Seeing Spectres in a Wet Twilight.

Darkness fell early this dreary twilight. When I went out to manage the bird feeders before retiring and locking up, the western sky which should have been red from the setting sun was but a mass of dark mist rendering the skyline invisible. And the rain which had been falling relentlessly since early afternoon continued its mindless pattering on the hood of my raincoat.

It took my mind back to one of my more favoured short stories, The Passenger, in which the protagonist sets off in just such conditions to drive through the wilder parts of northern Scotland en route to Ullapool. On the way he encounters the mysterious young woman dressed only in a white shift, at which point his paranormal adventure begins.

Fortunately, there were no young women in white shifts walking up my lane in need of rescue. I think I would have noticed, gloom or no gloom. And hopefully I shall be spared the experience of having a sopping wet wraith appear in my bed at dead of night.

It could just as easily have taken me back to the old comedy classic, Oh Mr Porter, and the eponymous gentleman’s similarly rain-sodden arrival at the remote rural railway station at Buggleskelly in Ireland having just been told the legend of the phantom miller who haunts the station and haunts the hill and the land that lies between.

Imagination can be such fun when the dull air drips and the dark sky drops and the day goes glooming down in wet and weariness.

The True Cleverness of Women.

I saw a middle aged woman and a young woman in Ashbourne today, both peering into a pram containing a newborn baby. (I sneaked a quick peek as I walked past.) It struck me yet again that women have one undeniable basis for claiming superiority over men: they can build new human beings and we can’t. I never cease to be in awe of the magic contained in that fact.

It never occurred to me, you know, before the Lady B gave birth to her first child a little over five years ago. I can’t help thinking it must mean something, but I don’t know what.

On Being Lifted and Dropped.

The Lady Fu has been very much on the ball over the past week, introducing me to a whole Gaggle of Gorgeous Girlies and thereby keeping my spirits a little more buoyant than they mostly have been for the past (pick a number) years. (None of them were actually girls in the strictest sense I might add, being all over the age of majority. But not by much, and my fondness for alliteration declines to be denied.)

Yesterday I had my Ms Medeea fix, and today it was the turn of a young Arab woman called something beginning with F. I keep thinking Fatima, but I’m sure that’s no more right than the misguided notion that all Australian women are called Sheila. I think it might have been Farah, but anyway…

Her job was to take the latest phial of blood from my reluctant arm, but first we played the game of guessing where she came from. I tried Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco… ‘Cold. Go further east.’ OK. Saudi Arabia. ‘Close.’ Iraq? ‘Nope: Palestine.’ So then we talked about Palestine, how difficult the Arabic language is to learn, and how lucky we Brits are in not having to learn anybody else’s language because nearly everybody else speaks ours. (I suppose I should say a reluctant ‘thank you’ to America for giving the world a language that is close enough to English that we generally have little trouble understanding it.)

And then she asked me whether I liked to be warned before she put the needle in. Now, in all the years of having blood tests, vaccinations, and cannulas thrust into various parts of my arm, nobody has ever asked me that before. I brushed it nonchalantly aside, of course, because I still retain the merest smidgeon of pride in what little is left of my masculinity. And you know what? I never even felt the needle go in. That was another first. I assumed that Arabic women must be expert in the business of sticking sharp things into people, and speculated that it might derive from the near-legendary reputation of Damascus steel.

(But now I’m being silly. And it’s all in the game.)

*  *  *

Shortly after I got back I received an email from E.ON, my energy supplier, which knocked me off the top step and back to the basement as missives from E.ON usually do. Normal service was resumed with another reminder that our increasingly divided and dysfunctional society is being ever more controlled by an unholy alliance of politicians and the corporate world. I think I might have said that before, but since I’m now awash with glumness again I thought it worth repeating.

Balancing the Benefit.

I went for my dental appointment with the incomparable Ms Medeea Popei today and realised that visits to her presence amount to my 6-monthly ‘Medeea fix.’ (You know me and my need for dog fixes. This is a new one.) I get called in by the nurse who asks ‘how are you today?’ and I reply grumpily ‘no comment.’ But when I walk into Ms M’s den the calm, caring energies are almost palpable. I willingly submit my supine form to her questions, conversation, advice, and physical attention with the scrapy thing, and come out feeling a whole lot lighter. Whoever would have thought it?

