrate the making of record profits so as to pay their executives and shareholders large sums of money they don’t need and might never be able to spend. (I assume you can only have so many private jets and swimming pools, can’t you? Not that I have the slightest interest in private jets or swimming pools, you understand, but there’s a principle involved. It’s my meagre savings they’re using.)

So that’s why I’m sitting with a cold nose and cold fingers in a cold office in a cold house reading Maddie’s Field Journals book. It’s taking me back to those autumn days nine years ago before the onset of health issues, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, increasing mayhem caused by climate change, and the overall cost of living crisis (not to mention the years of Tory administration during which the rich have become even richer and the poor even poorer.)

But here’s the nice bit…

I did something this evening which I never usually do: I skipped briefly to the end of the book to see whether there was an epilogue of some kind (I always think of the epilogue as ‘the amen bit’.) There was no epilogue, but what I found was this:

These field reports were originally published by Maddie in the form of a blog which I followed assiduously, and they’re reproduced here complete with the comments entered thereon by the various readers. And guess who entered the very last comment. I did, so the very final words in the book are mine. I think I might be allowed a tear or two at that revelation.

A Grand Day Out.

(With apologies to Mr Park.)

Today I went to the Uttoxeter Heath Community Centre for my Covid booster vaccination. OK, so here’s what happened when I went there last year:

I drove into the car park to find it full, so I had to go and find somewhere to park that wasn’t too far away. The queue of people extended from the gate to the entrance of the Centre. The vestibule was crowded with people, some queuing to register and some just hanging around and looking bored. The large ante room at the side of the vestibule was also crowded with people, some sitting and some standing because there was nowhere left to sit (I managed to find the edge of a table to perch on.) The main hall in which the jabbing was being performed was laid out with many seats, but there was still standing room only. I finally got jabbed an hour and a half after walking into the building.

My neighbour told me that he went there last week and the situation was the same as last year, so I wasn’t relishing the experience. But here’s what happened today:

I drove onto the car park to find three empty spaces (of which I took only one since I’m considerate like that.) By the time I climbed out of the car, two people had left so there were four empty spaces. There was no queue to get into the building. There was no queue inside the building. The previously crowded ante room was locked off and empty. The main hall had about six people in it. (I didn’t count them because I was too anxious to begin reading Maddie’s – see previous post – Field Journals book, but six would be about right.) I was called into Pod No 3 within ten minutes, and then had my details recorded and my stabbing performed over the next five. I even had time to ask the woman: ‘Are you a nurse?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Do you know how to do injections?’ ‘Yes; I’ve been trained.’ ‘OK, that’ll do. Carry on.’ And so she did, and I hardly felt a thing.

I walked out of the Centre feeling slightly light-headed, not from the effect of the vaccination but from the euphoria consequent on it having taken only twenty minutes in total. So then I went to Tesco to get petrol and a few groceries, and was back home half an hour earlier than I’d expected to be leaving the Centre. Not a bad day, eh?

The only problem was that I’d had very little time to read Maddie’s opus, and most of what I had read was about mortality rates in upstate New York during the 19^th century. So tonight I read lots more – this time about the dig itself – and found several items of conversation between my good self and the author on Maddie’s blog, which I was following at the time. I was surprised that she would go to the trouble of repeating these conversations in the book, especially since my remarks were meant to be amusing but were mostly a little fatuous, but decided on the obvious explanation. No doubt it was to reveal to the readers that American archaeologists are pretty smart, whereas ageing Englishmen who left school at sixteen are only good for providing exercise to the muscles which make the eyes roll. Nice one, Mad.

(And it’s worth repeating here that of all the people I’ve known in my life, Maddie is right up there with the most esteemed of the Valued Ones. I love her to bits, you know, in the nicest possible way.)

Time for coffee now, and then I’ll have a spinach and coleslaw sandwich a bit later. The coleslaw is in place of the more usual mayo because I feel the need to celebrate.

On Putin and the Nature of Leadership.

I was thinking about Putin today. It’s hard not to these days because he’s one of the most prominent people in the world at the moment, albeit in a rather dark, pariah-like sort of way. (I wondered whether he relishes the situation or finds it a burdensome pressure, but that’s not the point of the post.) The point of the post is that it caused me to muse on the nature of leadership.

