Notes on Just Another Day.

Christmas being over, I slept uncomfortably late this morning; and when I woke up my sinuses were sore as though I had a cold coming on. Tonight I feel a little feverish. Today we had yet more heavy rain including one spectacular downpour following a clap of thunder, and when I went for a walk I found the Shire to be impersonating Venice again. I suspect the three facts are connected.

I sometimes wonder whether I might benefit from allowing myself a day’s bed rest. I only did that once in my life, you know (apart from time spent in hospital.) It was twenty eight years ago and I’d come down with a particularly bad dose of flu. I spent all day in bed in an unheated bedroom (it was February), and then at about 7pm decided to go downstairs and get a hot drink laced with a shot of whisky. I thought it would make me feel better. What it actually did was make me feel sick to my stomach, and I hurried through the kitchen in the hope of making the bathroom in time. The next thing I knew I was waking up on the kitchen floor. The following day I began to feel better.

Throughout these wearisome, wet, windy days and dark, dreary, desolate nights, my mind keeps on returning to thoughts of the haunted Dr Haynes’s experience in James’s The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. I keep seeing his habitual note in his journal: ‘I must be firm.’ Strange as it might seem, it’s oddly comforting – an experience shared, as it were. Just as long as the mysterious cat doesn’t show up and contrive to make me miss my footing on the stairs and break my neck.

There are rats in the garden again.

I’m getting very close to the end of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall now. The narrator, Mr Markham, is on his way to Helen’s current abode, hoping to finally see her again after several frustrating months contemplating a bleak future without his one and only. (Helen’s husband has died, you see, and so it appears there is now no impediment to their union. But time will tell.) I imagine the meeting will be described in the most mind-bogglingly florid and overstated prose, because Anne Brontë does have a habit of slipping into such a practice occasionally. I have seriously wondered whether she might have been snorting something during those episodes, but maybe the explanation is more mundane. Being the devout Christian of the family – even more than her father, apparently – maybe she wrote those passages on a Sunday having become intoxicated through taking an extra big sip of the Communion wine. How can we know?

So that’s about it for today. Hope it wasn’t too tedious. But I would like to end by paraphrasing something somebody said to me in an email a little over eleven years ago. This is my version:

‘I keep anticipating receipt of a missive, but somehow I know it will never turn up.’

The original was all about cakes and company; mine is about finding the night sky utterly devoid of stars.

That will do.