The Second Coming?

I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming when I saw the picture, but I don’t remember where it was. I’m sure it must have been either on the BBC news website or YouTube. (Standards of BBC journalism have dropped so much over the past few years that there’s not much to choose between them these days. The BBC is still a little way ahead because the standard of YouTube has also declined, but for how much longer now there’s serious talk about scrapping the licence fee?) Anyway, back to the picture…

It showed a group of Americans, mostly elderly with some wearing red baseball caps, gathered around their Messiah and apparently in a state of rapture. One of them was carrying a placard which read:

Thank you GOD

For giving us

Donald Trump

‘GOD’ was in red, to match the baseball caps I assume.

And still I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming, however surreal it appears in retrospect. It even made me laugh, which very few things do. If I might paraphrase a long-running advertising slogan used by one of the UK’s internet and phone providers:

The future’s bright. The future’s MAGA.

Or should that be something else beginning with M, like Mad, Maleficent, or Malodorous?

Three Small Seasonal Anecdotes.

In an earlier post I mentioned how pleased I was that my daughter was gathering all her family together for Christmas. Being alone myself at Christmas is fine, but I know that other people feel differently. It surprised me that I should feel so pleased, but I suppose you might say that it offered a vicarious insight into the value of togetherness. I had an email from her just before midnight on Christmas night to say that the central heating boiler had failed and the house was unheated. I went to bed unhappy.

*  *  *

Tonight I’ve been getting the odd feeling that the cold, windy darkness beyond the walls of the house is pressing in on me. Anyone familiar with Algernon Blackwood’s best known horror story, The Willows, will know what I mean.

*  *  *

I still don’t know whether the young woman I saw jogging around the lanes yesterday – and who offered a brief wave – was the Lady B or not. The figure was about the right size, shape, and age for said lady, but I paid little attention to her face. One reason for that was because I felt ashamed to be encased in several layers of heavy winter clothing including a beanie hat and gloves (but only cheap woollen ones) while she was so lightly clad that I might have walked into a six month time slip. The other was because I was fixated on her pale pink shorts. I’ve seen the Lady B in shorts before, but never pale pink ones.

Another Christmas Note.

I’m worried about somebody. (Or at least let's say that I'm uncomfortably aware of her situation. Let’s avoid hyperbole.) I imagine that Christmas must be very stressful for her because of past problems and present pressures, and I’m so very fond of her.

But my daughter and her family were all together this year, which is good. Having been brought up in a household of seven they naturally gravitate to togetherness, whereas I was brought up in a household of three relatively disconnected individuals and so I gravitate naturally to aloneness because that confers freedoms which others might envy. I didn’t even meet anybody on my walk today, which is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

And on the subject of hyperbole, I intend to start examining YouTube critically with the aim of identifying those types of uploads which I refuse to watch. They’re legion, and I’ve been meaning to do it for a while. If I do manage to make the effort I might get a post out of it.

Compliments of the season or ‘bah, humbug’ as you prefer.

A Loner's Christmas.

After the morning there comes an evening

And after evening, another day

~ The Streets of Derry, Irish Traditional Song.

 

And after Christmas Eve there came a Christmas Day.

How did it seem? What tune did it play?

Dry and sunny with a cold and cutting north-easterly wind which chilled the fingers and gained access to all parts of my old house (as easterly winds always do.) Three more sojourns to the great outdoors to keep the birds’ feeding table topped up. (A robin hung around but didn’t come over to say hello.) A brief visit from Mel for tea, a mince pie, anecdotes (mostly about the ills of modern times and systems), and a fancy chocolate each from a fancy Nottingham chocolatier. A nearly new moon hanging dutifully at half mast in a clear but darkening sky at twilight. A light lunch and a vegan dinner which included the obligatory Brussels sprouts (Christmas is the only time I ever eat sprouts. I even have them with chips on Boxing Day. Weird, eh?) A little time spent doing spreadsheet work so I could play at being Bob Cratchit. A small glass of scotch whisky before dinner because Christmas is the only time I drink alcohol before midnight. No music or TV yet, and no sightings of the Lady B or any of the Shire’s first family, which is always a disappointment. (But she was hanging around a lot in last night’s dream.)

All pretty regular really. I wonder why we bother.

A Little Utterly Nondescript Something for the Season.

Another Christmas Eve has wandered sluggishly through another weary day and now is almost spent. The magic of the evening hours has succumbed to a mince pie with my mug of tea, and the expectation of tomorrow is nought but an extra glass of scotch before my dinner.

There are children in Australia, you know, who are rising to the great day even as I write, while others in California are still waiting for the magic to sprinkle its dust. I wonder how many of them consider the life they have to come, and are cognisant of the many changes they will have to embrace and maybe endure. Will they tell their own children and grandchildren of that simple, innocent time back in 2025, and will they still recall that innocence vividly when the roar of the cataract seems not so far ahead?

I’m only writing this because I’m beleaguered at every turn and wanted to write something. Does writing matter, I wonder. Does anything – even Christmas?

Hype and Ego.

Following the recent assassination of some high ranking Russian in a car bombing, two videos relating to the matter have appeared on YouTube. One leads with the statement:

Putin’s Not Safe

This is a bit redundant really because I don’t suppose Putin has ever been safe, but at least it’s commendably restrained. The second leads with:

Putin Will Be KILLED Immediately!

So is he dead yet? It does say ‘immediately.’ The creator has a picture of himself looking every bit the model of a boring but well balanced diplomat – 40ish, smartly dressed, smartly groomed, horn rim glasses… This is what makes Google and content creators rich and divides the viewers into the savvy and the tragically gullible. (I did say I wanted the internet obliterated, didn’t I?)

*  *  *

I keep on hearing a line in my head from the carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, the one that runs ‘For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.’ How many examples of the speculative and irrational are contained in those nine words, and yet millions of people sing it heartily (I expect) every year. I don’t sing Christmas carols myself, but earlier this evening I did begin to develop a script for a comedy version of the Nativity play:

‘We bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the royal child,’ proclaim the wise men. ‘Myrrh?’ queries Mary. ‘Yes, my lady. Myrrh.’ ‘Myrrrrh,’ counters Mary in mocking tone, ‘sounds like the noise a sheep would make if it had a stomach upset. Can you eat it?’

I doubt there would be any takers.

*  *  *

Best of all, though, is Dunderhead Donald’s plan to build a fleet of warships named after him. It will be called ‘The Golden Fleet’ apparently. Sounds like something an ancient Chinese emperor would dream up, doesn’t it? You really do have to laugh at that man, don’t you? Still, once Trump has gone, one way or another, I expect a lot of sailors will be usefully employed with some very big paint brushes.

An Outcry and Some Asides.

I did quite a lot of spreadsheet work today, which I always find stressful because my brain is no longer attuned to figures and formulas. I saved it as I went along as I always do, and when I’d finished I set about backing it up onto a memory stick. When I dragged and dropped it into the requisite folder, the file disappeared. Much searching led me to the inescapable conclusion that either the computer or the program had deleted all my work.

I felt I’d hit rock bottom because this sort of thing has become an almost daily occurrence over the past year or more. And so I did a simple job elsewhere and then did all the spreadsheet work again. It appears to have worked normally the second time.

Given all the malfunctions going on around me, I can attest to the fact that living in a disintegrating matrix is an enervating experience. I sometimes look forward to taking the last train out.

*  *  *

Later on I worked out that if I’m still alive on 10^th June 2026 I will have exceeded my mother’s lifespan by one day. For some reason I don’t seem to have a problem with figures if they’re related to dates.

*  *  *

I’ve decided that I would like to see the internet destroyed and for us to return to a simpler and slower way of living and communicating. It seems to me that the mad rush into an ever more technologised world is not only causing heightened stress levels, but also enabling the tech giants to become the new architects of social behaviour. And that means that the rich are getting richer and there are more people in relative poverty, which seems a bit of a backward step to me.

