Damned by Our Own DNA.

I read today that the NHS is to start mapping the DNA of every baby born in the UK, and I’m not happy about it. They say it’s so they can forecast everybody’s susceptibility to particular conditions. That way they can be ready for it, treat it earlier, and in so doing increase longevity and general health. The Health Secretary says it will change the NHS from ‘a service which diagnoses and treats ill health to one that predicts and prevents it.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it? It’s a nice bit of writing, too, and if there’s one thing which attracts my favour it’s a nice bit of writing. This one sounds like something a good scriptwriter might have written (and probably did.) But I’m still not happy about it.

It feels to me like just another way for the system to keep tabs on us. A person’s DNA is their own affair, so it’s another invasion of privacy. If you commit a crime you can expect to have your DNA mapped. That’s reasonable. And there might be other reasons to have it done, such as searching for you ancestry. That’s voluntary. But a blanket process applied to every baby born in the UK? Extend that to its inevitable conclusion and one day every citizen of the land will be trapped on a database controlled by an unsavoury partnership of artificial intelligence and the Establishment. That’s going too far because surely people don’t expect that it’s only the NHS that will be using it. It has more than a whiff of excessive state control about it.

It surprises me that nobody mentioned the security aspect. Having everybody’s DNA on the database will make the police’s job easier, won’t it? The reason I’m surprised is that the politicians only have to play the security card these days and the denizens of Middle England, who mostly have trouble seeing beyond their garden gate, fall to their knees and beg for the benefit. But what happens when the state decides to look for signs of criminal proclivity in this all-encompassing DNA record, and choose to lock the potentially guilty ones behind bars before they can commit a crime. I believe there’s a film based on just such an eventuality.

*  *  *

Today is the summer equinox – Midsummer’s Night. I didn’t see any moths and Titania hasn’t called on me yet, but I suppose there’s still time.

The Problem With Winning.

When I was younger I was quite keen on playing sport – rugby and cricket mainly with a little basketball and football thrown in. The odd thing is, however, I found winning difficult to enjoy because I was always aware that a winner’s pleasure is inevitably reflected back as a loser’s pain. Even as a youngster I baulked at causing pain unless I truly thought it warranted. And so I played for the pleasure of playing and developed a sense that winning should only be enjoyed as long as it is accompanied by humility.

And that’s why I so hate to see aggressive, triumphalist gestures made by a player who has just scored a point against an opponent he or she has left floundering. To me it suggests strong psychopathic leanings. I don’t think I could ever have had a top sportsperson as a friend. I doubt that he or she would have been the sort of person to whom I could get close, even though I know that there are other ways of seeing it.

I suppose I’m just a bit of a Corinthian at heart, so whenever I hear a sports player being interviewed and trotting out the same old mantra time after time – ‘winning is everything’ – I groan because to me it isn’t.

The Dominance of White.

I’ve lived in the English countryside for about 40% of my life, and yet there’s something about it I’ve never fully noticed until this year – the fact that the colour white dominates and decorates all expressions of the landscape from late winter until the end of summer.

It starts with the regiments of snowdrops which remind you that the darkness and drabness of winter is beginning to lift and the season will end as all seasons do. And as they return to the earth and sleep, copious white blossom clothes the blackthorn trees in March. As that fades in April, the even more copious hawthorn blossom begins to show itself, soon leaving the landscape dotted with giant ice cream cones as the world grows white with May.

The white umbrellas of the cow parsley come next, competing with the wild garlic flowers to ensure that white is never out of sight on the field margins and embankments of our precious piece of earth. They don’t last long, but before they fade away the cow parsley’s more robust cousin, the even bigger umbrellas topping the hogweed plants, take over the duty. And they have a competitor, too. As the sharp-white hogweed blooms strut their presence in the fields and lane verges, the creamy elder flowers display their more sedate presence from the hedgerows bordering every field, copse, and wood. And as their presence becomes more pronounced, the furry, white, and highly scented flowers of meadowsweet open to join them.

It doesn’t end there, either. Convolvulus – the bane of gardeners everywhere in its feral state – shows scant regard for prissy human concerns. They colonise hedgerows at the edges of fields and produce the biggest white flowers of all. They’re bell shaped, and almost as big as a hand bell. They’re prolific too, and last until nearly everything else is preparing for its winter sleep in the autumn.

All these years and I never noticed, but now I have.

Brand Trump and Other Questions.

I read yesterday that lucky Americans who have $500 dollars to spare on something really worth having can now obtain a gold (painted) smart phone on which is printed:

 

TRUMP

 Make America Great Again

I thought it pretty amusing – just the latest reason for the world to laugh at America, especially when it came to the bit about Trump insisting they be made in the USA while the tech boys politely informed him that the USA doesn’t possess the means to do so

But then I came to the more serious aspect. This is an American President to whom holding the highest position in the land isn’t enough. Now he wants to be a brand as well. I’ve never known this before in my lifetime, and it’s another reason to ask: ‘What on earth is going on over there?’ Is it simply what happens when you allow a businessman to take over the reins of politics? Is it another step along the road towards making America a dictatorship, in spite of banner-wielding crowds explaining that America is not a monarchy – constitutional or any other sort – and they’d prefer to keep it that way? I’m curious.

I’m also led to wonder whether an American President should really be acting as a disinterested intermediary in the Israel/Iran affair, not as a partisan authority figure ordering Iran to surrender unconditionally.

And on a slightly connected theme: is it true, as was written in a BBC news feature recently, that the IDF has developed the habit of shooting near-starving Palestinian civilians queuing for flour at aid centres? If so, I’m naturally curious to know what orders Trump has given to Israel on the matter.

You know, my head is shaking so much these days that I sometimes wonder why it doesn’t fall off.

PDA Revealed at Last.

Readers of longstanding might remember a post I made some years ago in which I jokingly tried to invent some psychological condition which I could have printed up to wear as a badge. Well, it seems I needn’t have bothered because I think I’ve now discovered a real one.

It’s called PDA, which stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance. I don’t claim to understand the symptoms in great depth, but they appear to run along the lines of:

A fear or hatred of being required by a second party to do something, no matter what that something might be.

In serious cases, I’m reliably informed, it can be highly debilitating and cause high levels of anxiety. And it’s included in the catalogue of conditions associated with autism.

I’ve been experiencing this all my life, you know. Most recently it’s manifested in appointment letters from the hospital. Your next appointment is on Friday 13^th of June at 11.30. I wilt almost visibly when I get one of those. I groan and start to consider whether I can think of a credible reason to refuse, even though the nature of the procedure or interview or whatever it might be is not at all taxing. And they’re doing it for my benefit. And it’s free. So what am I complaining about? The fact that I didn’t decide to go somewhere at a certain time, date, and place myself, that’s what. They were given to me by somebody else, and amounted therefore – in my mind at least – to a demand. I can’t tolerate demands, even small, innocent, or helpful ones. The foot goes down and the cry goes up: No!

That was how I felt for the whole of my school years and the jobs I did for employers. It’s one of the reasons why freelance photography was so amenable to me. For as much as my working trips were controlled to some extent by nature and the weather, I was still free to chose the date, time, and place in between the natural strictures.

And maybe this explains why my daughter has the same difficulties, as did Emily Brontë. I regard that as quite an exclusive little club.

(Add this to being an HSP, a sigma male, and an INFJ, and I really do wonder why I bother to stay here. To learn things, I suppose.)

Keeping It Short.

Something caused me to consider the subject of ambition again earlier. I have no time for it, you know. I believed in it as a callow youth, but as soon as I had climbed enough of ambition’s ladder I was kicked off it again by an enemy who was one of my greatest teachers. It hurt at the time but it was a good lesson.

Yet still the human race regards it highly, failing to see that ambition is one of the factors keeping people walking the well trodden path between the tram lines. It’s very evident that the majority of people are easily fooled, and those who are both ambitious and clever know this and use it to hold and exercise power over the population. The Churches and the great dictators have always used it, and today it’s the main tool of the advertisers.

(But I mustn’t go on. The last thing the Illustrious One said to Siddhartha before they parted was: ‘You are very clever, Siddhartha. Avoid being too clever.’)

I was never clever, you know. For all my elevated IQ score in the good old days before my brain began to fade, cleverness was never my strong suit. Maybe it’s fortunate that I never felt the inclination to hold power over people, and I never really wanted to either lead or be led.

(But I mustn’t go on…)

On Vendeta and a Simple Mind.