And now I’m the beneficiary of two new groups of best buddies. They consist of two small herds of bullocks resident in two of the fields up the lane. Whenever I walk past they rush to the gate and look at me imploringly until I go and talk to them and scratch a few ears. Cows like having their ears scratched. They throw their heads around in joyful abandon – the force of which makes you realise just how much damage they could do to you if they took it into their heads to be aggressive. But they’re not aggressive with me, and I take great pleasure in the feeling that maybe I’m making the daily lot of a few young cows just that little bit more tolerable.

So is it all a sort of balancing act? I like to think so.

Deriding Delilah.

The song Delilah, made famous by Tom Jones, is the subject of some dispute at the moment. For some reason unknown to me (but probably to do with Tom Jones being a Welshman) it’s become the anthem of Welsh rugby union, being frequently rendered by the crowd and visiting entertainers alike. But now those who run matters pertaining to Welsh rugby matches have told the entertainers that they must no longer include the song in their repertoire because it’s about violence by a man against a woman. And so I asked myself whether that is a justifiable reason to ban a song.

It is, indeed, a song about a man murdering his partner on discovering her infidelity, but that’s only the surface of the story. Go a little deeper and it becomes obvious that the song is really about a man driven to a state of insanity by infidelity and subsequent mockery. In a French court such an act would undoubtedly be deemed a crime of passion and treated differently than an act of violence not so engendered. And even in an English court the reason behind the act would be offered in mitigation on the grounds of temporary insanity. The song does, after all, include the line: ‘forgive me Delilah, I just couldn’t take any more.’ In short, it would be reasonable to assert that the song is about a temporary, though extreme, burst of mental ill health.

So what’s my verdict on the matter? My own personal jury is still out because I find violence committed by men against women utterly deplorable. It’s why I couldn’t watch the much-vaunted drama Game of Thrones beyond the first episode, however good it might be as a dramatic work.

But that’s a matter personal to me. The history of highly-regarded drama, fiction, and folk tales contains many examples of men committing violent acts against women. So should we bowdlerise Shakespeare and the Greek myths? Even the hard line members of the liberal alter-establishment are not suggesting we should, so what makes this song suitable for different treatment?

I don’t think anything does unless you count that brand of snobbery which ring-fences all aspects of high cultural tradition while deriding popular genres, and I don’t think such is the case here. I think it’s another example of needing to keep a careful eye on pendulums which swing too far.

On Tesco's Tipsy Till (with quotes.)

It is happening again

~ Twin Peaks 1990

 

Everything is broken

~ JJ Beazley 2023

I went into Tesco today to buy a few oddments, and as I had a lot of loose change in my pocket I decided to pay by cash. I waited for a Cash and Card till to be free and went about my business.

The bill was £10.80, so I loaded 80p worth of loose change into the machine and waited for confirmation (supermarket tills are notoriously slow at simple addition.) And then I placed a £10 note into the requisite slot – which the machine accepted – and waited for confirmation again. The machine remained silent and inscrutable, save for a message on the screen which read:

£10 still to pay

(~ Self service till Tesco 2023)

I waited a while longer, but in vain. It asked me whether I wished to continue. I pressed ‘Yes.’ And then it asked me again (and again.) Eventually it switched its red light on and an assistant came bustling over. I explained the situation to her, carefully maintaining a calm countenance in an effort to reassure her that I was not a shoplifter and really had given the machine a £10 note.

She took out a bundle of keys, opened the door of the recalcitrant piece of technology, and proceeded to extract a pot with a yellow lid. She seemed to be expecting to find a £10 note trapped in it, but the pot was empty.

The manager had to be sent for

He came and he said ‘what’s to do?’

~ Albert and the Lion 1932

The assistant explained to me that access to the deeper recesses would be necessary, and that such access required a magic key, a key so important that only the manager is allowed possession of it. The minutes ticked by as I waited. It’s what minutes usually do, and so I steeled myself to be patient. Eventually the manager arrived clutching the magic key, and he was not a he but a she.