Those we think of as leaders are people at the top of some sort of ladder, the nature of which can vary according to the operational environment, and it seemed to me that there are two principle types. There’s the tyrant type who holds the position through fear-induced power, and there’s the true leader who uses his or her character and personal qualities to inspire others in pursuit of a goal. (There are other types, too, like those who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. This is the case with hereditary monarchs. And in a democracy there are those who sit at the top of the ladder simply because there didn’t happen to be a better alternative on the ballot paper. But they’re relatively in the minority when it comes to situations of major gravitas.)

So what of Putin? Well, I don’t know him so I can’t really speak with authority on the matter. All I have to guide me is the view presented by the western media which does, admittedly, include views presented by the Russian media and reported by western counterparts, as well as views – partisan probably – offered by Russians who have escaped Putin’s grip. All of this presents a picture of a man who is the stereotypical tyrant, in which case he couldn’t be called a true leader.

And that’s as far as I got.

(Meanwhile, I want some fun but I don’t where to find any.)

A Christmas Present? In September?

Yes, I do know it isn’t Christmas yet, but I did have a splendid surprise three months early at lunchtime today: a parcel from New Hampshire, USA, containing a gift just for me.

So what was it? It was a book containing the field journals of one Maddie K (previously known to this blog as the Borg) when she was but a burgeoning – and unbelievably erudite and versatile – tadpole training to be an archaeologist (or architect, or arch-villain, or archetype, or something like that.)

It’s very splendid, and it arrived just in time. I go for my autumn Covid booster jab tomorrow, and because they couldn’t organise a bun fight in a bakery at the Uttoxeter Heath Community Centre I will have to be ensconced with a crowd of anonymous grey ghosts – in a room which will probably be cold – for between 1 and 2 hours. (You might imagine I would engage with my usual habit of people-watching as I do when distances are manageable such as in coffee ships and trains, but in a crowded room they become invaders in my personal space and I like to imagine they’re invisible.)

I did think of taking my current late night reading – Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ – but I think Maddie’s field journals will be more engaging. I so look forward to starting on it, and I thank her so very much for sending it.

And I have a guilty admission to make. For some years now there’s been something I’ve wanted to send to her. It’s an heirloom passed down from my grandmother to my mother, and I think it’s something she would quite like to have. (It has no monetary value and is laughably wrecked, but I still think she would value it.) The problem is that it’s in a box somewhere among a pile of boxes with other things on top of the pile, so finding it would take an unusual effort of will. I do intend to make the effort one day though, when I’m not gardening, decorating the house, doing chores, writing blog posts, watching the scrummy Dr Ellie Anderson on YouTube, or being lost in the wasteland of depression.

So that job has now been entered in the log of important-things-to-get-around-to-doing-before-I-die. And I’m a never say never type (well, mostly.) We INFJs do seem to have a perverse need to load our shoulders with pressures, you know. We feel naked without them.

Getting My Come Uppance.

Notwithstanding what I said in the previous post, something of note did happen in Ashbourne today.

I was shopping in Sainsbury’s and becoming increasingly irritated by the swarms of old people in there. They were slow and dithery and getting in the way. One old lady stood for ages hovering her hand over the Hovis medium sliced loaves, deciding which one to take of the twenty identical packages on the shelf. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, with less deference to her advancing years than would have been proper in the circumstances and about which I felt slightly guilty afterwards. Two others were standing in the middle of the aisle, nattering over heaven knows what, and blocking it. You get the picture. Eventually I managed to negotiate the geriatric minefield without serious incident and put my shopping through the till. I presented my card to the machine and waited.

Now, it is a feature of the post-cash era that the system occasionally declines a presented card and requires that you insert it and enter your PIN. Only you don’t know that until an untypical length of time has passed because the card is obscuring the screen. Such a length of time was on the verge of expiring when the operator spoke.

What I would have expected her to say was something like: ‘It wants your PIN this time.’ But she didn’t. She said: ‘Now, what you need to do is place your card in that slot at the bottom…’ Sensing the patronising tone in her voice, I said: ‘You mean it wants my PIN this time?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, appearing slightly taken aback. And so I did it the old fashioned way and there were no wrecks and nobody drownded.

So there you have it. I nip around the store getting increasingly irritated by old people being slow and dithery, and when I get to the checkout I’m treated like a little old man. Maybe the checkout operator was just going with the flow and failing to make due allowance for the fact that not everybody who looks like a cross between Quasimodo and Golum has a failing mind to match. And so I put it down to instant karma and went home.

Nadgy Briefs on the World Out There.

After all the issues I’ve been having with British Telecom and E.ON NEXT (my energy supplier) recently, the latest large organisation to have me rolling my eyes with incomprehension at their sheer lack of nous in the matter of organising something simple is the dear old NHS. What on earth is going on these days? Everything seems to be broken.