*  *  *

Finally, the dampness and darkness of a typically dour British autumn has led me to consider the vague notion of moving to Florida. There are several reasons why it isn’t a practicable prospect, the main one being that it’s in America.

A Rare Visitation.

I was cleaning up my living room this afternoon when I noticed a car parked at the bottom of my garden with its hazard lights flashing. I regarded it inquisitively for several seconds and then saw a small figure making its way up my garden path.

That’s unusual. You must understand that I’m a loner who rarely makes friends and never joins clubs, cults, social gatherings, church congregations, or any other situations to which the great, the good, and the not-so-good congregate. If ever I form an organised religion it will be limited to me, and will be known as the Non-Congregational Church.

So it was odd to see someone walking up my path…

It turned out to be young Bear, and the car evidently belonged to young Bear’s mother who was in the process of taking him home from school (the day being wet, you understand; they usually walk home.) You might remember young Bear from a post I made a few weeks ago. He’s the boy I mistook for a girl, largely, I assume, having been misled by his long blond Lancelot locks, the like of which are not generally favoured by young boys these days.

But that unfortunate error led me to ask his mother whether she would mind my buying Bear a chocolate selection box for Christmas. ‘Oh, he’d love that,’ said his mother as she touched my arm in approbation. (She touched it about five times actually. I’m not sure that any woman has touched my arm so many times in as many seconds in my life before, but I didn’t tremble or turn blue or do anything else which might have been considered disrespectful.)

So there you have it: I was treated to a brief visit from a young boy called Bear today. He gave me a Christmas card and a fancy tin box containing shortbread biscuits, and I gave him my meagre offering contained in an even fancier Christmassy bag. And it occurred to me that maybe young Bear might become a rare creature I can call ‘friend’ for as long as I have left.

Reverting to Trivia.

I was going to make a well thought out and carefully presented post about a matter of some gravitas tonight. I changed my mind because I’ve finally accepted that what the commentators say about the INFJ type is mostly true. However insightful and logically reasoned my opinion might be, a lot of people will read my argument through an emotional filter, come up with the wrong answer, and then cast me either as a villain or a fool. And that irritates me, so I’ll make a trivial post instead.

*  *  *

I went into my old coffee shop haunt today for a spot of lunch and a medium Americano. Young Sarah was one of the baristas and she was friendly for once. She isn’t usually. And her co-barista, who I haven’t seen before but is about the same age, was also friendly. I considered engaging them in banter again (because that’s mostly what I do with young baristas), but remembered what happened the last time I tried it. Gen Zs don’t do banter, so I stayed quiet and paid my money without comment.

And then I went into Ryman’s, the stationers, and chose an appointment calendar with which to adorn a section of the office wall next year. There was no assistant in sight in that part of the shop, and no presence of any kind at the till. Eventually I found a lone woman of around forty – definitely not Gen Z – stacking shelves and decided to give vent to my banter habit again. ‘Excuse me,’ I began, ‘would you mind taking the money for this so I don’t have to steal it?’ No return of banter, just a poker face and a slow walk to the till. Maybe she thought I was being sarcastic, which I wasn’t. See what I mean about being misunderstood?

And I didn’t bump into the other Sarah (the Lady B; the notable one) as I’d hoped, so I couldn't ask whether she had a Christmas tree. But then, it was very dull and depressingly wet, which probably explains everything.

(I seem to have developed a taste for trivial posts again. I wonder whether that’s a good or a bad thing.)

The New Power Bases.

I watched a YouTube video last night in which a content creator talked of the changes Google are planning for the platform starting next year. Much of it was for the benefit of other creators, but some related to users as well. It was all couched in terms familiar to those steeped in the mentality of business models, and so even though I understood the words easily enough, most of the meaning went over my head. Since I’m not a YouTube creator, I don’t suppose it matters very much.

What does matter to me is the impression it left me with. I have an increasing sense that the big tech companies are becoming the prime architects of modern civilisation, just as the corporations and banks are taking over the modus operandi of modern living. And it’s all in the name of profit, to make the tiny number of insanely rich people even richer.

I ask myself how much further this can go. Will the presidents and politicians wake up and change the system to benefit the many, or will it take a cataclysm of horrendous proportions? I look at history and understand how the conduct of a life has changed immeasurably, in some ways for the better, but still have to ask myself: ‘for whose real benefit’?

My Latest Good Idea.

I just got the idea for my next novel:

Alien spores drift through the atmosphere, turning the population from rampant acolytes of the God of Consumption Mania, and into enlightened beings in the Buddhist mould (rather like those pot-bellied figurines with Chinese eyes which people call Buddhas but actually aren’t.) Suddenly they become supremely uninterested in the folly of Samsara and turn instead to the process of leaving the wheel of life, death, and rebirth behind. A bit like an inverted Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Imagine what that would do to the economy.

I’m not going to write it, of course, because I’m too old and too lazy. Applications for the copyright are invited.

Coincience and an Unfamiliar Twinge.

I was reading today about the two mass shootings which were prominent in the international news, those at Bondi Beach in Sydney and Brown University in Rhode Island. I felt connected to them, you see, because during the last fifteen years since I started writing this blog a number of women rose to very high rank on my list of important people. One was the priestess who was born and raised in Sydney and lived there for most of the duration of our correspondence, and another was Madeline (aka The Borg) who completed her PhD at Brown. I wondered why fate should connect me with two tragedies, albeit a long way removed.

And then this afternoon something odd happened, which might or might not be connected. So let’s go back some years to when I was still a relatively young man (playing to dear old Dickens here.)

Christmas, the celebration of… The last time I had a Christmas tree in my house was in 1989, and the first Christmas I ever spent alone was in 1990. (The connection should be obvious.) I felt a slight sense of trepidation at the prospect of spending Christmas alone for the first time in my life, but I needn’t have worried. I discovered that I liked it. I think it was the first intimation I had that I was really a loner at heart; that having only myself for company was both freeing and lacking the pressure to contribute and belong. And over the intervening years Christmas gradually faded to a matter of little or no consequence.

But this afternoon, after reading about the shootings and being made aware of the imminent arrival of Christmas by various media, I suddenly felt lonely. And the first thing that occurred to me was the desire to bump into the Lady B and ask: ‘Do you have a Christmas tree in your house?’

I suppose it must indicate that some part of my consciousness still accepts that togetherness has value after all. Can’t think of any other reason why I should suddenly be made prey to such an unfamiliar feeling.

If AI Be a Natural Thing.

I heard an interesting theory last night regarding the development of AI. It proposes the following:

a. That intelligence is not generated by the brains of biological creatures, but is a core component of the universe, rather like gravity.

b. That the developers of AI are, therefore, not creating the intelligence itself, but only creating the advanced mechanical infrastructure capable of receiving natural intelligence from the universe.

c. That we are wrong in considering the human animal to be the pinnacle of evolution and that any further improvement will be limited to human and other biological creatures.

d. Biological life forms are relatively unstable, being subject to many forms of decay, malfunction, and ultimately demise. Machines, on the other hand, are generally more resilient, and any errors which do occur are more easily rectified.

e. That when the machines become more intelligent than the human animal, our primacy will cease. At that point the fundamental question will be whether the machines will permit us to share the world with them.

I suppose it would depend on whether they see any value in our existence, and whether their intelligence comes with an inbuilt ethical compass. They might allow us to live in zoos if they have the capacity for amusement, but I expect the word ‘humane’ will be deleted from the dictionary. And I suppose this is all old news to fans of science fiction.

A Rare, Short, and Pointless Late Reverie.

The moon is way past the yard arm and my head is full of Lady Bellas and Cary Mulligans. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last two hours listening to a mix of Cara Dillon songs. I’ve said often enough that three women is the optimum number so maybe I’m on the right road after all. Not long to go now. I’ve no idea why I’m posting this.