She proceeded to dismantle various items of the machine’s intestines, but remained silent. I mentioned that I was becoming a little frustrated by the fact that everything seems to be broken these days. No reply. I suggested that the machine might have been on the gin again. Still no reply. She opened a different pot containing lots of banknotes, the top one of which was probably mine because it had a light crease down the middle where it had been folded in my pocket. She remained not only silent, but as inscrutable as the machine.

She faffed and firked with the machine’s innards. She pressed button after button on the screen. She began to frown and look bewildered. Eventually she took out a note and coins to the value of £10.80 and instructed the lackey to put my shopping through another till. Said lackey emptied my bag and scanned the contents through a different, and presumably stone cold sober, machine, and replaced the items in my bag. (I was a little concerned that my bag was of the Sainsbury’s variety, not Tesco. I asked her whether she was afraid of developing a rash if she touched it. She smiled and said something unintelligible and then the matter was concluded. She handed me the bag of shopping and a receipt which I presumed amounted to permission to leave the store.

She speaks!

~ Bride of Frankenstein 1935

I touched the manager’s arm and said ‘thank you for your efforts’ just because I’m nice like that. ‘You’re welcome,’ she replied. She might have said ‘sorry about the trouble; thank you for your patience’ (because the whole episode had taken around 15 constantly ticking minutes), but she didn’t. This is the corporate world we’re dealing with, so maybe that’s not so surprising.

I walked out of the store half expecting to be apprehended by security, but there was no security visible. I expect it’s an economy measure. Or maybe the payroll program is broken and he’s got another job which pays cash. Who can tell?

Mostly Good.

I received an email this morning which contained a hint that the matter which has been bringing me so low lately might be about to improve. Early days, though. It’s a wait and see situation.

And then my morning walk treated me to a most unusual number of encounters: three young – or youngish – women, a splendid chestnut gelding, and two dogs which approached me to pay their respects without need of invitation. Needless to say I spent the rest of the walk in a state of disorientation. It seems the Lady Fu was in a particularly benevolent mood today. (She’s the one who occasionally treats me to random encounters with young women, dogs, and horses. I suspect she’s an intern in the pantheon of benevolent Chinese goddesses.)

This afternoon I received a telephone call from another young woman – a lady from Donegal who is one of the Senior Urology Nurses at the Royal Derby. She’d called to tell me that the CT scans I had a couple of weeks ago were ‘perfect’ (her term.) I like the word ‘perfect.’ So now it appears I will probably have to trudge through another winter, like it or not, but it’s still good to be told that my torso is perfect.

But then another encounter left me fairly convinced that a perceived connection I’ve been harbouring for many a long year has been unilaterally dismissed. I bear no ill will. Life moves on. (But it did hurt just a little.)

And what about the strange cat which loomed out of the heavy growth in the glooming garden at twilight yesterday? It was a most handsome creature – mostly white with a few tortoiseshell patches. It stood and stared at me for a few seconds, and then did what cats always do: turned tail and ran away at high speed. It seems that dogs and horses like me but cats don’t. I have no idea why.

My writing style is lacking fluidity lately. That’s a shame because I’m the sort who considers style to be at least as important as content, maybe even more so. Robert Louis Stevenson showed me that thirty years ago. Not giving up yet.

On Low Mood and Brexit's Revenge.

I was going to write a post about why I, a nature lover, lean towards disagreeing with the current trend for re-wilding, at least insofar as it relates to Europe. But I’m not in the mood for being serious, and when I’m not in the mood I write badly, as evidenced by recent posts.

The problem is that nothing amusing, surreal, exciting, or mysterious has happened lately, so where do I go to satisfy the monomania?

The weather, I suppose. It’s what the British famously do: when we’ve got nothing else to say we talk about the weather, so…

The weather today was a creature of manic mood swings, from warm, dry, sunny, and calm, to thunder, lightning, strong winds, and torrential rain. And they were getting all mixed up as though confusion reigned in heaven and earth. (And down here on earth I even saw a neighbour washing his car while thunder boomed, lightning flashed, and rain poured down in biblical quantities. I thought it a little odd, but then I realised it was his wife’s car, so maybe she had threatened dire consequences if the vehicle wasn’t shining by 1 o’clock.)