*  *  *

Reading between the lines of the propaganda, it does appear to be a fact that Mr Putin is not only losing the war in Ukraine, but also his equilibrium. This could be dangerous. And it also appears to be a fact that opposition to the war among the Russian public is growing, but only a few are prepared to openly protest and who can blame them? It seems to me that the obvious way to get out of this mess is for the Russian army to turn around, go home, and put Mr Putin in his rightful place. I doubt it will happen, but you never know.

*  *  *

I was reading today about the Hindu mob which went on the rampage against Muslims in the normally peaceful city of Leicester a few nights ago. It was pretty scary, apparently. I was also reading about the protests in Iran against the abusive behaviour of the ‘morality police’, and it brought to mind my growing conviction that religion really does have to go. People could still have their faith and be free to worship their version of God, but would have to do so in private. I doubt it’s too far from the truth to suggest that religions and their power-hungry leaders have probably been responsible for more suffering down the centuries than anything else.

*  *  *

One of the American YouTubers whose channel I subscribe to has posted nothing lately apart from video after video about the Queen’s death and funeral. I haven’t watched any of them because I’ve had more than enough of it on this side of the pond, so could we please let Lizzie rest in peace now.

*  *  *

And then there’s the growing awareness of the horrors being generated, presumably unwittingly but still recklessly, by the social media platforms (including YouTube, which is the only one I have anything to do with.) I needn’t go into detail, need I?

*  *  *

Nothing noteworthy happened in Ashbourne today. And this evening I had further evidence that Millie the horse only wants to know me when I’m bearing apples and carrots. As for people, apples and carrots don’t seem to impress them much and I don’t think I’m capable of offering anything that does.

Warming to Kathy.

I’m beginning to warm to Never Let Me Go. It’s no longer a case of it merely keeping me turning the page; now it’s got to the point where I want to pick it up and read some more.

It’s the character of Kathy, the narrator and MC, who’s responsible; she’s the one I think I’m warming to because of her quiet, wistful, sensitive, observant nature. I want to be a hitchhiker she’s picked up as she drives across flat landscapes with grey skies overhead and stretching all the way to the horizon. I want to hear the story directly from her own lips, and see the look in her eyes as she reminisces on life and loss without regret. And when we stop for coffee at some soulless motorway service area, I want to hear some more. And I will mostly be quiet and just listen.

I remember falling for Kathy when I watched the film version some years ago. But then, she was being played by Cary Mulligan and I’d fall for Cary Mulligan if she had a non-speaking part playing the flower seller on the corner and wearing a funny hat.

(I think I should shut up about Cary Mulligan now. I’m irritating myself.)

I needn’t shut up about flower sellers, though. I dislike cut flowers, you see, and so I dislike florists’ shops apart from the pleasant smell. I like to see flowers growing in the gardens, and the hedgerows, and the meadows, and alongside woodland paths. They look happy there. I suspect it’s an INFJ thing.

I’ve watched a lot of videos on INFJs recently and they’re so spot-on. Hearing my own nature being described to me is about the only thing that makes me smile at the moment.

The Peasant and the Silver Spoon Ladies.

Shortly before I encountered the jealous black horse mentioned in the previous post, I encountered the young woman who is to be the recipient of the big new house being built in Mill Lane. She’s either married, or about to be married, to the son of a local businessman, and she and her husband (or betrothed) are currently domiciled in a temporary structure so well appointed that many people would give their right arms to live permanently in it.

But she was uncommonly affable so I chose to overlook her outrageous fortune and slipped easily into affable response. The phrase ‘capitalist floosie’ did briefly enter my head, but my natural good grace held firm and I avoided stooping to such an impolite level by giving verbal expression to it. I did, however, refer to her present accommodation as a ‘posh caravan’ just to avoid being a complete traitor to my subordinate class.

And then I passed a mother and daughter who live in an even bigger new house – courtesy of yet another local businessman who is their husband/father – around the corner from me. They were out riding their immaculate 16.2 hunters and said ‘good morning.’ I sometimes think I don’t belong here. 

(And I might just add that, in spite of the foregoing, I don't actually give a damn about being of a subordinate class. Ostentation has no power; it merely irritates occasionally. And I do know it shouldn't.)

Behold a Jealous Horse.

I’m being rather serious lately, aren’t I. I don’t like that very much, so maybe I should mention the black horse which favoured me with its attention today.