Balm for a Scalded Mind.

I posted a cheque to somebody recently which hadn’t been delivered after ten days, so I decided to stop it and issue another one. That used to be a simple operation: a single phone call to the bank and it was done in minutes. Not so any more. I began the attempt yesterday and the matter was still unresolved by this afternoon, and so I had to try a different strategy. It took a long time and involved much frustration, but I got there in the end. And then it caused me a lot of extra trouble to deliver the new cheque personally.

This was yet another example of the fact that, while the hasty move to use modern and constantly developing technology for everything makes some things easier, the overall effect on life is to make it a lot more stressful. And it’s clearly evident that this movement is driven by, and for the benefit of, the new rulers of the world – the banks and the corporate world. They do it primarily to make more profit, not for the benefit of the mass of people sitting at the bottom of the heap having their patience and their brains fried in toxic fat.

And those who pretend they’re running the world don’t even seem to notice. Or maybe they just don’t care.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, a lady with a compelling American accent (yes, I did say American) said to me tonight: ‘Your mind is a cathedral of interconnected thoughts, a beautiful, haunted library.’

What a lovely turn of phrase. If only I could see it that way (but it was still good to hear it.)

Raising the Child Right.

It occurs to me that if I were bringing up a child now, the lessons I would impart with regard to living a life would be very different than they would have been even ten years ago, and increasingly so beyond that. I’ve spent my own life exploring angles on the matter from the middle of the tram lines to their edges of acceptability, and I’ve spent many an hour peering beyond those edges into the misty lands beyond. In consequence, my handling of life has always been in a state of flux.

I think that’s true of everybody. However imperceptible the change might be, I do suggest that each of us is slightly different today than we were yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow.

And then there’s the question of just how much we should teach children anyway. I dislike the didactic approach so favoured in our culture from the cradle to the end of formal education. I remember a disturbing blog I once read in which a woman said that one of her main priorities was to give her children to God. Which God might that be, I was tempted to ask, and by what right do you presume to give your children to anything or anybody? I favour the line in Khalil Gibran’s homily on raising children:

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

If we are to be realistic at this basic level, it needs to be accepted that each of us lives in our own world. We seek common consensus, of course, and to some extent we achieve it. And yet it still seems to me that everyone’s world is slightly different to everyone else’s, so what right do we have to coerce someone else into it?

Guidance is a separate issue. Guidance is good as long as it’s accepted that guidance guides, it doesn’t push. Guidance needs to be tailored to the kind of world in which the child lives, and the road on which the child is walking. And that requires a level of perceptive acumen that few people possess to any great degree. That’s the tragedy.

Do you know, I spent much of my childhood struggling with the version of me which my stepfather considered the ‘right’ one, even though it ran counter to my nature and instincts. I was in my teens before I was able to face him down and say ‘no.’

Failed Again.

I yelled at somebody today. I asked him to do something which I’d twice asked him to do and still he hadn’t complied. I kept myself in check through all his pointless excuses and reasons why he didn’t think it was necessary, but it was necessary and I explained it again several times. The red light was flickering throughout the conversation, and eventually it came on full power. The steam valve opened: For God’s sake just send me the bloody books!

I do this you know. As the steam of frustration rises I manage to keep the lid on the pressure cooker for so long and then it bursts forth. I think it’s a trait I inherited from my mother, which is surprising because very few of my traits came from my mother. But my half brother was the same and he was her other son, so maybe.

I consider it one of my greatest weaknesses and usually suffer a sense of guilt afterwards. I’d rather be the patient, level headed sort who argues quietly and rationally until I’m sure the point is made. But when you’ve got Irish on one side of your ancestry and Welsh on the other, what hope is there?

Disparate Connections.

My routines usually dictate that the most opportune time to clear the road grids up the lane coincides with the school run. It’s very handy, actually, because it means I get to wave to lots of young mothers. A few of them even wave back. (I expect the others are organising a petition to have me confined to the church bell tower, having first established that none of their august company is called Esmeralda.) And if Jupiter happens to be in the constellation of Sagittarius, there’s even a good chance that I will see a hand wave in the Lady B’s car. Whether she’s waving at me or somebody else I have no way of knowing, of course, but I can always pretend.

And a horse kept blowing warm air into my right ear from his nostril today. That’s never happened before. The person sitting on his back suggested that he probably likes me. Pity the same can’t be said about the young mothers on the school run.

The Matter of Intelligence.

I watched a video recently about octopuses (or octopi if you prefer.) It appears they’re highly intelligent creatures, having nine brains (one in their head and one in each arm), and no friends. (I also saw a note which said they have three hearts, but I didn’t watch the video so I can’t attest to the fact.) Apparently they’re one of the world’s best at solving mechanical and other practical problems. Having made this startling discovery, I wanted to put a picture of an octopus next to a picture of Donald Trump on the blog and ask ‘Which of these creatures do you think is the Republican?’ Only Google won’t let me without forcing me to cross a red line. 

*  *  *

And on the subject of intelligence, there’s a video which YouTube keeps offering among my recommendations and which reads:

If You Can Identify These 14 US States It Proves You Have an IQ Above 140

I’ve said before on this blog that having a high IQ is a greatly limited way of assessing a person’s worth. Let me also add that being able to identify 14 US states correctly has absolutely nothing to do with a person's IQ. That’s YouTube for you.

Considering the Flu Mystery.

I read in the news this morning that admissions to hospitals in the UK for cases of flu have risen 50% over the same period last year. And every year at around this time the news is full of wailing about the immense pressure under which the poor, benighted NHS is put throughout the flu season. I ask myself why that should be because in all my life I’ve never known anyone be admitted to hospital to be treated for flu.

When I was in my mid-forties I contracted a bad bout of it. It was winter and I was living in an old house which had no heating other than a gas fire in the living room. I took three days off work and rested up. In addition, for the only time in my life, I spent one whole day in bed. And then I went back to work on the fourth day. It was an unpleasant experience but something which simply needed to be got through until it burned itself out. And that was how everybody I’d ever known handled it.

So what’s different about now? Is it to do with the increasing age demographic? That hardly seems likely to explain such a rise because the age demographic isn’t going up that much. Are modern flu viruses much stronger than they used to be? Is there something about modern social habits which leads people to be more exposed to it? Or are we becoming so wimpy that we expect advanced medical treatment for everything from cancer to a wart on the left little finger?

Maybe it’s a combination of all of them. The next time I see my doctor I must ask him.

(And I still couldn’t find anything amusing to say about this one. I’m sure I would have done once. Then again, my house is uncomfortable tonight because the bitingly cold wind is in the east, and that’s always bad news.)

When Jesus Meets the Muslims.

Among the plethora of idiotic nonsense uploaded to YouTube, the following one caught my eye. It purports to come from a man who claims to have had a near death experience and went to heaven (as all NDEs do.) The video reporting his encounter is titled:

Jesus told me what he does with all the Muslims

I doubt it was a happy and accommodating experience for them, although there are several reasons why I didn’t waste my time watching it.

It raises several contentious points, of course, most of which should be obvious. But the first thing that occurred to me was how Jesus would know who is Muslim and who isn’t. Anybody can claim to be or not to be Muslim, just as anybody can claim to be or not to be Christian or Buddhist (Hindu and Jewish are different because bloodline comes into the picture with those.) Would a woman wearing a hijab, for example, be unable to contest the accusation of being Muslim?

And that leads me to a wholly unconnected question: There are several states in which the wearing of Muslim traditional dress is forbidden by law, and that includes the hijab. How would they respond, I wonder, if some major fashion designer set about popularising the hijab – presumably in gay colours and patterns – until it became a popular fashion statement? I truly wish somebody would do so just to find out.