It’s also a fact that the temperature has been unusually low by the standards normally expected of July, at least in the middle of England where I live it has. And yet, ironically, it appears that our storms and rain are consequent upon the frightful heatwave they’re suffering in central and southern Europe. I expect it’s yet another side effect of Brexit (which I voted against, you might remember.) As for the twilight, well… Today’s twilight did full justice to Tennyson’s famous words relating to the last days of Camelot (which I quote in full instead of the shortened version I usually quote):

The wan day went glooming down in wet and weariness

I suspect Alfred Lord Tennyson was as much affected by climatic conditions as I am, but we don’t appear to have much else in common. I live in a small house which leaks; he lived in several big ones which probably didn’t.

On Hollywood and Questionable Priorities.

The BBC World News website carries stories of various kinds from around the globe. Today’s headline – and it’s been there all day – is about the strike by Hollywood actors and staff writers. So the question has to be asked: why is this threat to the big studios in Hollywood today’s biggest international news item?

I suppose it’s because Hollywood is the world capital of cinematic entertainment. (Some people try to claim it’s an arm of the arts establishment, but I don’t believe it for a second. It’s about making mega bucks through the medium of entertainment.)

So let’s consider what entertainment is about. It’s about lifestyle, pure and simple. And I’ve long been concerned that life in the free market west has become so dominated by lifestyle that it stands above many of the more fundamental aspects of life in the matter of priority. It’s one of the major factors in keeping a tiny number of mega rich people mega rich, and mega rich people are highly influential when it comes to the promotion of priorities.

And that, I suggest, is why the strike is perceived as being of such importance. Hollywood is a major player in the dissemination of entertainment, and its tentacles spread far and wide throughout the world. By contrast, and for example, the food emergency in Kenya is of relatively little importance to a world obsessed with lifestyle. Am I wrong in finding that a little sad?

On Bad Days and Curses.

What a day of days today was. The morning was liberally filled with one sort of malfunction after another – corporate systems, the computer, the printer, and the mobile phone. I spent so much time trudging through it all to sort out a nagging problem with my energy supplier (as usual) that I was over an hour late going for my routine lunchtime walk, taken in a state of mind wholly unsuitable for the enjoyment of the bucolic idyll.

But at least the lateness proved serendipitous. It placed me in just the right place to be passed by the Lady B’s car, and this time I could be sure it was her. The vehicle and sun were in just the right relative positions to see the driver clearly and enable recognition. The wave was no mystery this time, and the accompanying smile went a little way to improving my mood.

Until, that is, I got home and found a worrying email from my daughter. The parlous nature of the day was not be denied, it seemed, and it was followed by much difficulty with the book-keeping work I’d set myself to do in the afternoon. And then my internet dropped out. I reset the router to get it back, and then my browser crashed. Friday 13^th has never caused me any difficulty, but today was Thursday 13^th and I wondered whether the old superstition has been getting it wrong all these centuries.

This evening I went for a late walk armed with raw carrot for Millie the Horse. She was in the middle of the field and therefore unreachable (for reason previously explained.) But on the way back I was the grateful beneficiary of a second smile and wave, this time from the Lady B’s dear mama. She slowed as she passed me as usual, and I began to wonder why she does that even when the carriageway is easily wide enough to accommodate a vehicle and pedestrian in perfect safety. I came up with three theories:

1) She is naturally careful for safety’s sake, even when it isn’t necessary.

2) It’s a conscious or unconscious instinct when she’s passing a person she knows.

3) She fears that if she takes a hand off the wheel to wave, the car might take it in its head to become uncontrollable and disaster might ensue.

I decided that 1) is the most likely and 3) the most absurd. But if all those clever scientists can’t even be sure whether or not anything came before the Big Bang, what hope is there that one common mortal can know the mind of another?

*  *  *

Through all of today’s issues I made occasional forays onto the BBC News website, and sank even lower when confronted with the parlous state of the human condition. I saw the never ending procession of murderers, abusers, psychopaths, and the dispiriting panoply of presidents, potentates, and politicians who are so easily moved to take the life of innocents with a perfunctory wave of their blood-ridden hands.