He came trotting over to me as I was passing a fence in Meadow Lane, clearly wanting a bit of fuss. A bit of fuss was what he got and he clearly revelled in it. Until, that is, one of the donkeys came along wanting the same nose and neck stroking.

The black horse took exception to this diminutive – if exceedingly cute – interloper sharing the affections of the beast on two legs, and insisted on placing its more substantial form between me and the trespasser. I did my best to share out the spoils, but with little success. I’ve noticed that horses can be a bit like that.

Seer or Silly Sausage.

I had a nightmare of sorts last night. I was standing in the middle of an urban landscape, watching in horror as it was being devastated by raging fires as far as the eye could see in all directions. I looked up to see a turtle floating through the air. The underside of the creature was hollow with fire burning inside it, but its head and legs were still moving. Seeing a creature burning from the inside disturbed me so much that I woke up.

So what should I make of it? Was it simply a reaction to the turbulent state the world is currently in – increasing evidence of climate change; a leading economist forecasting that economic meltdown is just around the corner; increasing tension between East and West as evidenced by Putin’s war on Ukraine; capitalist economies seeing an ever-growing gap between rich and poor? And why was the turtle there?

The fact is that for some years now the conviction has been growing in me that the world is approaching a period of cataclysmic change, and that generations alive today will have to go through some uncomfortable times before everything settles down again and the world will be a different place. And I might mention that I began to think that global economic meltdown was inevitable even in my thirties.

So am I a seer or just being silly? Am I becoming one of those shabby men who used to stand in town centres wearing placards declaring that ‘The End of the World Is Nigh’? I don’t know. Do you?

What was interesting about the dream, though, was that I felt no sense of personal danger while the conflagration was raging. So if I am being a seer, maybe I can feel reassured that I’ll be dead before it really gets underway. That, at least, is comforting.

On Dr Ellie and the Capitalist Ethos.

Remember me mentioning Dr Ellie Anderson recently? She’s the philosophy professor who gives short lectures on YouTube, taking some part of a well known philosopher’s ideas and giving a potted – and brilliantly expressed – explanation of it for us dummies. (Everything about that woman is so bloody scrummy, you know, but that’s beside the point.)

The point is that one of the ones I watched recently concerned Karl Marx’s views on the conflict between capital and labour, and she ended on a view which I assume was her own, rather than what Marx said.

She pointed out that Capitalism, as we understand the term today, is a fairly recent system which had its genesis in the Industrial Revolution. And she went on to say that it will one day fail and pass away naturally, as economic systems usually do, and will be replaced by something more inclusive and less divisive. (She hinted, though didn’t directly state, that it will be a more refined version of what we currently call Communism.)

This had me thinking about the current state of near-panic over the recent insane rise in fuel bills. Very many people are genuinely worried about how they’re going to balance the essential requirements of keeping warm and eating sufficient to stay healthy this winter. (And keeping the children clothed and fed, and dealing with Christmas, and avoiding unmanageable debt, and handling the damned advertisers who keep on telling them that they must spend, spend and spend some more in order to both belong to modern culture and keep up with its requirements.)

And of course, this is a bi-product of a fundamental principle of Capitalism – that if you produce something, you are incontrovertibly entitled to charge as much as you can get for it in order to maximise profit. This is all very well for luxuries, but what about the essentials? (This could now go into the question of mixed economy vs free market economy, Mrs Thatcher’s big mistake, and the success of the Nordic nations in keeping their people relatively content. But let’s move on.)

I realised that many people are now becoming aware of the fact that while they struggle, the companies behind the price rises – those who control the wholesale prices – are celebrating the making of record profits and being able to pay their (mostly already wealthy) shareholders lots of money which they don’t particularly need.

So, I gather there’s a new protest movement rising in the UK which styles itself: Enough is Enough. The fundamental thrust of their argument is that the system is broken and needs changing. The people, it seems, are becoming restive. So is this the beginning of Dr Ellie being right?

Sides of Life.

I saw a report on the BBC News website today which was as transparent a piece of western propaganda in relation to the Ukraine situation as you’d ever be likely to see. It will have become obvious by now that I’m strongly anti-Putin and anti the war, but I’m also anti-propaganda whichever side is using it. I thought of making a detailed post about it, but I’m tired of writing about Putin and Ukraine so I’ll give this one a miss for once.