And a second issue raises its head: I’ve noticed that there are a lot of anti-Islam videos appearing on YouTube lately. Given the high sensitivity to anything which can be viewed as being in any way prejudiced in the modern world, I’m surprised that Google aren’t being pressured to remove them on the grounds of ‘hate speech’ or ‘inciting racial or religious intolerance.’ I’m not suggesting they should, just surprised that it isn’t happening.

My own position is simple: I detest the excesses of Islamism for obvious reasons, as all reasonable people do, and I would object most strongly to the imposition of shariah law in what is effectively a secular state. But if someone chooses be Muslim and follow its dress code, I really don’t give a hoot. (Some people might remember my effusive praise of a student nurse called Sabs back around the period of my kidney operation. She wore a black hijab. It suited her.)

Flat Blog Blues.

I’m feeling a little troubled lately because my blog has gone flat, and I’m asking myself why it’s gone flat. Well, it’s like this:

I write the blog in order to have something to write. Writing has been in my blood since I was a teenager and has had several outlets down the years. It came to its high point when I was writing fiction between 2002 and 2011, and when the stories ran out I turned to blogging instead.

Let me make clear the fact that I don’t expect to change the world with the blog. I don’t see myself as an ‘influencer’ (in fact, I would be horrified if anybody called me that.) But I do like, for whatever reason, to present myself through it. I like to throw out to the universe what I am, how I feel, what my opinions are on matters important to me, how the environment in which I live functions, and occasionally what little stories I tell myself to make the inner me more worth the bother of being here. And so the blog has to be a picture of me in words – all of me (or at least most of me.)

One aspect of me that has always been prominent has been a tendency to see an undercurrent of humour in most situations. The humour was usually subtle, mostly based on sarcasm, innuendo, irony, and the surreal, and so it naturally found its way onto the blog in a significant number of posts. Not all obviously, because some subjects don’t allow even a minor diversion into humour, but I often found something funny even in the darker situations. And that’s what’s missing these days.

So what’s causing it? The health issues I can cope with, even though some of them are inconvenient at times. The descent into winter with its short days, long nights, cold accommodation, and general grimness doesn’t help, but I’ve felt that way about winter for much of my life and the humour has still managed to pop its head above the ice now and then. Being alone so much of the time can be a bit galling now and then, but not often. Mostly I prefer being alone and having my space to myself, and there are so few people I would consider amenable company that aloneness is my natural state. And my current near-obsession with mortality is not, in itself, a big issue because it’s never morbid. It’s part and parcel of my lifelong drive to discover the true nature of life and existence in general.

And yet the black cloud of unease and apprehension still hangs over my head for much of the time, often descending to darker depths. I suppose it could be that the issues mentioned above coalesce into a weight that’s troublesome to carry around all the time. And there’s one that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: so many of the functional things I have around me are breaking down now, and when you feel you don’t have much longer to go the temptation is to hope that they will stay with you long enough to see you out, rather than accepting the trouble and expense of replacing them.

I wanted to close this post with something amusing, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Language and the Cheap Shot.

Something which so irritates me on YouTube are those videos which say: Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? And then they show Japanese people trying their best and failing miserably. So what do we do then? Why, mock them of course, even if under our breath. (And maybe feel superior.)

Surely it must be obvious to everybody that different languages have sounds which don’t appear in other languages, and so the relative positions of tongue, teeth, and palate to which native speakers are habituated are different. It’s well known, for example, that the Japanese have difficulty with the letter ‘l’ and the hard ‘g’ because they haven’t been trained to use the sounds those letters make. And it works both ways.

So here’s a new rule for Google to apply: Any video which says Can Japanese people pronounce these difficult English words? must be accompanied by another one which says Can English people pronounce these difficult Japanese words? And then we can mock ourselves as well. (And maybe feel inferior.)

On Autumn and Its Faces.

I’ve noticed throughout my life that the autumn season mostly wears a small but distinctly different set of faces. This evening I decided that there are four.

The first is the pallid face when the light remains constant due to the universal cloud cover. It’s undistinguished and often wet. It drags us through the day in sombre mood and further hastens the dread of approaching winter.

The second is the jolly face when the sun bestows its beneficence from a pale blue sky and casts its glow on the warm colours of landscape and building alike. Myriad shades of red and yellow woodland delight the eye, and the low evening sun turns the dark tree trunks red while casting old limestone buildings in a shade of old gold.

The third is the face of vaporous air, less bright than the jolly face but still bright enough to encourage the dying leaves to glow in a final celebration of the inevitability of demise. And that’s the one which reaches the olfactory organs, filling the head with the musty scent of dead leaves on the woodland floor.

Finally there’s the magical face late in the year when river valleys fill with dense white mist, and floating above the fluid but impenetrable whiteness are the topmost branches of skeletal trees. There’s no colour to be seen anywhere, but there is mystery. That’s my favourite, and that’s the one I saw at twilight today.

And still I ask whether any of it is truly real. And still I ask whether anything lies beyond it, and if so what. And still I try to place it all within the concept of universal consciousness, and maybe one day I’ll know.

The Near Miss.

The route from my village to Uttoxeter begins with a narrow country lane of around two miles in length. The width varies from place to place and has quite a few blind bends, so a certain amount of caution is required. I drove it this morning.

The day was fine and dry with a low, bright sun shining from an almost wholly blue sky. It’s the sort of condition which produces the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows, and even at midday – the time I usually go to Uttoxeter – the sun is low enough to require the use of the car’s visor to keep the blinding sun out of one’s eyes.

And then there is the problem of road glare. We’d had rain the previous night and so the road was damp. That problem is best addressed with the wearing of polarising sunglasses because they’re the best at reducing glare. But the problem with sunglasses of any kind is that they make everything else darker too, and so anything in a shaded spot is almost invisible.

I was driving around a right hand blind bend when I saw her: an elderly lady only just visible in the gloom bestowed by the shadow of a hedgerow tree. She was walking towards me along the edge of the lane and my driver’s door was level with her before I knew she was there. Had she been only a little further out into the lane my car would have hit her before I’d even had reason to brake. I was driving more slowly than usual but it would still have been an awful accident.

And so there was a lesson to be learned on both sides. To a driver one would have to say: ‘be very, very careful when negotiating a bend that’s in shadow.’ And to a pedestrian one might refer to Eric Idle’s famous song beginning Always look on the bright side of life. Maybe somebody should record a new version for us country dwellers beginning Always walk on the bright side of the lane.

Unhappy Birthday.

It was my birthday yesterday. I cleaned the kitchen sink by way of celebration. The rest of the day was a liturgy of misadventures and malfunctions. In fact, it was a pretty awful day one way and another, possibly the worst of the year so far.

What surprised me, though, was my reaction to remembering of the fact, which I didn’t do until I came into my office first thing and saw the little parcel and card sitting on the chest of drawers next to my desk.

The fact is, you see, that until I reached the dizzy age of 30 I had always welcomed birthdays because they were carrying me forth to a time when I could feel my adult status to be fully vindicated. After that I gave them little attention, but this year my immediate reaction was to feel depressed. I don’t think a birthday has ever actually depressed me before. Maybe it was because it brought me to the age my mother was when she died of cancer, but I’m not convinced. I think it’s simply the fact that I’m unsuited to being old. And the period covering November, December, and January is my least favourite time of year.

But at least my kitchen sink is clean, for now.

Lost in Uncertainties.

I once wrote a post proposing the idea that nothing actually exists as we perceive the definition of ‘existence.’ It was a very simple proposition: The past doesn’t exist because it’s gone; the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet; and the concept of ‘now’ doesn’t exist because the flow of time never stops.