I was thinking about it as I was walking along Meadow Lane (having just remarked to myself that the barley on a field running down to the river was ready for harvesting), when an inner voice accosted me:

‘But surely,’ said the still, small voice, ‘you must allow for the fact that there are many good people in this world – kind, humanitarian, altruistic people who truly want to make the world better.’

‘I know,’ I replied, but let’s put it this way: If you go into a pub and order a pint of beer, it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll get a pint glass of nothing but beer. If instead you’re given a glass consisting of half beer and half engine oil, you would discard it in disgust because the oil would pollute the beer and render it undrinkable. That’s the problem. Goodness should be the universal condition, but the bad people pollute it and render it unpalatable.’

‘You’re just a hopeless idealist,’ offered the still, small voice.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘It’s one of the worst of my curses.’

On Existential Theories and Insignificance.

After getting myself a bit worked up about the danger posed by AI, a thought occurred. Could it be that God is an advanced form of AI which manufactured the whole of phenomenal reality for its own amusement, knowing that we humans would eventually manufacture an inferior version of itself?

But if that’s the case, who or what created the advanced form of AI? I suppose the Hindu trinity of Tat, Sat, and Aum would be a favourite candidate, but then who or what created the Hindu trinity?

*  *  *

And I gather that some quantum physicists are now speculating that the big bang (and all those mind-bogglingly complicated things that go with it) was created by an earlier form of the universe. They’re suggesting (apparently) that, contrary to the current received wisdom, time and matter did exist before the big bang went boom. And further, that one day our known universe will completely collapse, thus setting up the creation of the next universe in which everything will happen just as it did in this one. And yet further, that this process has been going on in both directions, past and future, to infinity. I’m told that Buddhism teaches something similar.

Of course, I might have got this all wrong because my own intelligence is not artificial and is somewhat limited. If I haven’t, it seems as though all we humans can do is keep on fetching water and chopping wood for ever and ever. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of sawdust left at the bottom of a Russian doll when all the pieces have been removed.

On Nature's Illusion.

I think it’s true to say that we folks living in temperate latitudes generally agree that winter lasts longer than summer, even though we know it doesn’t. I used to think that it was a simple temporal illusion on a par with the fact that time appears to rush by when we’re active and having fun, but drags when we’re sedentary and feeling bored. But this evening I realised that there’s a more compelling reason.

During the summer, nature is constantly changing its appearance. The leaves on the trees are coloured various hues in early summer, but gradually standardise to a regular green as the light increases and the air becomes warmer. The blossom that arrives early eventually falls to be replaced by berries or fruit. The flowers in the garden are particularly notable for being in a constant state of flux, from the early crocuses and primroses to the final flowering of the sedums which presage the change from high summer to the onset of autumn. In short, nature is constantly reminding us that time is flowing relentlessly as the world turns.

Winter is different. From somewhere around the end of November to late February, nature goes into visual stasis. The world still turns and time continues to flow, but the view across the landscape looks pretty much the same. And so it seems to our minds that time has stopped. Only the change in day length offers the truth of the matter, but the cold winds and lack of colour are potent distractions.

I wonder why it’s taken me this long to notice something so obvious.

Evolution: Then and Now.

This was me a very long time ago (but post-hippie by quite a long way), living in a different Shire about fifteen miles from here. At the time I was in one of the lower reaches of the rollercoaster which has been my life – clandestine affair, imminent divorce, my best friend (Em the dog) had recently died, and my day job was getting me down badly.

 

 

This was me around ten years later. Odd though it might seem, I was on the up slope at the time. 

 

And then I found the ring, murdered my buddy, and transformed into this.

You should see me now. Cats, being the smart and selective little creatures they are, flee my close presence. Even the wasps avoid me, and women no longer smile in amusement when they spot me shuffling my lonely little way across the market town alone and unregarded.

I’m in a flat mood today. I know I should be doing things, but I can’t be bothered to engage with anything that needs doing. It’s why I’m adding to the blog in the afternoon. Most unusual.

But something interesting happened yesterday. The Lady B’s car passed me on the lane and I could have sworn I saw several arms and hands raised in waves. I used to think I wasn’t prone to hallucinations, but now I know better.