Next up was the sight of newspapers in one of the shops in Uttoxeter. Every headline was about the Queen’s funeral, and every one was risible in the extreme. They would have made a post of sorts, but I’m also tired of writing about the media’s treatment of the Queen’s death and funeral, so I’ll give that one a miss too.

And then I saw a man sitting outside a shop near the top of a busy thoroughfare. He looked elderly and weather-beaten, and was sitting in a wheelchair. I say ‘sitting’, but not quite conventionally so because he had no legs below the knee. He was holding a cheap plastic pot in the hope of receiving some donation to his personal cause and I desperately wanted to give him something, before realising that I’d forgotten to put any cash in my pocket when I’d left the house hurriedly. I apologised and said I’d catch him next time, which I certainly will if he happens to be there again.

My flippant side jumped in, as it often does in emotionally-charged situations, and I wanted to say ‘don’t suppose you take cards, do you?’ I realised in time that it wasn’t funny, so I walked on by.

Too Many Bits for a Title.

Today was unusual in that I had an intelligent (yes, intelligent) conversation with a woman on YouTube around the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw and its subsequent, highly regarded film adaptation. She had a foreign name and her use of English was impeccable. How often do I have this experience on YouTube? Both intelligent and a good writer? Not often.

I then had an email conversation with a customer advisor from my fuel provider. Her name was an English one and her use of language was pretty poor in several respects. This is an odd phenomenon, but not unusual.

But anyway…

I was walking up the lane today commiserating with my tree friends about this summer’s unusually dry weather. I wished them a good rest, a successful return, and a better year next year. (I talk to the trees, you know, but they don’t listen to me. Or maybe they do; it’s hard to tell with trees. Whether I was born under a wandering star or not I wouldn’t know, but I have my suspicions.)

I felt a sudden, rushing sense of how quickly the years are passing now, and I wondered how trees perceive time. Tolkien probably pondered the same question.

*  *  *

I subscribe to a YouTube channel in which an American woman called Dr Ellie Anderson discusses – mercifully briefly – the pronouncements of the world’s most celebrated philosophers. She is highly intelligent, highly attractive, highly personable, and therefore highly entertaining. Sounds like the woman I’ve been looking for all my life, right? Wrong.

Imagine sitting down to the dinner table every night and deciding which philosopher’s wisdom to contemplate. You’d have indigestion before you’d even consumed the hors d’oeuvre, wouldn’t you?

Incidentally, I’m a fan of the 5-course meal. The 7-course version is beyond me because I don’t know what mignardise is. If it’s a cheese board, OK. If it’s brandy, also OK. And if I could be bothered to find out I would, but I can’t. And whatever it is, I couldn’t afford it anyway.

About Writing.

I’m writing some pretty tedious stuff on this blog lately, aren’t I? The fact is that I feel the need to write something – whatever it might be and irrespective of how it might be received – because it’s the only link I have to my human side. The problem is that I’m in the doldrums most of the time now, so there isn’t much about which to wax eloquent or even enthusiastic. At the same time, it wouldn’t do to make every other blog post a matter of ‘woe is me; I’m so depressed’ because, if I did, I’d start to sound like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and who would want to?

So anyway…

I’m currently reading my second Kazuo Ishiguro novel: Never Let Me Go. It’s all written in the first person by the main protagonist, Kathy, who writes as a person might speak, and so the prose style has an unusually vernacular feel about it. I find that a little discomfiting because I generally like a prose style that is rich, lyrical and emotionally evocative. So far, this isn’t any of those. There’s also an awful lot of seemingly trivial detail being recounted, which can be a bit yawn-inducing at times. And yet it keeps me turning the page, as did Klara and the Sun about which similar things could be said.

What’s also a problem is that the film version (starring the utterly glorious Cary Mulligan) happens to be one of my very favourite films, and when you know what’s coming you naturally want more than just plot to give you a reason to read it. But I am still reading it, and I will continue to the end because that’s what I do.

So there you have it for what it’s worth, and sorry if it induced a yawn.

On Failure and a Saviour.

I had another of those days again today. My internet dropped out at around a quarter to eleven and all the usual ploys to get it back failed. I tried four times, but to no avail. And so I called my ISP.

That is, I tried to call my ISP. (Oh dear, I think I’d better make this brief. The whole story would take until tomorrow to type and would be extremely boring.)

Suffice it to say that two hours later I was none the wiser and the internet was still comatose, so I went out for a belated walk without having spoken to anybody. Speaking to somebody is the old fashioned way, of course, and that’s what I’d tried first. It is, after all, the primary means by which humans have communicated ever since we’ve been on this planet, but it’s fallen out of favour now with just about everybody who controls our lives. And I had also tried to jump through their new hoops via text and automated reply, but that hadn’t worked either.