But of course, the counter argument is that it’s a matter of how we perceive the phenomenon we call ‘now.’ We tend to regard it, rather lazily I suppose, as a fixed concept. The boss might say ‘I don’t want it tomorrow, or next week, or even in an hour’s time. I want it now.’ And that’s the simple reason why certain people of moderate wisdom argue that now is the only thing that exists. It’s just a matter of understanding that ‘now’ is a feature of existence which is in a state of continuous motion.

That’s fine, but existential enquiry gets more complicated than that. We could argue the case that solidity has no objective reality, and that colour is not a quality of an object but is created entirely in the brain. We could consider the theory that every fact of existence – past, present, and future – still exists because experiences do not move through us with the passage of time, but that it is actually us who move through a permanent state of experiences. And that’s before we consider the nature of time itself, the study of which I admit goes over my head. And where in all this is the dimension generally held under the all-encompassing banner of ‘spirituality’? That’s where the edge of the continental shelf is reached and beyond it is only unknown depth and impenetrable darkness, some of which certain people claim to have explored. But how do you know whether to believe them or not, and whether their findings were truly real?

And that’s the point of this post. I’ve been engaged in existential – and particularly spiritual – enquiry ever since I saw through certain absurdities inherent in standard Christian doctrine at the age of about 12. I’ve gained many insights but I still have a massive jigsaw on the table before me with only a few of the pieces in the right place. (At least I think they’re in the right place.)

But now I’m growing tired of it all. I’m considering whether I should shut it all out and concentrate on the delights of nature, the fortunes of my local football team, and whether there is a person somewhere in this world who might one day make me a baked Alaska. And time is running short.

I don’t know whether I can shut the matter of existential enquiry inquiry in a locked box and put it away; it’s too big a component of who I am. But I think I might try.

Tricks and Trash.

I was browsing my YouTube recommendations this afternoon and learned a few interesting facts. One channel, for example, informed me that the streets in China are littered with dead bodies and the country is in catastrophic meltdown. Another said that Paris is little more than a pile of shattered masonry because the city is collapsing. New York is also collapsing because huge gangs of angry people are setting fire to everything. And China is currently preparing for war with Japan. It didn’t take long to find those four. YouTube is full of outrageous claims like that because clicks are profitable, which is preferable to being authentic.

I was mildly disappointed that I never came across ‘Aliens ate my hamster’, but reasoned that even the average YouTuber would know that that story was debunked about fifty years ago.

So then I started to compile a list of the phrases used by YouTubers to convince the gullible that there’s something deliciously hidden to be found, and this video will let you in on the secret. Surprisingly they were few and far between in the couple of minutes I was looking, and so I’ve only picked up three so far. There’s usually more than that. They are:

… will shock you

… which they don’t want you to know

… it’s not what you think

I’ll keep looking and add some more another time.

I find it sad that a platform with the potential of YouTube should have degenerated into having a large proportion of its output clearly aimed at those for whom The National Enquirer has become too highbrow, but it appears that there’s a growing consensus that it’s just the way the western world’s mentality has progressed over the past few decades.

*  *  *

And I think I need to put a notice up somewhere in the village:

Lost: JJ’s sense of humour. Please check your sheds and outbuildings, and if you find it call this number urgently. No reward, I’m afraid, except that attaching to the attainment of virtue.

When Money is a Distant Irrelevance.

Very many moons ago when I was writing my fiction, an indie publisher (of sorts) took four of my short stories and said: ‘If JJ Beazley wrote a story about watching paint dry, I bet it would be interesting.’ That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it (even if the editor involved was training to become a Catholic priest and might have had as much literary nous as Dougal Maguire.)

But then this week my daughter told me that whenever I relate the latest goings on in my little world, I always make it an interesting story. She certainly has more nous than Dougal Maguire so maybe I should take the compliment seriously after all.

Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t go all out to make a living out of my fiction, since it’s the one thing I apparently do passably well. It’s because it was never written for monetary reward. I had something like twenty five stories published by different levels of the indie press – some of them more than once – and had two of them included in ‘best of’ anthologies, and yet I think my total earnings from the lot amounted to no more than about £200. The novel and novella which I self-published are available online at all the main book retailers and they’ve enjoyed a similar lack of attention.

And that’s fine by me. I was never ensnared by the pecuniary principle which so obsesses and rules modern culture, you see. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do at the speed and in the way I wanted to do it. Money never really entered the picture because my writing habit occupied a part of my mind far distant from that in which monetary reward lies.

But I did take up the challenge of writing a story about watching paint dry. It’s here if anybody wants to read it.

Information and the Internet.

Having recently said a few words about how the Christian faith is shamelessly manipulated to match indoctrinated American attitudes, I was pleased to see this on my YouTube home page:

It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be a Christian at the same time

Maybe it was intended as clickbait, but since it’s a rare example of something I consider not only axiomatic but transparently so, I won’t complain about this one.

*  *  *

I’ve noticed something else about YouTube recently. I’ve seen an increasing number of examples of self-professed experts explaining their position on something or other in a simple and rational form of words. And then they repeat that position using different words. And then they repeat it all a second time using different words again, and I find myself thinking ‘but you said all this three minutes ago and three minutes before that.’ I’ve little doubt that it’s a recommended practice – encouraged by Google, no doubt – to drag the video out as long as possible because one of the factors used to consider the ‘value’ of a video is retention. They want to keep people locked onto the video as long as possible because that, or so I’m reliably informed, increases the fee they can charge the advertisers.

This didn’t happen much back in the days when people derived their information from books published by responsible publishers. Good editors would look out for repetition and only allow it if they deemed it genuinely necessary. The world of information availability has changed greatly since the coming of the internet, and not always in a good way. The concept of monetization has changed all that, as it has in most aspects of life.

Sound Bites, a Welcome, and a Contradiction.

These two thoughts dropped into my head while I was fetching my first scotch last night. They don’t have to be anybody else’s thoughts, so take them or leave them.

 

On Reality

There is only one consciousness in the whole universe. The illusion of individuality arises from its desire to view all possibilities from innumerable angles.

 

On Capitalism (After Churchill)

Never in the field of human endeavour have so few owed so much to the discontent of so many.

*  *  *

I had my chin licked by an ageing greyhound today. He appeared to be excusing me for disturbing his position on the coffee shop floor. I did apologise to him.

*  *  *

I’ve made the 200 posts for the year a month early. It’s an interesting fact (to me, that is) that I have no truck with targets, believing them to be a pointless facet of modern times. I do, however, like statistics. It’s just another example of the two halves of my brain falling out.

Being the Reluctant Wimp.

We’re having the first taste of winter in the UK at the moment. Down here in the English Midlands the temperature today was low enough to be considered cold even by January standards. It’s been much worse further north.

It had me thinking of times past when several winters showed their meanest faces, and I realised how much stronger, braver, and mentally tougher I was back then when dealing with difficulties and emergencies in unusually harsh winter weather.

Now, as I descend into old age, I’m becoming quite the wimp. I’m brought to depression by every ice-cold blast. I want to go to bed and hibernate until spring instead of fronting up and dealing with whatever needs dealing with. I still do deal with them of course, when it’s really necessary, but not before I’ve realised that seeking an excuse to ignore the whole thing and say ‘I don’t care; what will be will be’ simply won’t do and reluctance must be overcome.

So should I be ashamed of losing the will to fight nature’s nastier side until it retires to a safe distance? I suppose I should and I suppose I do, but life is very different from what it was back in the day. For the most part my sole responsibility is to myself and my little world. There’s nobody out there to lend a hand, so maybe the best approach really is to say ‘I don’t care.’ (But only if I can get away with it.)

Right now the night is dark and very cold and I have one room in the house that is just about tolerable, and I worry about the birds and the animals stuck out in the fields with nowhere to go and get warm. Maybe I should make that post about the talkative techie I encountered in Ashbourne last week, or the way in which my perception of life since I moved to this house has become compartmentalised around certain people and events. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or maybe I should just stop talking about myself.