Let’s see whether I’ve got this right. Netanyahu launches a pre-emptive strike against Iran without any direct provocation (a reason of sorts, maybe, but no direct provocation.) It kills some military leaders, some scientists, and some innocent bystanders. Iran strikes back and some innocent bystanders in Israel also get killed. This is tragic, but the cycle is complete.

Not according to Mr Netanyahu, it isn’t. He’s outraged and swears massive revenge against Iran. How can revenge be justified against retaliation? It can’t; it’s irrational; it’s the stupidity of vendetta taking hold of a simple mind.

I did suggest in a recent post that Mr N is lacking natural intelligence, didn’t I? People lacking intelligence do have an unfortunate habit of putting carts before horses. If I were Israeli, I think I would be feeling frighteningly insecure under such leadership.

Is This What Really Happened to Galahad?

I recently included a link to a YouTube video which posited that the relationship between the brain and consciousness is completely misunderstood. The received presumption is that the brain creates, feeds, and operates our consciousness, but the alternative view is quite different.

This view maintains that every individual consciousness is a tiny fragment of the universal consciousness which holds all knowledge. In this view, the brain does not operate our consciousness at all, but instead acts as a ‘restricting valve’ to keep us from accessing all but a small and simple amount of experience and knowledge. And the reason it performs such a function is that to be made aware of everything there is to be aware of would be far too heavy for the simple human animal to bear. In short, it would kill us.

So let’s turn this theory to the search for the Holy Grail, and let’s remind ourselves that the meaning of the Holy Grail has never been known. It was first mentioned in a work by Chretien de Troyes in the 12^th century in one of several Arthurian romances, but Chretien died before the work was complete and he never said what the Holy Grail actually was.

Mediaeval Christianity was quick to seize upon it and invent the notion that it was either the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper, or a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught some of Jesus’s blood as he was dying in the cross. Such speculation was readily accepted and has been the received view ever since.

Now let’s make another big leap to Malory’s collection of the Arthurian romances in his book Le Morte D’Arthur. According to that source, several knights undertook the quest for the Grail, and as I said in post some year ago there was:

Lancelot, who searched for the Grail but didn’t find it, Perceval, who saw the Grail but didn’t recognise it, and Galahad, who found the Grail, recognised its significance, and then died almost immediately from a surfeit of ecstasy?

I don’t know whether this story of the three knights was taken from Chretien’s original or whether it was added by Mallory, but I’m now tempted to wonder whether somebody knew the true nature of the relationship between the brain and consciousness, and that he also knew the true meaning of the Grail.

The Pull of Siddhartha.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to read the novel Siddhartha again. Something in my mind suggested it was important that I should do so, and that I would understand it better than when I last read it many years ago.

I wondered how I would find a copy since there are no book shops in either of the towns I frequent. I supposed I would have to seek a copy online, consciously avoiding both Amazon and eBay of whom I’m not the greatest of admirers. And so I thought I’d begin a probably fruitless search of the charity shops. I didn’t relish the effort and had little confidence of success; most of the novels in charity shops are either of the populist variety or at least the more popular and well known classics. I also considered that the sort of person who would happen to have a copy of Siddhartha was also the sort likely to want to keep it with them for multiple readings.

But I decided to try anyway and began the search yesterday in one of the Ashbourne shops. I went straight to the second hand book section and saw a small wire carousel-style display unit – the sort that has books stacked from the outside to the inside and swivels. And there on the outside and directly facing me was a second hand copy of Siddhartha. It was a little shabby but entirely readable, and what else did I need? I think I might be forgiven the fancifully self-indulgent suspicion that it was put there for me to find. By whom is a mystery (for now, maybe.)

On the inside of the front cover is a handwritten note which says:

To Emily

This book is my all time favourite, and I wanted you to read it too. You will probably best be able to read it, though, in another ten years time, so keep it safe eh?

Lots of love

Uncle Steve.

ps I’ve given you a £10 book token so you can buy a book to read now!

There’s that name again: Emily – much mentioned, and fondly so, on this blog. And I do hope that Uncle Steve and Emily were well worthy of one another.

On Birds, Bees, and a Bit on Blood.

The grass on my lawn has been growing strongly this year and needing frequent cuts. I’ve been unable to mow it for several days because the occasional rain showers have been keeping the grass damp and my mower doesn’t work too well on damp grass. But yesterday we’d had a long enough break from the showers to leave the grass dry enough to mow, and so I got all the equipment out of the shed and was ready to do the job.

And then I noticed something incongruous on the path beside the lawn. It was a baby blue tit – looked fresh out of the nest – sitting there looking confused and unsteady, so I performed my duty. I picked it up and cradled in both hands to keep it warm while it rested uncomplaining, occasionally blinking at me and looking around. We stayed like that for about ten minutes until I felt some movement. Five minutes later the movement grew into something like a struggle, so I opened my hand. The bird perched on my finger for another five minutes, still regarding me with apparent interest and blinking a lot. I began to wonder whether it simply didn’t know how to fly and considered throwing it up into the air, but decided that was risky and so I kept my patience. And then, in little more than an instant, it was gone – into the branches of a nearby tree.

Good. Job done. Now to get on with mowing the lawn. Problem: one of the blades of grass on the lawn had a bee on it looking (yep) confused and unsteady, and there’s no way I would mow over a bee. Another rescue was called for, but this one was easy – encourage the little creature onto my finger and place it on a leaf. It seems that bees are much easier to rescue than blue tits.

Now to get on with mowing the lawn…

*  *  *

Remember my post offering the opinion that nurses should be regarded as equal partners with doctors? Well, yesterday I met the new nurse at my GP’s practice when I went for my blood letting (which wasn’t ‘blood letting’ at all – I just like being melodramatic sometimes. It was to have a blood sample taken in preparation for my next CT scans. It appears they have to check the condition of my liver so they can be reasonably confident that it won’t explode and cover the walls in yellow matter when the contrast dye is injected. Or something like that.)

Anyway, I related my opinion to the new nurse and she said ‘Ahhh, thank you.’ She was quite lovely, actually. And my only reservation was that she has some way to go in learning how to insert needles without causing a sharp pain (which the best nurses are very good at.) And then she told me that I have ‘good veins, but they’re a bit wiggly.’ I suppose if she can tell the difference between wiggly and non-wiggly veins, she’s doing OK.

So what did I see on the BBC News when I came back? A news report to the effect that NHS nurses are currently voting on the latest pay offer from the bounders in government. The junior doctors have been offered the highest percentage rise, the senior doctors and consultants a little lower, and nurses the lowest of all. Maybe I should send my blog post to the Chancellor.

Suffocating in a Fog of Wrongness.

For some time now I’ve been wilting under the growing yet foggy sense that there’s something very wrong with the world and the human condition. It seems to be getting worse, and this morning there were two photographs on the BBC News page: one of Greta Thunberg after she’d been turned away from the Gaza carnage, and another of Ben-Gvir. Greta looked sad; Butcher Ben was smiling and looked happy. Their juxtaposition lifted the fog just a little.

Even the purportedly peaceful USA is having its crises. A worldwide poll was conducted recently in which people from twenty five (I think) countries were asked whether they had a positive or negative view of other countries and their leaders. The USA got a seriously negative score, and so did Trump. Trump’s negative score was even higher than Putin’s. Hey, ho. There goes America’s ‘soft power’ down the drain. As for sending the marines into California to quell the left wing ‘scum’ fomenting trouble, that raises its own issue. Has nobody noticed that Trump will stop at nothing to crush left wing protests, but when right wing protesters violently storm Capitol Hill he cheers them and waves them forwards? Hey, ho again. There goes democracy.

And this is being played out against the background of a world more and more geared to serve the greed of the bankers, the billionaire entrepreneurs, and the corporate world in general. Seems to me that capitalism is doing its best to destroy itself through its own greed, as Marx predicted it eventually would. If and when that happens, the very root of how human society functions will have to undergo radical change, and it won’t be comfortable.

That’s if WWIII doesn’t happen first. The west is gearing up to increase its percentage of GDP spent on arms production because someone in the know has forecast that Russia will attack a NATO country some time in the next four years. He might be wrong, of course. He might be giving vent to some partisan agenda of one sort or another. We really can’t tell in this post-truth age, can we?

Anti the Anti.

I gather one of Mr Netanyahu’s so-called reasons for disallowing Greta Thunberg entry to Gaza is that she is anti-Semitic. Is she? I couldn’t honestly claim to know because I don’t know the woman personally. I’ve never had the impression that she was prejudiced against Jews, I’ve never heard her say anything to give rise to such a suspicion, and from what I’ve seen of her she doesn’t seem the type. So where is the evidence? I’m interested.