In consequence, the walk was not a pleasant one, being heavily polluted with frustration and no small sense of anxiety over the question of how one might manage to navigate even the simplest of lifestyles these days (and I do live a very simple lifestyle) without access to the internet. When I got back the internet had woken up, so I tried to put the whole thing behind me. The only problem now is that I’m constantly on edge waiting for the same thing to happen again. But let’s move on.

*  *  *

I turned on the TV news at midday, just in time to see a reporter asking a man standing in a field and wearing a funny hat how he felt about the Queen’s-death-and-funeral business. I didn’t wait for his reply. The whole media treatment of this event has now become so trite and absurd that I can’t stand it any longer.

*  *  *

The afternoon’s strenuous garden work laid me fairly low because I’m not as fit or strong or supple as I used to be. And it isn’t going to get any better.

*  *  *

This evening I braved the sudden, and fairly extreme, drop in temperature to sally forth in search of a horse which might appreciate an apple and a carrot. They’re in short supply these days, you know. (Horses, that is, not apples and carrots.) I haven’t seen Rosie for several weeks, the little white pony at the end of Mill Lane has definitely gone, and the two strapping geldings which have appeared in a field a little way down my lane are never there when I have comestibles to bestow. But Millie was. Dear Millie was in her field and close enough to the school fence to recognise who was approaching. Millie got the goods, so let’s hear it for dearest Millie who saved the day.

Becoming the Wistful Hunchback.

I waved at, and spoke nicely to, three little girls today, all being walked home from school by their dear mamas. None of them waved back or spoke, and it occurred to me that this could be the thin end of the wedge.

The next stage will be where they whimper and try to hide behind each other, while the happy little dogs accompanying the group and being led by the dear mamas will suddenly turn restive and bark at me aggressively. And it struck me that being the sort to frighten little girls is rather more disturbing than being aware of my mortality and knowing that I will have to die one day.

I sometimes wonder where I shall be when that day arrives. Will I still be living here, a capable and independent householder, or will I be in a hospital or rest home somewhere far from the mostly peaceful Shire? Perhaps it will be in the bell tower of the local church, and then little girls will tell stories about me far into the future when they’ve grown into dear mamas and grandmamas themselves.

On Fake Emotion and Feeling Robbed.

I’m growing tired of all this Queen business that’s filling the news pages and TV screens again every day. I’m even growing tired of writing about it, but not much else is happening at the moment so why not? I mean, what else can they say? How many more depths can they plumb? Today we had ‘Mourners in tears at sight of Queen’s coffin.’

I don’t believe it, you know. There was very little evidence of such high emotional commitment to the Queen when she was alive, and my revised view is that it’s all about releasing a pressure valve. People have been under a level of stress unfamiliar to most of them over the past few years, what with Covid, Ukraine, climate change and the cost of living crisis, and the death of the Queen has simply been the trigger to externalise it.

But what would I know? I wouldn’t, would I, so maybe it’s time I shut up. (Although I must just mention: ‘We re-enacted our marriage vows in honour of Her Majesty.’ That one is so patently absurd as to be amusing at least.)

(What’s bothering me much more at the moment is something I discovered recently, and was reminded of again by an ad which has persistently soiled my inbox all day. Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Son (though now solo apparently) is married to Cary Mulligan. That’s upsetting, because what chance is there now that Cary, bless her Lady B eyes, will learn of me, want to meet me, and then beg to be the light of my firmament for the rest of what time I have left? Even less than there was before, I’d say.)

But back to royalty for a moment. I could have met Princess Anne once, you know. I say ‘met’, but you don’t actually meet royal personages. What happens is that you stand dutifully in a line (whether you want to go to the bathroom or not) until she comes level with you. You bow, she offers the weakest of handshakes and asks ‘and what do you do?’ to which you reply ‘not a lot’, and then she does the dismissive version of the royal smile before moving onto the next victim. It was at the theatre where I worked once. I declined to go in that day because, I said, I don’t do bows. It made me briefly unpopular but we got over it.

Raining Luck?

For some reason I’ve developed an odd fascination with the old 1930s classic ballad Pennies from Heaven.

 

I’m not quite sure exactly what one is supposed to infer from the enigmatic lyrics, much less why the song has suddenly captured my interest, but you can listen to it here if you like. It’s the original Arthur Tracy version which many consider the best. 