Time to see what YouTube has to offer. Maybe something will be watchable.

Two Sides of the Gender Coin.

When I was 19 (which was quite a long time ago) I worked with a man who told me one day that his wife wanted to get a job. His response was typical of the age: ‘No wife of mine is going out to work’ he said with much indignation. Well, this attitude has nuances.

The first is his assumption that he had the right to tell his wife what he would and wouldn’t allow. It’s worth remembering that although the Church of England allowed the bride’s undertaking to ‘obey’ her husband to be omitted from the marriage vows in 1928, it didn’t become normal practice until the 1980s. (I was a little older than 19 by then…)

The second concerns the accepted attitude to gender roles. My work colleague no doubt considered – as did many men in those days – that a wife’s place was in the home and nowhere else (except, perhaps, the performing of voluntary work which made no pecuniary contribution to the household and therefore broke no taboos.)

But there’s also the other side of the gender imperative. A husband considered it his duty to work in order to provide for his wife and family, and so having a working wife would have diluted that role and been injurious to his pride. Knowing the man in question, I suspect that was his major concern.

Things have changed now, of course. Wives are expected to work because relatively few husbands earn enough to provide the sort of lifestyle regarded as normal in modern developed economies. And I suspect that this development has largely been driven by the corporate world and its lackeys as part of its drive to rule society and become obscenely rich in consequence. That’s the part I dislike.

And therein lie the nuances, so take your pick. I expect people of my generation will tend to see the situation quite differently from the younger ones, and I’m tempted to think that there’s a competition going on here between what some people consider preferable and not preferable, and what other people consider normal and not normal.

Suffer the Little Children.

I had a bad night last night. It happens occasionally. I wake up in the dark and the bedclothes feel to be in a state of disarray. And then I feel disoriented, not knowing how my body aligns with the four walls of the room. I don’t know whether I’m chilled or not because some parts of me are and some not, so I sit up and look in the direction of the panel heater under the window. If the red light is on it means that the room should at least be tolerable, and at least I know which way I’m facing. And so I pull all available fabric around my recumbent form and go back to sleep.

When I got up I felt empty inside, as I do often these days. I thought about the impending Christmas season and asked whether it was worth acknowledging. I didn’t think so, but considered the idea of buying myself a present. But what do I want? Nothing, at least nothing I can afford. And when I went out to top up the birds’ feed table, I had to remove the first ice cap of the winter from the water bowl. Winter is not a pleasant experience in this house.

I decided to go for my morning walk, and as I strode down the lane I spotted a small group approaching from the opposite direction. It turned out to be a little girl of around 2 or 3 sitting astride a small pony being led by a woman, presumably her mother. The child stared at me as the gap closed, and when they turned into Bag Lane she waved. I waved back. And then her mother waved. They walked on and then the child turned to watch me over her shoulder. She waved again, which I returned again. And her mother waved again.

A sense of some substance added itself to my perception of life, and the 2½ mile walk was navigated at a slightly brisker pace. How I have come to realise that the presence and lack of inhibition in children can be such a light in the growing darkness of the times. (And why I think of mothers as being the most important people in society.)

Three Little Connected Notes.

While listening to some music on YouTube last night I was reminded of a question I’ve asked on this blog before, so I’m going to ask it again (using different words this time.) How does a composer know that if he writes a number of notes in a particular order, the effect on a person’s emotional state on hearing them played can be mightily profound. How does he know?

*  *  *

It will be my birthday in eleven days time and I’ve realised something quite disturbing: I’ve started to notice attractive women over 40. I think the end must surely be nigh.

*  *  *

And to join the two previous notes together, I’ve been hearing Roy Orbison singing the song It’s Over all day today. I’m not aware of coming across any reference to either the singer or the song in a very long time, which makes it an odd coincidence.

America's Answer to Cirque du Soleil.

I see the American political scene continues to resemble a third rate circus which can boast no more than an endless supply of clowns throwing custard pies around to amuse its eager audience – in this case the citizens of the free world.

The latest spat is between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene (or Marjorie 'Traitor' Greene as Trump is now inclined to label her, calling on that ultra-sharp wit for which he is justly famous. It seems that anybody who disagrees with Donald these days is labelled a traitor. I suppose it’s meant to have maximum effect on a population brainwashed from the cradle to believe that patriotism is on a par with godliness, since the world 'traitor' is commonly understood to be the opposite of 'patriot'.)

Talking of godliness, Ms Greene’s response to Donald’s invective was 'I don’t worship Donald Trump. I worship God, and Jesus is my saviour.' I expect something as weak and frankly ludicrous as that was meant to appeal to the single brain cell shared by the mentally challenged denizens of the Bible Belt. Can’t think of any other reason why she would aim so low with her dish of custard.

And of course, there remains the inevitable irony: if Jesus of Nazareth was anything like the character pictured in the canonical gospels, I doubt he would have had anything to do with a firebrand Republican politician from Georgia, USA. And I expect Donald the Dunderhead would have been one of the money changers he swept out of the temple.

Contrasting Habits.

On my walk this morning I was approached in a friendly manner by one dog, one cat (most unusually), one donkey, one horse, two cows, one woman from the village, and one man from the village. That’s a lot for a morning walk, isn’t it? Guess which ones were welcomed in return 

*  *  *

It occurred to me today that when we refer to people’s parents we always call them ‘mum and dad.’ (Or mops and pops if you’re a southerner, mother and father if you’re being formal, mater and pater if you’re very posh and at least 100 years old, and ma and pa if you’re American.) What’s odd is that in western culture it has generally been the norm to place the masculine ahead of the feminine. So why the difference?

The Dubious Side of YouTube.

There’s a thumbnail in my YouTube recommendations which is titled:

What Would Happen If All the Scandinavian Countries Combined?

It’s accompanied by a map showing the ‘Scandinavian countries.’ Only it’s wrong because it includes Finland, which isn’t in Scandinavia. This is ignorance and therefore regrettable, but at least it’s probably a genuine and relatively common misapprehension, so there’s little harm done.

What is much worse is the habit of peddling outright lies in order to get clicks. A recent example was ‘King Charles III Abdicates!’ No he didn’t, and there’s no reason to think that he might have done. This has become so common now that the practice of lying to get clicks is apparently regarded as acceptable.

When did this happen? It’s long been accepted in modern civilisations that deliberately lying on a public platform in order to make money is at least frowned upon and usually illegal. This practice on YouTube is akin to those unscrupulous peddlers of coloured water in the Old West who assured the ignorant that their magic elixir was a guaranteed panacea and particularly efficacious against rattlesnake bites.

And money is what it’s all about. The more clicks, the more advertising revenue, so both the YouTuber and Google are happy. It’s inevitable to conclude that it’s why Google apparently makes no attempt to put a stop to it, and why YouTube has become an object of suspicion as much as a means of acquiring information and entertainment.

Losing Community Approbation.

I blotted my copy book while out clearing the road grids today – twice.

First I mistook a little boy for a little girl. ‘What’s your name, miss?’ I asked. ‘Bear.’ ‘Sorry, did you say Belle?’ ‘Bear,’ intoned his mother. ‘He’s a boy.’ Whoops (but he did have long curly blond hair and that’s as good an excuse as any.)

And then I saw Lydia coming down the road with her little girl (I think) and her new whippet puppy. It being the fourth time I’ve encountered Lydia at school run time, I felt that sufficient familiarity had been established to regale her with the Lydia the Tattooed Lady song. She was unimpressed. She carried on walking and muttered something I didn’t catch. And she declined to allow Gwen the dog to come over and smother me in canine affection, even though Gwen the dog seemed desperate to do so.