But herein lies an example of the wider problem. The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has become so misused and overused in the past few years that it has become effectively meaningless. Maybe Mr Netanyahu has generated a self-motivated and self-interested definition of his own, quite separate from any appeal to logic which normally accompanies a universal expression. Or maybe not. I can’t know that either.

But I also have to say this: It has been evident for a long time that Mr N is a dark-hearted individual and I see little point in trying to manufacture any defence against the charge of genocide levelled at him by the ICC and most fair minded people around the world. What I’m only now coming strongly to suspect is that he is also of low intelligence. That surprises me and makes me wonder why he’s there.

Doctors and Nurses.

No, this isn’t about shenanigans in the playground. It’s about real doctors, real nurses, and their relative merits.

We think of doctors as superior to nurses, don’t we? Their training takes longer; they get paid more; they’re the bosses while the nurses assist. It’s an acceptable and inevitable view, but I’m not so sure that it’s wholly reasonable.

When all’s said and done, doctors are fundamentally mechanics whose tools are the stethoscope and scalpel rather than the spanner and screwdriver. They’re highly trained and highly skilled, certainly. They need to know the function and interrelation of every aspect of the physical body. But ‘physical’ is the operative word. They don’t need a good bedside manner, however laudable one might be. I seem to recall Gregory House once saying something to the effect that the business of doctoring is not about curing conditions, but about solving puzzles. He didn’t have much of a bedside manner, did he, for all his genius. And I’ve had personal experience of other doctors who didn’t have much of a bedside manner either.

Nurses, on the other hand, are the care givers. They’re more highly trained technically than they used to be, although not to the level of doctors, obviously. But they still need to understand how people – as opposed to merely the constructions we call bodies – function. This is a vital skill which nurses need but doctors don’t. A good nurse needs an innate understanding of psychology while the good doctor gets on with solving the puzzle and mending the broken bits.

And that’s why I think they should be regarded as equal partners.

Remember that student nurse I mentioned on this blog back in 2018 – a young Pakistani girl called Sabs? She was around twenty years old and not yet fully qualified, but as she went off duty at 7pm she turned to the ward full of elderly men and said ‘goodnight boys.’ I’ll lay odds that she’s now a very valuable nurse. And we hadn’t seen a doctor for hours.

Educating the Non-English.

Since the garden has been constantly challenging me to keep up with its growth imperative for the past few weeks, the inside of my house has been largely ignored. In consequence, this afternoon I gave my full attention to the bathroom which was looking a bit grotty.

Now, there’s an interesting word which might be unknown to non-native English speakers. It’s an English colloquialism freely used by people of all classes, and means dirty, dishevelled, or sometimes as a derogatory opinion. And there are few, if any, situations where it might be inappropriate. The matter of my unkempt bathroom is a typical example, or it might be used to describe a coffee mug which hasn’t been washed for the last two or three months of daily use (which used to be a habit of mine when I worked in an office. The women used to tut at me and insist on correcting the issue.) Then again, a person of even moderately elevated class might address a peasant like me as ‘you grotty little man.’ It has been known.

So now I’m wondering whether the Chinese have a pictogram approximating to the word ‘grotty.’ I expect they probably do.

The word ‘tatty’ is similar, but is used to describe things which are not only unkempt, but generally cheap and of low quality. (Unless you happen to be from the north of England where ‘tatty’ is a noun synonymous with potato.)

Have you got that?

The Reaction Formula.

Yesterday was one of those days which start off badly shortly after you’ve climbed out of bed. Something goes wrong, and then things continue to go wrong with disturbing regularity right up to bedtime sixteen hours later. The whole day is one long progression of malfunctions, outright breakdowns, and various forms of mishap.

Initial reaction to this is mild irritation. That gives way to the second stage which is serious annoyance. The third stage is the point at which you turn your eyes skyward, searching for any god which might be peeking over the top of Mount Olympus so you can demand to know what the hell is going on today. And then, just as you’re dropping off to sleep, the mind settles and you regard the whole things as an Interesting Phenomenon.

Pity we can’t skip the first three stages, isn’t it?

The Reducing Valve.

I want to commend this YouTube video to anybody interested in the relationship between the brain and consciousness. I found it very compelling because it explained – if right – a problem I’ve had throughout the second half of my life. Make of it what you will.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOdk1rb5mZc&t=604s 

Blogger won't allow me to upload the thumbnails of YouTube videos any longer. Just another example of the modern techno world becoming more fascist. I'm uploading this in the hope that the URL will act as s hyperlink. If not, copy and paste.

Reaching the Peak.

I’m always a little sad when we reach the end of May. May is the last month in the year during which the days continue to grow longer for the whole of its span. And then along comes June which brings us to the summer solstice. The days begin to grow shorter again and the sun begins its gradual descent en route to the dark days of winter.

And it’s usually the month when the swallows first appear to thrill us with their aerial acrobatics. And the kiddies dance around the maypole to the sound of an Irish jig on the school playing field. And the wild birds feed their young ones with great energy and diligence. And things of – usually beneficent – great consequence often happen in May. (Although not this year, and there’s only three hours of May left.)

And the wheel turns. And nothing is meant to last beyond its allotted span.

The young are generally unaware of this, even though the knowledge must be hiding somewhere, waiting for the right time time to spring the ambush.

(The priestess - remember her? - was an exception of course. She felt the knowledge from an early age. It's why she was one third hedonist, one third philosopher, and one third explorer. Unlike hedonism and philosophy, exploration has no limits. If I remember the novel Sidhartha correctly, there would appear to be a direct parallel between me and the eponymous hero in the matter of the priestess. If so, all I have to do now is work with the ferryman until it's time for the crossing. Maybe I should read the book again.)

*  *  *

I’ve decided that when I die I want be greeted on the other side by a pack of friendly wolves, come to guide me to wherever I’m supposed to go. They are, after all, the ultimate dog.

*  *  *

I found a picture of mine, published as a postcard, in the 'classic postcards' section of eBay. It was priced at £5.99. Fancy that. (And that was the second, incidentally, both taken in the English Lake District.) Mel thinks I'm going to be famous after I'm dead. I won't care as long as I have wolves for company.

Swamped.

Over the past two years the pageview count on this blog has been massively higher than it ever was during the previous thirteen. The month of May has already exceeded the all time record, and what’s odd is that in the earlier years it attracted many comments from mostly regular readers; now it gets next to none.

I’ve often wondered whether bot activity could be responsible, but it doesn’t fit because there’s no regularity of pattern and the visits are made by a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. And the individual posts are all listed on the stats page. It appears that a lot of people from disparate parts of the world – most notably Singapore, the USA, Brazil, Vietnam, and Mexico – are spending a good deal of time reading my old blog posts.

So the question is: who are they and why are they doing it? Is my blog performing some kind of function in various parts of the world? If so, I’d love to know what it is.

Bird News:

The blue tits in the nest box behind the kitchen fledged yesterday just as the weather turned cooler and damp. And also yesterday, I saw the first baby robin on the bird table. What’s concerning me is that some of the adult birds are now in full moult, and today we had the first proper rain for several months – several hours of it. This was good to see because the land was becoming dangerously dry, but if the birds don’t have their proper quota of water-repellent feathers, how will they cope with the cold nights? Being chilled is a major hazard for birds.

And I’m reminded of how easily we take the good things for granted. On nearly every day for the past three months it would have been appropriate to say to a passing stranger: ‘Good morning. Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ because nearly every day was. And yet I never heard anybody say it. But when I went out this evening to replenish the bird table, the remains of the day had a distinct ‘glooming down in wet and weariness’ feeling about it. I hurried back to the house, grumbling inwardly. It appears I don’t deserve to live in California even if I wanted to.

Trump's Tablets.

I see Trump is now directing his fire at America’s Ivy League universities. He says they’re not doing enough to prevent pro-Palestinian protests and are not supportive of his brand of American conservatism. Well now, what can they be thinking? And so the dear old US of A takes one more faltering step down the slippery slope to fascism.

American Conservatism According to Trump:

1. You will stand with hand on heart to recite the Oath of Allegiance every day.

2. You will repeat: ‘God bless America, land of the free where all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ every time you see my face or hear my name. (Although he won’t realise that Voltaire was joking.)

3 You will revere the insanely rich as demi-gods, for they are the descendants of the Founding Fathers and represent the spirit of America.