The Bats Came Back.

My garden came alive this evening with the arrival of several bats out a-hunting. They were flying close, too, which is always a thrill. And I was particularly pleased because that sort of thing used to be an almost daily occurrence during the warmer months, but it hasn’t happened for several years.

So to what do I owe this sudden reprise of an old pleasure? I imagine it was because hibernation beckons, and when it’s nearly time to go to sleep for several months, a bat needs to get fat. But why today specifically? Probably the fact that all my hedges received the attention of blade-wielding contractors today, so maybe there were lots of homeless insects about.

Whatever the reason, it was delightful to see them. But apologies to insects everywhere. Life really isn’t fair, is it?

A Reason Never to Go Out.

I had to get my picture taken today in one of those booths with a curtain across so nobody can see you looking stupid. (They should really have a soundproofed door so nobody can hear you scream.) I followed all the prompts, and pressed all the right buttons, and paid the unearthly fee of £8, and tried to look intelligent, and then went outside and waited for my little strip of pictures to appear. Eventually they did, and I soon wished they hadn’t.

I know these booths never take pictures which might be described as flattering, and I know I’m older than the last time I used one, and I know I look like a cross between Quasimodo and Golum these days, but I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw there. ‘Do I really look that terrible?’ I asked myself. ‘Possibly not,’ I answered, ‘but you never know.’

I knocked on the cabinet in hope of being able to complain to the little person with the camera, but nobody appeared. I expect they’ve been told to stay still and very quiet until the disgruntled customer slinks dejectedly away, and that’s what I did eventually.

If I could be certain that nobody ever looks at this blog I might be tempted to post the picture here, but there’s evidence to suggest that about three people still do so they’ll just have to imagine it.

The Matter of What Matters.

Do you know what was the most-read feature on the BBC News website today? This was the news event which attracted more interest than anything else going on in the world.

Forget Putin’s prospective meeting with Xi (which might include how to take over Eurasia and carve it up between them.) Forget Ukrainian advances in the war. Forget the rash of people in Lebanon holding up bank tellers at gunpoint purely to draw their own money out because everybody’s assets have been frozen. Forget the pro-Trump nutcase in America trying to take New Hampshire away from the Democrats. Forget the killer natural disasters happening all over the place. It was none of those. The headline ran:

William and Harry to walk behind coffin

And do you remember the headline: ‘Andrew to take care of corgis’? They didn’t let the subject drop at that, because today we had:

Welsh farmer’s dog sired Queen’s corgi

But best of all was this one:

Stay of execution for palace mice 

Traps to be un-baited until Tuesday

OK, I admit it. I made that one up for the sake of going with the flow. Fits nicely, though, doesn’t it?

Visiting What Isn't There.

The big Queen news today is the matter of the much-vaunted ‘lying in state’ (though in a closed coffin), first in Edinburgh and then in London from tomorrow. Apparently, thousands of people queued all night to file past the casket, and thousands more are expected in London over the next few days.

(This does rather suggest a scenario, doesn’t it? One of the filing-past mourners asks the attendant – I assume there must be some kind of attendant or guard of honour or something – a question:

“’Scuse me, mate.”

“What?”

“How do we know she’s in there?”

“I can assure you, she is.”

“Not proof though, is it? Couldn’t you open it up and let’s have a peek?”

“Move along please.”

But now I’m being flippant, so let’s move on.)

I once saw a TV drama in which a pathologist was taking a group of students through the process of conducting a post mortem (autopsy if you prefer.) The first thing the pathologist said was “You mustn’t think of this as a person. It’s just a body. The person has gone.”

It made sense to me then and it still does. Everything that made the physical manifestation a person is no more. It’s a human body, but not a human being. It’s now a mass of inert biological material beginning the natural process of decay. The person has gone, OK? In this case it certainly isn’t a Queen because you have to be alive to be one of those.

So why are people so keen to file past it, and even go without sleep in order to do so?

I suspect that most of them think it’s because they want to express their sense of mourning for someone who was important to them, even though they’d never met her, were never going to meet her, were certainly never going to visit her on an ad hoc basis to chat about the weather over morning coffee, and she isn’t actually there anyway.

And are they really in mourning? I expect those of a diehard royalist persuasion might be, but I further suspect that most are there for a slightly different reason: they want to be there in order to join with the masses in a kind of inverted celebration of what might be seen as a momentous event in history. It serves the need to belong.

And that’s why I wouldn’t bother.