I think I’m becoming ever further removed from the tolerance of the Shire dwellers, but that’s no problem since there are so few of them I want to be tolerated by anyway. I don’t mind being thought a fruitcake, you see, but it does concern me a little that I might be becoming creepy in my advanced years. I wouldn’t like to become – or even be thought – creepy, but it’s such a difficult characteristic to define, isn’t it? What’s creepy to one person is eccentric to another.

Still, it’s life and life only, and as long as the horses and dogs accept me for what I am, that will suffice.

Clued-Up YouTube.

This is an amusing little example of how well some YouTubers know their subject. The title reads:

This gorilla is seeing a human baby for the first time.

The picture shows a woman’s arms holding a young baby out to show it to an Orang-Utan.

A Techie Turncoat and Barmy Bureaucrats.

I met a man today who’s spent his working life to date as a tech consultant. He was probably in his mid to late forties. He told me that when he started out he loved the ingenuity of modern technology and enjoyed working with it, but now he feels very differently. He said it’s moving too quickly, it’s too full of glitches, and it’s allowing all manner of ne’er-do-wells to know your business and habits. And that enables them to cheat you, manipulate you, and steal from you. He said it’s a world he doesn’t want to work in any longer and is looking for ways to scale back and live a simpler life. So maybe I’ve been getting it right all along.

*  *  *

I read this morning of a woman in London who took a used cardboard envelope to a public bin to dispose of it. She found the bin full, but there was a pile of cardboard next to it awaiting collection so she put the envelope on top and thought no more about it. And then she received a letter from the local council accusing her of fly tipping and fining her £1,000 which she hasn’t got (lots of people haven’t.) This is the wild, wondrous, and wonky way of bureaucracy in modern Britain. The cataract is beginning to look inviting.

 

*  *  * 

I wish I could remember where I put my sense of humour and my aptitude for a neat turn of phrase.

On Posts Made and Not Made.

I lost some money on Sunday at the retail park in Uttoxeter. As part of my latest crusade against the system (it’s a use it or lose it thing) I decided to pay cash for my purchases in Tesco. The change was £4.25 but I forgot to pick it out of the tray when I left. I’ve lost several things on that retail park and have decided that it has a bad vibe about it.

But then I met two lovely horses accompanied by two young girls at the other end of the park, so I chose to consider the matter of good and bad fortune to be in balance after all. I’ve never seen a horse on a retail park before.

*  *  *

I considered making a post about last night’s strange dream in which a man committed suicide and homicide in a single action. I used to make quite a few posts about strange dreams back in the early days of the blog, but I doubt the details would be of interest to anybody else. I can’t think for the life of me what it was supposed to mean, especially since the Lady B made a brief appearance at the end.

I also considered making a post about the Israeli hardliners’ latest descent into the sewer of mediaevalism. I’m not going to do so because it would be hard to avoid mentioning the name of the most objectionable of said body of ne’er-do-wells, and I don’t want it polluting my blog. They say that words have power, and I think they probably do.

The Sprint and Stumble of Emma Watson.

Emma Watson is coming in for a lot of stick on YouTube lately, and she received a particularly stinging rebuke from her old friend and mentor Joanne Rowling recently because of something she said in an award ceremony speech. There are now a lot of pictures of Ms Watson looking upset on YouTube’s recommendations pages, and it’s causing a certain dichotomy in my view of her.

The thing is, you see, over the course of the Harry Potter franchise the character of Hermione Granger was my ideal child, my ideal adolescent, and ultimately my ideal mature woman. I know full well that it’s a big mistake to confuse a character with the actor performing it, but I was inevitably left with a warm impression of the lady Emma.

But all that changed quickly when it became evident that, having virtually owned the biggest spotlight in the film franchise, she set out to achieve mainstream starlet immortality, first by resorting to some dubious (in my opinion) modelling, and then by taking up an activist stance and revealing what I saw as a juvenile and rather silly nature. And so I went off Emma Watson big time. Fine, you might say, Emma Watson is just an actor, she’s no concern of mine, so let the whole thing go and think no more about. And so I did, until now.

The problem for me is that I separate cause and effect in such matters. I can’t just say ‘Emma Watson brought all this criticism on herself so she deserves the brickbats. End of story.’ When I see somebody being attacked for views and behaviour which they held honestly, if a little immaturely, such an attack feels unjust and my sympathy gene is immediately aroused. Occasionally I have seen that tendency as a fault, but it’s who I am and I’m not likely to change now. I don’t even want to change. Why should I?

And so that’s why I want to have a long confabulation with Ms Watson to see whether my imperfect INFJ mind can say something to help. It isn’t going to happen, of course, but at least I managed to get a blog post out of it.

Taking Refuge in the Cryptids.

I have time to make a post tonight, but as luck – good or bad – would have it, I have nothing to make a post about because nothing of consequence has befallen me today. I suppose I could augment the post stats to the tune of one by saying:

The views near and far around the Shire today were decorated by countless tracts of arboreal gold glowing in the still, misty air.

I like that sort of autumn day. They’re atmospheric, especially if you can find a wood to walk through. I’m a little suspicious of woodland these days, though. My forays into the nature of reality have led me to consider the question of cryptids, you see, and I watched a video last night about the strange sightings on Cannock Chase.

Cannock Chase is a large area of forest and heath not far from where I was brought up, and one of the subjects of such sightings was of the creature known as ‘dogman’ (although they referred to it as a vampire in the documentary, which is something quite different and just goes to show how much ignorance is frequently encountered in the documentary form.)

The point is, however, that dogman is pretty big, horribly black, and presumed to be homicidal when it’s hungry. It isn’t something you’d want to encounter while wandering through the woods on a still, misty day in autumn. But fortunately there was an expert on hand to give us the rational explanation for dogman sightings.

He said that a Red Deer stag (cut to a picture of the Monarch of the Glen replete with antlers) can look surprisingly like a dogman when it stands on its rear legs after dark. Are Red Deer stags in the habit of standing on their rear legs after dark? Does something with the head of a deer (replete with antlers) really look like a hound from hell with a humanoid body? I suspect that this particular expert was not being entirely rational (and it’s not the first time I’ve said that) and had probably been gorging on Far Side cartoons.

The Lying Channel and a Little Mystery.

I complained in an earlier post about the sheer fakeness proliferating on YouTube, and one aspect in particular is bothering me. More and more videos on YouTube are being introduced by thumbnails containing outright, and often outrageous, lies. One recently claimed that King Charles had just abdicated, another that a city in England was ‘ablaze’ due to rioting amounting to civil war, and several others claiming that a well known celebrity had died, only they hadn’t.

It troubles me that people are prepared to lie to this extent purely to get more hits and therefore more money from the advertising, but that’s just the latest example of a sad truth about the modern age – that the pursuit of money outweighs the application of basic standards in nearly all circumstances. What troubles me more is that nobody seems to want to put a stop to it, which indicates that lying on a public platform has become the new norm and is therefore acceptable. Well, not to me it isn’t. The importance of truth is ever paramount.

*  *  *

I put a comment on a YouTube video recently. (I often do.) It was a simple exposition of a point I wished to make and the grammar, syntax, and spelling were –as you would expect, I hope – impeccable. And it was written in English, as you would also expect, since it’s the only language I know well enough to engage with people. Yesterday I received a reply written in one of the East Asian languages, so I clicked ‘translate.’ This is what it said:

‘Your Japanese is perfect but your English is a little casual.’

What the hell am I supposed to make of that?

Glitches and a Dubious Celebration.

It began when I woke up this morning. I looked at the clock and saw that it was forty minutes later than the time I’d set on my phone alarm for a wake up call. My alarm has always been reliable, and quite loud. And if I don’t silence it in the correct manner it goes off again ten minutes later, so either I was sleeping too heavily or the phone had a glitch. And that was only the start.