Postscript Notes:

A few of the statements above are a little exaggerated, but not by much. And I’m intending to have chips and salad for my dinner. (My limited culinary skills are becoming tedious in the extreme.) Still no word from the hospital regarding the CT scans. My energy supplier, E.ON, continues to be incompetent

On Steam Trains and Futuristic Monsters.

If I go a day without making a blog post the day feels incomplete. And so last night, having gone three days without writing one, I set about filling the void. I spent an hour rambling on about a particular set of petty bureaucrats being pettily bureaucratic as usual, and taking political correctness beyond the bounds of acceptability. I had to break off at one point, and so I left it with the intention of completing it later. When later came I decided it was utterly tedious and cast it aside.

This is a symptom of a wider issue. I’ve reached the point of feeling like an old steam locomotive which has run out of steam. All the old sparkles which used to provide the fuel to heat the boiler to produce the energy to keep moving onwards have gone now, and I see no more in prospect.

So where is this going? I don’t know; I’m whinging and I don’t want whinging to become my only attribute. But I must say this:

The state of the world and the human condition is driving me to distraction these days, and I said recently that I’m becoming ever more convinced that a major sea shift in the affairs of mankind is looming. I was expecting it to be brought about by one of the three currently perceived threats – climate change, economic meltdown, or another world war. But it seems that a fourth is possibly more imminent, and that’s the development of artificial intelligence.

Many of the scientists currently working on AI are going public with their belief that AI is a potential monster which could threaten not only the way we’re used to living, but our very existence as a species. And they’re not joking. Some say that all further development must stop immediately, while others take the view that we simply need to be more careful. But their views probably don’t count for much anyway because AI has attracted the attention of the military machines owned by the world’s major powers, and if there’s one thing military machines won’t permit, it’s the possibility of falling behind the game. And so development is bound to continue, like it or not.

It’s being speculated by those in the know that AI will reach the point of being capable of annihilating the human race in as little as ten years if it should choose to do so. They say that this is not science fantasy, nor even science fiction; this is real.

So now where do I go? I have no idea, except to hope that this old steam locomotive will be cold and permanently stationery by the time the sentient robots – which have ‘no moral compass’, as the popular phrase has it – reach their potential.

More Random Bits.

My routine trip to Ashbourne today provided another example of something I’ve been complaining about for a few years – the systems out there in that world I try to avoid are becoming increasingly broken. And I was further reminded that so many of those entrusted with operating the systems are hidebound and inflexible at best, and seriously incompetent at worst. I still incline strongly to the belief that the Thatcher/Blair years were responsible for downgrading British society, but since I claim to know nothing I can’t be sure. Ashbourne was otherwise uneventful, apart from the fact that I gave up browsing the charity shops because too many bloody tourists kept getting in the way.

But it’s good to see that the barley on the lower fields down near the river is now ripe. It’s a bit stunted after the dry spring, but at least it’s yellow and ready for harvesting. I have a particular fondness for barley, you know. I love the way it ripples in waves when the wind blows. When I was in my teens I was particularly drawn to a traditional Irish ballad called The Wind that Shakes the Barley. It seems I was already aware of the propensity of barley to charm the eye even though I’d grown up in the suburbs of a city and didn’t know what it looked like. Maybe it was another genetic memory from the Irish part of my ancestry.

The wheat on the higher parts, on the other hand, has now reached the pale green, pre-ripening stage, adding another hue to the patchwork of variable greens which grace the lowlands and uplands of the Shire’s topography.

And the moths finally came out to grace the twilit garden today in spite of the unseasonably low temperature. They’re late this year. I remember that time a couple of years ago when they were playing the part of fairies on Midsummer’s Night. They missed their cue by a couple of weeks this year, but at least they’ve now turned up.

And I saw three swallows yesterday. Three!

Surviving the Trials and Ending on a High.

I negotiated today’s principal necessity with fortitude. I went for the CT scans and emerged relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, there’s nothing amusing to report because nothing amusing happened (unless you count the incident with the car park ticket which I’ll mention in a mo.) The staff are thin on the ground at the Royal Derby Hospital at the moment (as they are in all hospitals, I gather; shortage of staff in the NHS is a big political issue these days.) I used to be seen by three or four clinical staff before I made it into the scanner suite, but today one woman was doing all the jobs. I sympathised, naturally. And I managed a little of my usual banter, but nothing worth repeating.