(It also reminds of that favourite Far Side cartoon in which a man in full climbing gear is descending a hole in the ground. When asked why he’s doing it he replies: “Because it isn’t there.”)

Chalk and Cheese.

Somebody else told me the other day that I looked like Clint Eastwood. Could it be significant that both claimants were female, I wonder? In any event, let’s take a look. This was Clint Eastwood in his prime:

 

 And this was me in mine:

 

 

Where’s the similarity? I never had a hat like that. And besides, I imagine that Clint approves of the swing to the right in Swedish politics, whereas I don’t. (And just as I was beginning to warm to them.)

Overkill.

I just opened the BBC UK News page and counted the number of features it had published. There were twenty four. And then I counted the ones that were about the Queen: twenty one.

So then I looked at the World News site and found it full of reactions around the world to the death of the UK monarch. (There was a bit about Ukraine as well.)

BBC Sports News next. There were reports about weekend sporting fixtures being cancelled because the funeral will be on Monday. I suppose that’s fair enough up to a point, but then we get a piece about the England cricket team’s victory against South Africa today, and the headline is a quotation from the captain: ‘England took inspiration from the Queen.’ Oh right; I bet they did.

I imagine editors cajoling their feature writers: ‘We’ve got to fill the site with more about the Queen but we’re running out of ideas. Give me something new.’ ‘How about the fate of the dogs?’ suggests one enterprising young hack. ‘’The dogs?’ ‘Yeah. She liked corgis, didn’t she?’  ‘Nice one,’ says the editor, much relieved. ‘Find out and write it up.’ And that, no doubt, is how we got the one entitled: ‘Prince Andrew to Take Care of the Corgis.’

The only one of these features I could be bothered to read was the one about several people being arrested for shouting anti-monarchist slogans in public. (The police deemed it a public order offence.) That has to be a bit worrying, doesn’t it? You know, freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully protest in a democracy? I gather one protester was later de-arrested. I didn’t even know that a person could be de-arrested, but apparently the malefactor is now ‘voluntarily assisting officers.’

This country is becoming sillier and sillier.

Connections and Coincidences.

Take a look at the picture posted below. The woman on the right is my mother, the one on the left my Auntie Hilda, my father’s youngest sister. And here’s the story:

They’d known each other as children when they’d lived in the same area and played together. Many years later my mother met my father and only then discovered that Hilda was his sister. A year or so after this picture was taken my parents separated and the two women never met again, but approximately forty years later they both died within forty minutes of each other, one in a hospice in Stoke on Trent and the other in a hospital in Coventry.

Coincidences can occasionally seem somehow meaningful, can’t they?

 

 

*  *  *

And here’s another little coincidence:

Yesterday was a highly stressful one for me, and today I seem to be in the throes of the old Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The sense of inner weakness occasioning both physical and mental dysfunction would be impossible to fully describe, but it’s quite unpleasant. It feels as though the life force is being dangerously stretched and might snap at any moment. And the coincidence is that the performance of my computer accurately reflects the performance of my mind and body. It nearly always does.

On Family and the Importance of Hats.

A very pretty 21-year-old woman said ‘love you’ to me today, which was rather sweet. And the fact that she was one of my granddaughters made it really quite moving. And the other two (I have three, you know) told me several times how glad they were that they had inherited my (slightly unconventional) genes. If I may reprise a sentence which appears about a hundred and fifty times in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: ‘I did not say anything.’

I should mention that I had a visit today from my daughter and three granddaughters. My daughter told me the story of her aunt’s misgivings regarding her marriage way back whenever it was. On the day before the nuptials were to be performed she had communicated her fears to her mother and said that she didn’t think she was able to go through with it, to which her mother replied: ‘You have to. We’ve bought the hats.’

Her aunt and uncle are, incidentally, still married and apparently despise one another.

Staying Put.

It’s often occurred to me throughout my life that we in the UK – and most of the rest of Europe come to that – live a life relatively free of the kind of hazards commonly found in much of the rest of the world.

Take America, for example. I for one cannot imagine how anybody could possibly feel comfortable living in a country which has bears, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, alligators, tornadoes, hurricanes, active volcanoes, fearsomely cold winters, scorchingly hot summers, American TV, National Guardsmen, and Donald Trump supporters.

And what about Australia? Salt water crocodiles in the billabong, venomous spiders in the shower, Great White sharks in the paddling pools, man-eating ants in the garage, and seemingly the most inept politicians on the planet.

How on earth do they get through life with that lot on the doorstep?