4. You will do as you are told at all times by men of wealth who wear the badge of status conferred by me.

5. Women will be treated as objects of play to suit your pleasure, for that is their purpose in life. You will only take them seriously if they are young, pretty, and reading from an autocue words written by me or which have my approbation.

6. You will have no truck with dictionaries. However I define ‘terrorism’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ shall be the new truth.

7. You will develop the habit of somnambulance at all times and remain quiet except to roar angrily at my enemies.

I didn’t make this up, you know. This is what I’ve heard Americans with brains say about America.

Hypocrites or Specimens?

Two items on the BBC News website caught my attention this morning. The first was the shooting of the Jewish couple in Washington DC, and the second was the ‘meeting’ between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. What most caught my eye were the words attributed to Netanyahu regarding the first incident, and those of Trump in the course of the second. The level of gross hypocrisy was staggering even by the sad standards of senior politicians generally, and I wondered yet again why, since there are so many good people on this planet, we allow our sacred space to be so hideously polluted by men such as these.

(Although I think it likely that conspiracy theories will soon start circulating around the murder off the Jewish couple.)

My first thought on entering Sainsbury’s to do my grocery shop yesterday was for the people of Gaza, especially the children who haven’t yet been slaughtered by Netanyahu.

*  *  *

You know, I was watching a magpie pecking at something on a fallen tree branch this morning, and as I wondered what was attracting its attention I had a deep inner sensation that I’m no longer connected to this world. If only I could hold on to that feeling, maybe I could start being merely observant of the dark creatures instead of being angered by them. Seems I have a way to go yet.

Things I Don't Understand.

I don’t understand why a charity shop on Ashbourne has a sign on the door saying ‘No Dogs.’ It’s why I rarely visit that one on principle.

I don’t understand why the human race regards sex so highly. I’ve reached the point in life where I now realise it’s boringly trivial and rather messy. (I didn’t used to see it that way, and I gather that neither do certain religious traditions.) Maybe my new focus in life should be to consort only with virgins.

I don’t understand how Netanyahu can commit genocide willy-nilly and get away with it.

I thought of another one earlier, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

*  *  *

I encountered Ms Medeea, my ex-dentist, in Ashbourne today. It seems she hasn’t gone back to Romania after all. She omitted to say whether she lives in a castle and engages in nocturnal, ne’er-do-welling practices guarded by a troop of gypsies and a pack of wolves, but it was good to see her. (Readers of longstanding will remember that she’s one of my heroes.)

An Unrealistic Suggestion.

I find myself asking why the US – preferably in conjunction with European partners – doesn’t have the balls to organise a massive airdrop of food supplies into Gaza, thereby challenging the Israeli armed forces to try to stop them.

Imagine what a shockwave would reverberate around the world of international diplomacy (especially if the Israeli armed forces tried to stop them.) And I suppose that’s the answer to the question, for we all know that politicians hold the world of international diplomacy in far higher regard than the mere matter of the deaths of children.

Dogs and Drones and Stuff.

Been too busy for blogging this week, so now I’ve got half an hour to spare let’s see whether I can remember anything worth remembering…

Nope, but a few nondescript oddments might avoid the next half hour going to  waste, so here goes:

I heard a loud noise going over my house one day. It was much louder than the commercial jetliners heading for East Midlands Airport, and it didn’t sound like a jet engine anyway, so I went out to take a look. Four big drones were crossing the field beyond my garden, so big that I assumed they must have been military drones. I’ve only ever seen one drone before. A small one spent five minutes hovering around me as I walked along Mill Lane last autumn. (Nearly everything of interest that happens in these parts happens in Mill Lane. Have you noticed?)

I encountered the Lady B’s dear mama, honourable sister, and Oscar the dog on my walk yesterday (as I was approaching Mill Lane.) ‘Hello Oscar,’ I said enthusiastically, because that’s what you normally say to dogs called Oscar. ‘You remember his name,’ said honourable sister in a tone indicating both surprise and approbation. Well, of course I remembered his name. It’s people’s names I can never remember.

I’m doing the toughest of the spring garden jobs at the moment – out with the pole hedge trimmer and ladder trimming the tall boundary hedge which runs down the length of my garden. It’s hard going these days because my energy, strength, and sense of balance are a little depleted now, and so I have to rely on courage to get the job done. The problem is that my courage is much depleted as well.

I was woken up last night by a deep, scraping sound above my bedroom ceiling. It sounded like somebody pulling a heavy object across the floor. This is a little odd because all there is above my bedroom ceiling is the house roof space, the floor of which is not boarded. I was reminded of the short but deep growling sound I heard outside my bedroom door one night, and so I did the same as I did on that occasion – decided I was unlikely to think of an explanation and went back to sleep.

The half hour is conveniently up.

An Assertive Avian and Another Mystery Maiden.

I’ve mentioned many times that it’s fun at this time of year to watch a pair of blue tits raising a brood in the nest box behind my kitchen. A few days ago I saw one of the birds fly in – from probably quite a long way away – carrying a caterpillar to add to the dinner table. He perched on a nearby branch, evidently aware that there was already activity in the box (and nest boxes aren’t very big, you know?)

And then the other bird flew out, joined the one on the branch, and flapped her wings rapidly. (That’s how I’m fairly sure that the second bird was the female, because females get more practice at rapid wing fluttering. It’s their way of saying ‘gimme, gimme, gimme.’) The male bird gave her the caterpillar which she then took into the box.

She tried it again today, but Mr B was having none of it this time.

‘No, I won’t give you the caterpillar.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I fetched it from quite a long way away, and I don’t see why I should give it to you so you can fly a mere three feet to the box while I fly a long way away again to fetch another one.’

‘You’re mean.’

‘No I’m not, I’ve just grown wise to that rapid wing flapping stuff. Go and fetch your own caterpillar.’

And then he flew the mere three feet to the box and disappeared inside. The female flew off rapidly in the opposite direction, presumably in a huff. Fascinating.

*  *  *

I passed another unidentified maiden in Mill Lane today, but this one did at least half turn her eyes in my direction and grunt something which I presume was meant to be taken as a reluctant greeting.

But where are these unidentified maidens coming from? If somebody’s opened a maiden factory somewhere in the vicinity of Mill Lane, why has nobody told me?

Baby's First Neighbour.

I heard somebody say on a YouTube video recently that part of the value of a mother to a baby is that she’s the first ‘other person’ the baby experiences in his or her new life. Sounds profound, doesn’t it? But is it true?

Not usually. The first other person a baby experiences is usually a midwife, a doctor, a paramedic, or a policeman in an emergency. And in America they charge the poor parents a fee to allow the mother to be, at best, only the second person the baby experiences as other. I believe they call it something like a 'skin contact' charge.

You know, I’m surprised that some American entrepreneur hasn’t developed a device to take the oxygen out of the atmosphere, then they could charge everybody to have a continuous supply of oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. If Trump only had a brain, he’d probably be working on it right now.

Mill Lane Bits and the Mystery Maiden.

I saw three swallows flying above Mill Lane today. ‘One swallow does not a summer make’ says the old adage. Maybe three do.

Walking north along Mill Lane gives a comprehensive view of the Weaver Hills, a final outcropping of the Pennines before the land descends southward to the Trent valley. In the years I’ve lived here I’m sure I’ve never seen them look so bare and brown, presumably because we’ve had the driest spring in Britain for sixty nine years.

Paradoxically, however, the barley growing in several fields alongside the lane is a very healthy bright green and growing well, with fully formed ears and beards. The blue-green wheat in other fields is showing no sign of ears yet, but it looks happy enough. And the maize seed which was sown a week or two ago is already germinating.

The hawthorn trees and bushes have been unusually heavily stacked with May flowers this year – in Mill Lane and everywhere else (which fact would be worth a post of its own, given the magnificent sights it’s produced.) What’s odd is that second showings are appearing which I don’t remember happening before. Maybe hawthorn likes dry springs. If I’d been aware of that sort of thing as a young lad I would have kept notes and would probably know by now.

And then there’s the mystery maid of Mill Lane who I’ve now seen twice. I first saw her about two weeks ago and at first thought it was the Lady B: same slender build, same height, same elegant, upright walk, same shoulder length dark hair. We were walking in opposite directions, and as we passed I saw that she was probably about fifteen years younger than said Lady. I intended to offer a greeting but she declined even to look at me, much less speak. And so I walked on (because gentlemen don’t accost young ladies – unless they have a dog with them, of course – but merely invite them to speak if they so wish.)