The only drama happened when my car reached the ticket machine at the front of the queue (by which time I’d been moving slowly up the queue for nearly half an hour.) I waited for about five minutes for the screen to replace ‘car park full’ with ‘please take ticket’, but as I reached out to grasp the little piece of paper being disgorged from the appropriate slot, the wind caught it and blew it away. Such an occurrence has never happened to me before, and the problem should be obvious: you need to have the ticket for payment and validation in order to get out again. I opened the driver’s door just wide enough to see the ticket lying on the grass a few feet away, but the door wouldn’t open any wider because the ticket machine was in the way. I thought quickly – unusually for me these days. I drove the car forward to the now-open barrier, got out quickly to retrieve the ticket, and managed to get back in and drive through before the barrier came down onto the car. Of course, the man in the car behind could have had the good grace to leave his own vehicle, pick up my ticket, and hand it to me, but he seemed to be lacking the mental wherewithal to take the obvious remedial action. Maybe it was because his car was a lot newer and bigger than mine and he wasn’t inclined to give assistance to an inferior being. How can I know? In the event I drove on and hoped that his injection, or whatever, would hurt. (No I didn’t. I don’t think like that.)

But then came the nice bit. On my way to the X-Ray Department where the scanners are located, I called into Urology Outpatients to leave a gift (a box of Thornton’s chocolates) for the three Senior Nurses who have always been so friendly and lovely with me over the past five years. I left it with the receptionist who asked: ‘Who shall I say they’re from?’  ‘You needn’t tell them,’ I replied. ‘It doesn’t matter who they’re from. All that matters is that they know they’re appreciated.’ (That sounds noble to the point of sick-making, doesn’t it? It isn’t actually. To me it’s just logical.)  ‘Ahhh…’ said the receptionist, apparently fighting back the tears. I managed a smile and headed off to the Chamber of Secrets.

*  *  *

And tonight I settled a conundrum which has been troubling me for the past few days. It concerned the identity of two very bright bodies in the night sky – one in the late evening which I assumed was Venus, and one at around two in the morning which I thought must be Jupiter. The problem was that because of their relative positions to planet earth, and because Venus is an inner planet but Jupiter an outer one, I might have got them the wrong way round. Tonight I found a website which told me I was right. That can’t be a bad end to a trying day, can it?

On Trials, Nightmares, and Cold Twilights.

I had a dream last night which seemed to reflect my current perception of life. I was in an upstairs room in my house, a room built into the roof space and boxed in with a ceiling and four walls. I looked at the ceiling and saw a gash opening up, about a foot wide and spreading towards the wall. Plaster and other detritus was crashing to the floor around me. When it got to the edge it continued down the wall to leave a view into the dirty, gloomy roof space beyond. I saw a rat glaring at me out of the near-darkness, and then a large bug at least the size of a golf ball crawled towards me. I had no idea what it was, but it was coloured bright blue and I had to concentrate in order to avoid stepping on it as I picked my way among the rubbish littering the floor. I was beset by a fear that the periphery of my world had fractured and allowed the potential for all sorts of creeping, crawling, biting creatures to enter my private space. And then I woke up.

I’m sure this is all to do with my impending CT scan on Monday. I’ve had nightmares before when a trip to the hospital for the annual CT scan was due. I check my blood pressure regularly at the request of the doctor, and the past two days it’s increased dramatically. Going for CT scans is something I find highly disturbing because I feel as though I’m going to trial and will then have to wait for the verdict and possible sentencing. 

If I tell people this, they don’t get it. Most people take the rational, pragmatic view: the scan is there to catch any problem early so that it might be successfully treated. I know that, and I remind myself of the fact, but it doesn’t stop the disturbance, the nightmares, or the increase in blood pressure. (And wouldn’t it be ironic if the prospect of having a CT scan brought on a coronary? Some people I know might even find it funny.) I’m not sure why this should be. I imagine it’s to do with the fact that I don’t feel entirely connected to the human race, the cultures and perceptions to which it subscribes, or the corporeal nature of life at this level. I suppose I’m some sort of oddball.

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This evening’s twilight was cold, dull, and windy. Such twilights almost always connect me with the last days of Camelot in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.