Today I saw her again, only she was following me this time. And she continued to follow me almost to the end of the road. When I stopped to talk to the sheep in the little paddock where the white pony used to be, I looked over my shoulder to see that she’d turned tail and was walking back the way she’d come. Evidently she had no intention of entering my orbit and saying ‘isn’t it a wonderful day, and did you see the three swallows flying above the lane earlier?’ Maybe she dislikes men. Maybe she dislikes old men. Maybe she’s been told that I’m the village weirdo and might behave unpredictably (though surely not inappropriately, surely not that; I’ve never given anybody the slightest hint of a reason to suspect I might be that sort of weirdo.)

The fact is, I’m familiar with most of the people who live at the bottom of the Shire where Mill Lane is situated, but I haven’t a clue who this young woman is. Maybe she’s a ghost, or somebody come through a dimensional or time shift. I thought the same about the young Chinese woman I saw wandering aimlessly around the environs of Mill Lane a few years ago, with no vehicle in sight. We don’t get Chinese women in the Shire – ever.

On Blackbirds and Bonding.

There’s something unusual going on with the blackbirds in my garden. Around the time of sunset and shortly after, they suddenly become active and numerous just when the other birds have mostly disappeared for the day. The males are usually flying fast and determinedly from tree to tree, often chasing other males. The females are mostly hopping around the lawn and vegetable plots, or in among the vegetation in the flower beds, picking up unidentified morsels from the earth. And they come closer to me than usual, only moving away if I put a foot one step too far in their direction. It feels almost as though I’m beginning to bond with blackbirds in the twilight hour.

But as I said to the woman in the pet shop where I went to buy my sack of wild bird seed yesterday: ‘there are worse things to bond with than blackbirds.’ She agreed. And then I asked whether she was familiar with the story of Molly Lee, ‘the Burslem witch’ who was buried with a live blackbird in her coffin, and how disturbing the thought of such an atrocity is. She did know the story; she’d even visited Molly’s grave which had been re-aligned north-south in an apparently successful attempt to lay her ghost.

I also suggested that the pet shop acquire two friendly dogs to work shifts sitting by the till near the door. It occurs to me that the shop would be constantly full of people wanting their dog fixes (as I do.) You wouldn’t think a visit to a retail park could be interesting, would you?

Alice in America.

There’s something real and yet surreal going on in the USA at the moment. It has a distinctly Lewis Caroll feel about it.

First there was the man thrown into prison for writing something critical of Israeli policy on social media. Then there was the college professor sacked and deported for taking part in a pro-Palestinian rally. And then along comes Mr Bannon bemoaning the fact that the new Pope might be American, but critically is not America First. Why would anybody think that he should be? The Pope is the spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics, not America’s altar boy. (It’s hard to know with Bannon whether he’s a complete imbecile, or whether he’s sufficiently au fait with the culture to realise that 43% of Americans really are complete imbeciles and he can get away with acting like them.)

But we haven’t come to the best one yet, and this is the important one: Trump’s entourage are seriously – or so it is said – considering suspending habeas corpus. If there’s one thing giving rise to the serious suspicion that the USA, the ‘leader of the free world’ (and for ‘free world’ read ‘democratic world’), is sliding or being pushed into fascism, it’s this. Habeas corpus is a major part of the foundation of any democracy. It has to be, otherwise you might as well be living in 1930s Germany, and look where that led.

Personally, I think one of two things needs to happen. Either the bulk of Americans needs to rise up to remove Trump and his donkeys from their positions of power, or the rest of the world – especially Europe – should find a way to turn its back on the USA.

Neither is likely to happen, of course. Big capitalism has ingratiated itself too far into the American psyche. I’m quite sure that the lure of trinkets and baubles, devices and lifestyle accessories has long since killed off the spirit of 1776. Nobody with an outdoor swimming pool, four cars in the driveway, and a plethora of electronic devices with which to bitch, insult, or praise effusively is going to want to occupy the barricades. (Ironically, the only ones likely to do that are the hardcore Trump supporters. That’s part of why the whole thing is surreal.)

As for the second part, that’s also not going to happen because it would mean reordering the whole system of world economics. America is too big a player to simply shut it out, much as we would like to.

And so I suppose all we can do is wait and see. Sometimes I like the idea of a cataclysmic nuclear war coming along to kill off most of the human population, and then maybe we could start again and make a better job of it next time. But it’s easy for someone like me to say at my end of life. What about my daughter and her kids? What about the Lady B and hers? What about all the young and middle aged adults and the millions of babies being born every day?

And so we wait. And, as usual, maybe I’m wrong.

Excitement Shire Style.

I saw the first two swallows of the season at the bottom end of the Shire today. I watched them approach from a southerly direction and settle on somebody’s TV aerial.  I thought it reasonable to presume, given their southerly approach route, that they were finally making their first landfall since leaving South Africa a few weeks ago. I said ‘welcome and good luck’ to them as you would. Exciting things like that often happen in the Shire. Sometimes the adrenalin rush is hard to tolerate, especially if you’re blessed with an underperforming left ventricle.

The second exciting thing which happened to me was being passed in a motor car by the Lady B. She slowed, smiled, and waved, which is exactly what her mother always does so I suppose it’s an example of learned behaviour. I fully expect that one day one or the other will actually stop the car, lower the window, and proclaim:

‘Good morning, Mr Jeffrey. I presume you’ve noticed that I always slow down when I pass you on the road.’

‘I have indeed, ma’am,’ I will make hasty reply, ‘and I cannot thank you enough for your care and courtesy.’

‘Well actually,’ one or the other will continue, ‘the reason I do so is to avoid making an intolerable mess on the road. You know, all that blood and skin and broken bone and gelatinous tissue and so on. I fear it might frighten the horses, you see, and that would never do. I’m sure you understand. Goodbye.’

Being in a Deep, Dark Hole.

This post was begun on Monday 5^th May, three days after my phone line became comatose and my internet access naturally followed suit. The people at British Telecom said they were sending an engineer to trace the fault, but no result so far. I decided to write a post anyway – mostly for the sake of having something to do – and publish it if and when BT get their lethargic fingers out and resolve the matter.

During my enforced separation from the internet I discovered a file of images which I’d forgotten I had. It was a large selection of photographs from my pro days, held at that time (and probably still held as far as I know) by the publisher of a magazine which specialised in the landscapes and other places of interest in the UK. It’s a long time since I’d seen them and I was truly surprised by how good many of them were. I never realised how good an eye I had for form, visual balance, atmosphere, and the qualities of tone and texture. And then I remembered something else: I remembered how massively enthusiastic I was about my photography. Here are a couple of examples, chosen only because they remind me of the difference between nature’s endeavours and those of mankind. Nature is all about softness, sinuousness, and impermanence; the works of man are hard, run in straight lines, and built to last forever or as close as we can manage:

 

And that took me back to something I once wrote a blog post about: the tendency throughout my life to be subject to a variety of monomanias. There were mostly three of them – fishing, photography, and the writing of fiction. These were interests which consumed my waking desires at all times when I wasn’t being forced to walk the treadmill of school or salaried employment. I remembered the day when I went for a walk around the lanes where I lived, cameras and notebook at the ready to practice my new interest in the craft of photography. I was working as a revenue inspector at the time and a dispiriting revelation suddenly descended upon my consciousness and almost forced me to my knees – a sense that the time I spent in the office or out doing visits was akin to being trapped in a cold, musty crypt with only desiccated bones for company. It was at that moment that the aspiration to become a freelance pro was born.

And so the monomania became a career, and a very pleasant career it turned out to be. The enthusiasm never waned, you see, and being paid to do something you really like doing is a blessing indeed. Mrs Thatcher’s recession eventually killed it off and circumstances led me into theatre work, first as a volunteer and later in a paid position. I wouldn’t quite call the theatre work a monomania, but I was certainly enthusiastic about it and that means a lot.

And this brings me to the point of the post: the operative word is ‘enthusiasm.’ I was massively enthusiastic about all my obsessions – fishing, photography, the writing of fiction, and even the lesser matter of the theatre work. And that’s what’s missing in my life now. I have nothing to be enthusiastic about, and without enthusiasm life is a cold, grey affair. (I think that’s part of the explanation for the Lady B’s place in my life. Her presence was about the only thing which raised my consciousness to a state resembling enthusiasm, and why she has been mentioned so much on this blog. But life moves on, and so do people, and that’s just as it should be.)

So now for the complication:

There is something in my life which now provides the fuel to keep the motor running. Strange as it might sound to those who know of my attitude to the modern world and its oft-disturbing ways, it’s the internet. The internet has achieved a place in my life which I would never have thought credible in the early days. It’s where I go for information on news, sport, and the weather. It’s what I use to control my bills and general finances. Google searches provide most of the information on people and various sundry subjects. The internet provides my blog and feeds my love of Blogger stats. It’s the source of both learning and entertainment through YouTube and BBC iPlayer. And it’s been my main medium of correspondence for the past fifteen years. The internet very nearly fills what remains of my life when I’m not engaged in the chores of gardening, housework, and grocery shopping.

*  *  *

It’s now Tuesday 6^th May and I still have no internet because the land line problem remains unresolved. The consequence of this is to feel an overwhelming sense of something massive missing from my life. When I look at my computer monitor all I see is my desktop looking impassively back at me. It reminds me of a cold fireplace on a cold winter’s morning. Where there should be glowing embers, flickering flames, and wholesome heat, there is only black metal, soot-stained fire bricks, and dead cinders. That’s what having no internet is like and it’s depressing.

*  *  *

Wednesday 7^th May. My phone line is restored and I have access to the internet again. There were a lot of matters awaiting my attention when it returned this afternoon, including two emails from BT which provides the phone line. They were both apologies for the delay, and they’d been sent to me by email (duh?)

1st of Beltane.

In the pleasant month of May

As I roved out on a fine May morning

In the merry, merry month of May

Three lines from different folk songs, all recognising the fact that May is a special month. In the Celtic calendar, May is the youthful first month of summer, and in the Shire this morning all was green and bountiful in the Mayday sunshine. Vast swathes of white flowers on the wild garlic in The Hollow, veritable regiments of fresh young bracken everywhere, rockery gardens festooned with hanging colour of every hue, and the tree canopies in wood, field, and hedgerow proudly presenting their summer finery of leaf and seed.

When I came back to my house I heard music playing. I looked over to the school playing field where the kids were performing their maypole dance, and doing so to the lively brilliance of an Irish jig. Perfect; and for a brief few minutes the conviction held that life in this often torturous place called reality has compensations.

In the afternoon the loss arrived. I decline to go into detail, but I was reminded again of the connection between the forces of creation and destruction. But even that was ameliorated by the steady shower of light rain which graced the gardens and the dusty fields for a while this evening. We needed it after weeks of warm, dry, sunny weather.

And that was the first day of Beltane in a nutshell.

A Muse for Beltane.

It was a good Beltane fire this evening. No rain to spit indecorously in the embers, and no harsh wind to rouse the flames to demonic hostility. Just the temperate, dry air and the merest hint of a breeze to give harmonious life to the flickering.

And then I noticed something satisfactorily apposite. I looked westward into the uninterrupted blue of a darkening sky and saw the new baby reclining peacefully in the firmament. I’m referring, of course, to the slim crescent of the new moon which always reminds me of a new baby these days. (Does that indicate a growing awareness of symbolism, or is it mere incipient senility? I don’t know and I see no reason to care.)

Whichever it is, it put me in mind of the ouroboros which featured in a video I watched on YouTube last night – the snake or dragon which is constantly consuming its own tail, and which is a symbolic representation of the cyclical nature of reality, the persistence of soul, and the connection between the forces of creation and destruction. This is an ouroboros:

And that took me into further musing on the two active constituents of the Hindu lower trinity – Shiva the destroyer and Vishnu the creator. I asked whether they, too, are symbols of ancient pedigree and represent ancient knowledge of which the modern human is unaware, or whether they’re simply an early form of philosophical speculation.

I didn’t know and it didn’t seem to matter. It was just rather satisfying that the musing was engendered by the burning of a Beltane fire. And this is the 13th post of the month, which is probably irrelevant.

Being an Object of Scrutiny.

I was walking along Mill Lane today when a car drew up alongside and stopped. The view through the open driver’s window revealed an elderly woman of unknown identity, and she said:

‘I see you’re not wearing a coat today. You usually wear a coat when you go for a walk, but not today. Is that because it’s warm and sunny?’

I replied in the affirmative, of course. What else could I do? (Actually, I could have asked ‘Who are you and why do you stop my way upon this blasted heath? You should be a woman and yet your beard forbids me to interpret that you are so.’ I think it unlikely, however, that she would have been familiar with the provenance of the question, and that the irony and humour contained within it would therefore have proved elusive. In other words, she might have been offended, so I’m glad I didn’t think of it at the time.)

What little remained of the conversation was too perfunctory even to be memorable, so I won’t bother trying to remember it. Eventually she drove on. I think I waved.

It was a salutary experience nonetheless because it demonstrated yet again that I’m being observed in my solitary perambulations. Maybe I’m being studied, analysed even. And that’s the problem with small English villages. They’re full of Miss Marples.

A Special Sight

Most parts of my garden have plants in them that shouldn’t be there. (By that I mean they’re what people call weeds, only I find the term disrespectful and decline to use it.)  But anyway…

One of the wild flowers I have growing in my garden is the periwinkle. It grows on the narrow strip of land next to the side wall of my house, and looks quite at home with other plants which should (purportedly) be there such as snapdragons, teasels, climbing roses, basil, and a forsythia bush.

Well, yesterday – when it was sunny – I arrived at the top of my garden and something leaped into my vision like a nugget of gold on a pebble beach. There was an orange tip butterfly (the first of the season) sitting on a periwinkle flower and feeding on the nectar in the middle.  This is a periwinkle:

And this is an orange tip butterfly. (Sorry I can’t overlay one onto the other, but I don’t have the equipment or the expertise to do fancy stuff like that. Please employ your imagination):

I found the relative shapes, patterns, and colours so startling that everything else – the wall, the plants, the tall hedge, the shrubs, the lawn – became merely three-dimensional, but the butterfly on the periwinkle belonged to the fourth.

It’s because I’m neurodivergent, you see. I’ve known I’m neurodivegent ever since somebody on YouTube told me I am, but I haven’t been so diagnosed as yet because I don’t know anybody who would consider it an issue.

On Danegeld, Bad Ditties, Ducks, and Days.

Yesterday I read that President Xi of China has warned the countries of the world not to give in to American bullying in Trump’s trade wars. It reminded me of that episode in history when bands of Danish Vikings would rampage across a territory, terrorise the population, and then demand money in return for some peace and quiet (for a while at least.) The payment was known as the Danegeld, and Kipling wrote a poem about it which includes the line:

If once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

If Trump wins this one, he’ll know he’s got the world on a string, won’t he? We’ll all be puppets to be played with at will. Not a good idea, so let’s hope he loses.

(This week’s cover cartoon on Private Eye, by the way, shows a brat-like Trump bleating: ‘It’s Easter. Where’s my egg?’ And the reply comes back: ‘On your face, mate.’)

*  *  *

I made mention of Ellie, the new barista at Costa Coffee, didn’t I? I did. It occurred to me that the name Ellie should be suitable for the creation of a ditty, something I haven’t done for a very long time. I tried to think of suitable rhymes and decided that ‘smelly’ and ‘belly’ were entirely inappropriate. In fact, I didn’t do very well at all and could only come up with a second rate Limerick which doesn’t really pass muster. I’m going to publish it anyway, though, because even a cupfull of your own urine is better than nothing when you’re stuck in an arid desert awaiting rescue and there’s no water for miles.

There was a young woman called Ellie

Who saw something strange on the telly

A cook with no taste

Preparing a paste

With cow dung and raspberry jelly

*  *  *

For a span of several evenings last week I saw a pair of ducks flying over my garden at twilight. I thought it a rather comfortable image, but on the fourth or fifth night only one duck flew over and I thought it a little sad. The following evening there were no ducks at all, so I reasoned that they might have argued over the best place to spend the night and one of them had won. The female probably. Females usually win that sort of argument. So then I felt better.

*  *  *

I often wonder why I’m still trying to keep this blog going. It isn’t what it was, I know that. It lacks the flow, the humour, and the little bits of cleverness it used to have. It’s all in the mind, of course, beleaguered and belittled as it is by a consciousness become very demanding. I’m trying to stay afloat in a sea of existential speculation replete with capricious tides and opposing cross currents. Most of what I have around me is malfunctioning and so is my body, so there’s an ever present end-of-days feeling in the air and in my dreams. But the blog is still here and sometimes plays the role of pressure valve, so letting it go would probably be a bad idea.

Did I ever mention that words have a similar effect on me that certain foods have on other people? The wan day went glooming down in wet and weariness is my baked Alaska, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable Dominion over all my slice of chocolate gateau. I expect I probably did.

On Pitfalls and Pleasant Things.

Let’s have something we haven’t had for quite a long time, eh? A My-Day-In-Ashbourne post. (Sounds grander than it is, but I suppose it will do in the absence of anything better.) Here goes then:

The generally quiet little market town called Ashbourne has a troubled air about it at the moment, courtesy of the county council choosing to spend millions of pounds it doesn’t really have making a difference that doesn’t really need making. They’re digging up all the pavements (sidewalks) and replacing them with smart, off-white flagstones which obviously won’t stay off-white for very long. They’re also re-laying and making changes to the two town centre streets which carry all the summer tourist traffic heading for the Peak District as well as the year-round quarry wagons going in the same direction. Consequently, the quiet and normally unobtrusive little town is littered with yellow signs redirecting vehicular traffic, and red barriers doing the same to pedestrians.

It’s occurred to me a few times that if only we had steam vents blowing off and the odd broken fire hydrant treating us to an impromptu fountain, it would be easy to imagine being in Manhattan. Apart from the honking of horns, that is, or rather the lack of them. I think it’s probably self-evident that British – and other European – drivers are less given to impatience, angry outbursts, and the making of excessive noise in protest, than those who frequent New York City. But I might be wrong.

*  *  *

(The line break is so you don’t get bored because you think there’s something completely different about to take the stage. There is actually.) This:

Costa Coffee has a new Ellie. She has all the physical credentials to be eminently noticeable, and I was somewhat intrigued by her nose. I couldn’t decide whether it was Jewish or merely aquiline, but decided it didn’t matter. She’s also energetic – constantly shifting from one foot to the other and occasionally breaking into a little dance to complement the background music. Ashbourne Costa has become somewhat downbeat and characterless since the last crew left after the Covid lockdown, so I have hopes that the new Ellie will re-invigorate the old place.

And do you know what she said to me? ‘I think I remember you.’ That’s what she said. Me? Memorable? The only time I remember anybody saying that was seven years ago in a different coffee shop (that was Lucy, the ex-dental nurse.) That’s how rare it is. It transpired that Ellie used to work in the pet shop where I bought seed and peanuts for the feeding of wild birds, although that doesn’t explain why she should have noticed me and remembered my face all these years later. (Then again, both Gollum and Quasimodo had pretty memorable faces, so maybe…) I chose not to smile at her lest she thought me creepy. I’m not, you know, not at all. It’s just that some people are wont to get the wrong impression when faced with the odd creature that masquerades as me.

But it got even better. The Bernese Mountain dog sitting with its humans at the next table, and the chocolate Cockapoo I encountered in the street following my departure, both insisted that my company and approbation were every bit the equal of a juicy bone and became my very best friends for a few minutes. And life made sense after all.

A Notable Week of Sorts.

The past week has been a bad one, hence no posts. Matters are a little improved at the moment, but not by much.

*  *  *

I’ve listened to several people talking about the nature of the sigma male on YouTube and they all described me pretty well. Imagine being a sigma male, an INFJ, and an HSP all in one person (if you can.) Not much hope for a contented dotage, is there?

*  *  *

Nevertheless, I still managed to be mildly intrigued by the news that Signorina Meloni of Italy has gone cap in hand to visit Mr Trump of somewhere over the big water, hoping to persuade him to be kind to us poor Europeans. The news report suggested that she might have some success because, being one of the most right wing of Europe’s leaders, she has more in common ideologically with Mr T than most other European leaders. If she does, I suspect it will owe more to the fact that she is blonde, petite, good looking, and thirty years younger than him.

*  *  *

I also caught a video on YouTube made by a well spoken and intelligent American man (a creature rather commoner, no doubt, than we poor Europeans are wont to acknowledge in the circumstances currently prevailing.) He spoke about the possibility that, contrary to popular belief, consciousness is not a product of the brain but the creator of my brain, your brain, and every other fragment of material in the whole of the universe. This idea is not new to me, but the way he explained it impressed me to the point of almost believing him. I didn’t, of course, because I don’t do belief, but I did feel a satisfying sense of vindication.

*  *  *

Should I talk about the three knocks which woke me up at 3am a few nights ago, and the shuffling sounds I subsequently heard in my bedroom? Don’t think so. That sort of thing is best left to fly past on the wind.

On Trump and the T Word.

I read earlier that a woman has been charged with criminal damage after splashing some red paint on the walls of the clubhouse on one of Donald Trumps Scottish golf courses. Donald called it ‘an act of terrorism’ and said he hoped that she would be very harshly treated.

Well, come on. Turnberry isn’t exactly a national monument, is it? And the building hardly stands out as a notable piece of architecture. Vandalising property is, indeed, criminal under British law, but it’s a pretty minor sort of criminal. It doesn’t come close to wanting to steal Greenland from the Danes, or evict the Palestinians from Gaza so he can turn their ancestral homeland into another Mediterranean playground for the rich.

And have you noticed that Trump reacts to every bit of protest aimed at him or his entourage by calling it ‘terrorism’? He’s obsessed with the word and clearly hasn’t a clue what it means. A simple definition of terrorism would be: ‘purposefully hurting the innocent with the aim of reducing their resolve or morale.’ Writing ‘go home Trump’ - or whatever it was - in red paint on the wall of an unprepossessing building is hardly hurting the innocent. And I wonder whether Trump realises that American policy has been responsible for some of the greatest acts of true terrorism the world has ever known. How many innocent people were cruelly killed or hurt by the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in 1945? There was a war on, yes, but none of them were combatants. That’s terrorism. Defacing a building or trashing a Tesla car isn’t (except to Mr Dunderhead.)

On the Battery God Being Belligerent.

I was on my way out to go to Ashbourne for my weekly shopping trip this morning, but when I pushed the button to unlock the car nothing happened. I tried it from a different direction but still nothing happened. I tried it from several directions, and even returned to the house and came back again, thinking it might be one of those odd temporal shifts in the matrix. And then I unscrewed the key fob and jiggled the button cell in there. Nothing. Not a clunk or a wink-wink was in evidence to set my mind at rest. And of course, the door wouldn’t open.

Thus began a long period of telephonic and other activity aimed at remedying the situation, the details of which may be mostly omitted to avoid the risk of inducing an atmosphere of terminal boredom to the relating of the tale. Apart from one interesting fact:

When I made the first call using my mobile phone I noticed that my phone battery had hardly any charge in it, so I plugged the charger in and proceeded with the calls in situ. But the screen kept flashing up a message saying ‘charger plugged out.’ Only it wasn’t plugged out, so now I had another problem. Was it a fault with the charger, the phone battery, or the phone itself? You never know these days, do you? That’s one of the problems we have with modern technology in the modern world.

But here’s the interesting bit: at the end of all the testing and theorising, the problem with the car was diagnosed as being simply a flat battery. It wasn’t flat yesterday, but now it is. ‘That’s the problem with modern batteries,’ said the mechanic. ‘Full of life one minute and dead the next. They don’t give you any warning any more.’

A new battery was ultimately located and fitted, and now the little French princess is purring and blushing prettily again just as she should, and opening her doors freely to welcome my august presence into her midst.

But isn’t it odd that I should have two unconnected battery failures at the same time. Is there a god of batteries up there in the cosmos somewhere, and might he have a toothache today? And there’s a little adjunct to the tale:

Yesterday I went to the GP surgery for my spring Covid booster, and when the nurse came to insert the needle she jumped back. I suppose I probably asked some feckless question like ‘do I really smell that bad?’ (because that’s what I usually do). ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I just got an electric shock off your arm.’ Well, maybe the battery god has a more extended portfolio which includes all matters electrical. And maybe he’s had toothache for two days. Whatever the likelihood or otherwise of such speculation, there definitely seems to be summat up (as they say in the wild north country.)

The Mystery of Donald and Greta.

I’m currently thirty minutes into a documentary about Greta Thunberg, and one of the questions which has become uppermost in my mind is this:

How can Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg both be members of the same species?

One sub-ordinary and the other super extraordinary; one deluded follower and one a visionary leader; one of achingly narrow perception and one who sees the world as it truly is. And both claiming descent from Adam.

Didn’t I read once that the chimpanzee has 98% of its DNA in common with the human? That might be true of Trump, although I suspect the figure might be higher in his case, but Thunberg? Therein lies the mystery.

Having Prospero for President.

I once read that an American – presumably a sound man of business – had stated the opinion that the president of a country should always be a businessman. Well, America now has one and the question has come into sharp relief. Personally I think it’s a load of tosh, so I thought I’d make a case for the opposite assertion.

The problem with businessmen, certainly at a level which would qualify them to run for President, is that they’re conditioned by, and committed to, the notion that the overarching concern in any organisation is the pecuniary principle. Money is the bottom line; money is everything. This must surely give them an unrealistically narrow view of the spectrum of cultural concerns and values, and lead them to consider that the only thing which really matters when creating a stable and contented society is economic growth.

But economic growth, at least in an overwhelmingly capitalist system, doesn’t create a contented society. What it creates is the illusion that having things like prestigious cars and big houses and trinkets and gadgets and expensive pastimes is the predominant means by which happiness and contentment are gained. And it simply isn’t true. The main effect of having more and more things is to create a permanent desire to have yet more things once you’ve become habituated to those you’ve already got, and that in turn produces a perpetual state of discontent. It’s usually subconscious, but it’s no less real for so being.

The creation of stability and contentment requires the right balancing of the spectrum, and this is something the high flying businessman is ill prepared to understand. Money really isn’t everything, and that’s a fact. And as long as the businessman running the country thinks it is, the pestilence of discontent and social division will not only continue to thrive but probably grow stronger.

As Edgar Allan Poe wrote at the end of Masque of the Red Death, when the plague has taken Prince Prospero and proved it knows no boundaries (and I hope I might be forgiven the necessary paraphrase):

And Darkness and Decay and the scourge of the mighty Dollar will hold illimitable Dominion over all

The Matter of the Reflective Posts.

A little way down the lane from my gate stand two curved metal posts hammered into the shallow grass verge. They’re reflective and coloured red, white, yellow, and black, and were put there a couple of years ago to warn drivers at night away from the drainage ditch which lies the other side of the verge.

The problem is that the red, white, yellow, and black had been completely obscured by road dust, leaving them a dirty dark grey and anything but reflective. Today I went out and cleaned them, and also hammered one of the posts further into the ground because it had worked loose and was in danger of falling over. Several cars passed me while I was so engaged because it was school run time. Two people and a dog also passed me on foot, and none of them stopped to ask ‘what’ya doing?’

And so I fully expect that one day someone will be driving along that part of the lane at night and say: ‘Oh look, somebody’s cleaned those reflective posts. I wonder who it was.’ And any generally uninterested passenger will probably reply: ‘The council, I expect.’ And they’ll be wrong, but I won’t mind a bit because I will tell myself that virtue is its own reward. Yeah.

A couple of hours before that I was taking my walk when a young Cocker Spaniel gleefully made my acquaintance. He then proceeded to wrap his paws around my arm and chew my thumb. My, how it took me back to happier times when another Cocker Spaniel and I got on famously. (This is the point at which ‘hey ho’ would come in useful if it weren’t such a cliché.)

And then I got the ladder out and trimmed the ivy festooning the side wall of my house, so now it looks all smarty pants.

I’d say that today might be described as ‘productive.’ Do you know how rare that is?

Coincidence and a Dark Suspicion.

I came across a second hand book in a charity shop today, a glossary of mainly archaic, but with some new, words which have fallen out of use or not yet become common. One of the archaic terms is the verb ‘to betrump’ which means to deceive, to cheat, to evade by guile, and the example of usage is given as ‘he betrumped her out of winning the election.’ (And the book was published long before Kamala Harris entered the presidential lists, just in case you’re wondering.)

It seemed to me that this is the good old universe showing us connections again, so I bought the book.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Starmer is apparently going ahead with his plan to give tax breaks to the American tech giants – huge, soulless multi-billion dollar organisations – in the hope of gaining favourable terms in the matter of Trump and his trade war. He also still declines to extract a little more tax from the multi-millionaires in this country, but remains committed to reducing welfare payments to the sick and disabled. Methinks there is something rotten in the state of Albion.

And it isn’t just dear old Albion under the microscope. I’m beginning to sense the spreading of an aggressive cancer across the politics of the whole western world. I read today that Putin’s little lackey, Mr Orban of Hungary, is to allow a visit from the genocidal and land-grabbing Netanyahu without arresting him, in spite of an arrest warrant being issued by the International Criminal Court to which Hungary is a signatory. And I gather that the new German Chancellor is likely to do the same.

So am I right with my cancer analogy? And if so, has it reached stage 3 yet?

*  *  *

While I was eating my dinner tonight I took to thinking of all the things I’d done today. And then I thought about the things I did yesterday and the things I’m likely to do tomorrow. A sinking feeling began to take over as the realisation set in that it’s all completely bloody pointless. And then I remembered that there were lots of dogs in Ashbourne today and they all seemed happy, and as long as the world has happy dogs in it there’s reason to carry on.

Open Wounds and the Baby Moon.

A week or so ago I was doing a small job at the top of the stairs using a piece of hollow metal tubing from an old vacuum cleaner. I dropped it and one end of the tube scraped along the white-painted lining paper on the opposite wall, scraping off a small piece of about 2”x½”. I carried on with the job meaning to repair it later.

But then I looked at it more closely and noticed something. Behind the paper is a thin layer of polystyrene sheeting which is meant to provide a little insulation between the paper and the plastered wall. It’s normally smooth, but the sharp metal had dragged across it and broken the surface into small polystyrene granules. At that point a sense of horror and disgust came over me, so profound as to be genuinely enervating, and it lasted for about ten minutes. Every time I went up or down the stairs my eye was drawn to this scar and the same thing happened. Eventually I had to make a point of not looking at it until I got around to repairing it.

That’s a little strange, isn’t it, and it reminded me of how I’d felt as a boy when I read a horror story which I think was called Lukundo, or something similar. It was about a man camping out in a remote area who develops a nasty condition: every so often a small, human-like being breaks out of his skin and talks to him in a foreign language. I felt the same sense of horror and disgust then. I also remembered that there was a time in my young life when the sight of a tree troubled me because it was growing out of the ‘skin’ of the earth, and anything coming out of the skin from beneath it produced a sense of loathing. Seeing the skin broken, and that which is normally hidden become visible, appears to have a strangely disturbing effect on me.

So where does this odd sensibility come from? Is it a form of neurosis which has it origin in some long forgotten trauma? And could my adverse reaction to very loud noises spring from the same source?

*  *  *

Meanwhile, the nice news this week is that the first bluebells are flowering. They’re early, as are the flowers on the wild garlic and the blossom now growing heavy on my plum tree. But we need rain because we’ve hardly had any for about two months. Unusually dry springs are becoming the norm in this little outpost of Europe.

*  *  *

And yesterday evening I noticed something unusual about the super thin crescent of the new moon. Its height in the sky relative to the position of the sun below the horizon put it a certain angle, which caused me to see a new-born baby lying back in the crook of its new mother’s arm. Such is the potential for imagination in this little outpost of the human condition.

Redaction and Recovery.

I was just reading about Trump’s latest foray into absurdity with his attacks on the Smithsonian and other institutions. He says they’re giving a false view of American history, and what needs to be shouted from the rooftops is everything which can be presented as glorious or grandiose by those with a conservative mindset (or maybe that should be mind(less)set.) Oh, and run by white men of course. Everything dark or dubious must be airbrushed out so as to give a true picture.

You know, we British had a very big empire at one time, and some people still regard it as a glorious achievement. But we don’t pretend that the Amritsar massacre didn’t happen, or that the forced labour camps in India didn’t exist, or that the Croke Park massacre in Ireland is just an urban legend. If history is to be worth anything it must be on a warts-and-all basis, otherwise it isn’t worth a hill ’o beans.

I’m beginning to have a vague, so far unformed suspicion that there’s more to Donald Trump than appears on the surface. He’s too far out, too extreme, too volatile, too bird brained to be just another Republican President. He looks more like a conspiracy theory beginning to take shape, and it looks to me as though America – and maybe the world at large – could be heading for something bad and irreversible if he isn’t stopped sooner rather than later.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, a shout-out for Mark the technician at Plusnet (my ISP.) I spent an hour this afternoon wallowing in techno devices, many twisted and unruly yards of various cables, the litter of cardboard boxes, and much of it spent balancing awkward things on my lap or crouched uncomfortably under the desk where my computer lives. And at the end of it all the new device didn’t work. A further hour was then spent with Mark the technician on the phone. It was hard going but he got me there, and there was even an element of serendipity thrown in for good measure. That little story is a rare one these days.