Next up was the computer behaving like a right ne’er-do-well, and then the car exhibited a few glitches, and when I attempted to pay for my groceries in Sainsbury’s, their computer system was faulty and it took six attempts before the transaction was complete. ‘It’s like this all over the country,’ said the cashier. And then there were other misfortunes which I won’t bother to relate. (Although I might the mention the pigeon which had become trapped in one of the charity shops and appeared most distraught, poor lady.) It was that sort of day.

It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is this all just coincidence, or is it the configuration of the heavenly bodies, or is there something up with what we generally rely on as reality? I’ve been surprised over the last few years by how many people I’ve heard say ‘I think the matrix is crumbling’ and I’m quite sure that some of them weren’t joking. I used to think that only strange people like me said things like that.

*  *  *

Today, November 5^th, is Bonfire Night in the UK. It’s a celebration remembering the day in 1605 when a group of Catholic activists planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament with thirty six kegs of gunpowder, with the intention of killing the King and many other notable personages. They failed because somebody snitched on them anonymously, and the man designated to light the fuses – one Guy Fawkes Esq – was caught. He was subsequently executed most horribly and now we celebrate his failure by lighting bonfires, setting off fireworks, and burning effigies of Mr Fawkes himself. (They’re simply known as ‘guys’, as in ‘penny for the guy, mister.’) For my part, I’m inclined to investigate the cost of having a T shirt printed with Guy Fawkes for Prime Minister.

*  *  *

The fakery, the naked lies, the disinformation, the persistent irrationality, and the sheer preponderance of half-baked trivia which now constitutes a large percentage of YouTube’s output are getting on my nerves. I’m seriously considering giving it up.

On Ladies and God and Things.

Today was a day of Lydias, Lady Bs, and a near-multitude of women called Megan. The coincidence of so many Megans suddenly appearing in my life encouraged me to investigate the name. Seems it’s the Welsh diminutive of Margaret and comes from the Greek for ‘pearl’, which is odd because Megans and Margarets are very different sorts of people.

Did I ever mention that my name at birth and for the first eight years of my life was Jeffrey Godwin? If you trace both names back to their Germanic roots, they both mean something approximating to ‘friend of God.’ No wonder it got changed.

*  *  *

I watched a video recently on the differences between the UK and the USA on the meaning and values of Christianity. She said that in America it’s considered good to be wealthy because it indicates that God is pleased with you. That being the case, I wonder how they circumvent Matthew 19.24. Or could it be that Matthew 19.24 has been redacted from the American version of the canonical Gospels?

*  *  *

When I went to bed last night I suddenly remembered, for no apparent reason, the film The Elephant Man. In particular I remembered the poignant scene near the end when Mr Merrick decides he wants to go to sleep lying down, knowing that the cranial condition to which he is prey will kill him if he does. That’s why he’s doing it, of course. I remembered the sense of the moment when he said it, and as I was climbing into bed I felt the same sense. I thought it entirely possible that I might not wake up in the morning, but I suppose I must have done because several people waved at me today.

*  *  *

My Lady of the Day, with whom I’m becoming a little fascinated and possibly even enamoured, is Mary Magdalene.

Preparing the Answer.

You know, I realised only yesterday, when I was putting a glass of scotch and a pastry out for the little people at midnight, that my birthday falls precisely four weeks after Halloween. Fancy not noticing that before, and at my age too.

On similar note. I’m waiting for somebody in the Shire to ask me: ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ I have my answer ready:

‘That’s like asking me whether I believe in ghosts and whether I believe in God. There are two answers to all three. The first is “I don’t do belief.” And the second is “It’s complicated.”’

And then I’ll walk away with the sort of detached air which befits the sigma INFJ.

Trump and his Qualifications.

I was reading this morning of King Donald’s massive reduction in the USA’s immigration quota, and particularly of his intention to give priority to white South Africans. Sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?

‘Oh no,’ says Donald, ‘it’s not racist at all. It’s because white people in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in large numbers by nasty black people. I have photographs to prove it.’

And then he smugly produces photographs of body bags stacked up and awaiting disposal, and expects us to believe it. Meanwhile, Reuters points out that the photographs didn’t come from South Africa; they came from the Democratic Republic of Congo thousands of miles to the north. They have nothing to do with South Africa. The White House, apparently, declined to comment.

So I’m still a little confused as to why the majority of American people voted to make Donald their President, but I have a theory.

(A Little Aside: I think I know why Donald wants to take possession of Canada and Greenland. Not satisfied with being merely King of the USA, his ego craves the title Emperor of the Americas. He wants to be added to that star-spangled list along with Peter the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Ming the Merciless. Donald the Dunderhead fits nicely. But I digress…)

The theory: We all know that the world is mostly ruled by idiots, psychopaths, cheats, and liars, so Donald probably has the perfect qualifications in the minds of the majority of Americans, he being able to tick all four boxes with supreme confidence. And who can blame them? America is, after all, still a fledgling culture. It didn’t live through the Middle Ages and learn the error of its ways as most of the rest of the world did. Could that explain it, I wonder.

(And I must just mention again that some of the finest people I have ever known have been Americans, just not the majority.)

The Geese Are Going Ga-Ga.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that every autumn I see, and hear, a large gaggle of geese flying north. I still don’t know why they would want to go north since north is generally colder than south in the northern hemisphere. Notwithstanding the apparent lapse in credibility, however, north is the direction they’ve always been taking. But not this year.

Over the past few days I’ve seen – and heard – four smaller skeins flying over my house. The first was heading west, the second south, the third east, and the fourth south-east. Why is this, I ask myself. Does it have something to do with the earth’s magnetic field, or climate change, or that infamous comet 3I/Atlas and its close proximity to the sun? My own feeling is that they’re either bored with taking their hols in Svalbard every year, or they’re tired of honking at the aurora.

And I still don’t understand why I still find the honking of migratory geese so magical, but I think I’m getting there.

Is Gen Z Destroying My Country?!

The sensationalist title to this post was deliberately engineered to mock YouTube where such titles predominate almost to the point of being ubiquitous. Just so you know.

To continue…

I’ve noticed that Gen Z seems to have no concept or appreciation of banter at all. If you try to engage a person of that era in banter you’re mostly met with a quiet stare which varies between blank and bemused. It’s as though you’ve asked them a complex question on the subject of advanced thermodynamics and done so in the most ancient dialect of Mongolian. Gen Z doesn’t do banter, and on thinking about it I realised that it’s also uncommon among Millennials, so maybe they started the rot.

Wiki gives the definition of banter as ‘playful and teasing remarks.’ So it is, and it’s central to the life blood of British communication, especially among the peasant classes from which I originate. I’ve often wondered whether it grew out of the hardships of working class life during the horrors of the Industrial Revolution when the majority of the population was condemned to labour on treadmills and live in crowded conditions.

If so, maybe we have a reversal of a trend going on here. If the Industrial Revolution, which threw large numbers of people together in adversity, gave genesis to the propensity for banter, maybe the Technological Revolution, which discourages human contact except when conducted in the limited environment of laptops and smart phones, is now taking it away again. And one of the primary aspects of human connection is being lost.

The State of Me.

I felt fine when I woke up this morning. I continued to feel fine all the time I spent lying there ruminating on the prospect of not ruminating but getting up instead. But get up I did eventually, and then I didn’t feel fine. My face was suddenly attacked by the combined forces of earache, toothache, blocked sinuses, and a general facial malaise down the left side. So then I felt rough instead.

But being ever in thrall to my practiced routines, I still had a breakfast of a bowl of cereals, milk, and sugar, and I still went out for my customary walk, and after lunch I completed the job in the garden which I’d set myself to do today. I even worked through the light rain which was falling at one point. So then I told myself what a good boy I am and noticed that the symptoms of the earlier lurgy had eased quite a lot.

By the time I’d finished the garden work the light was falling rapidly and so I spent an hour or so thinking about the Lady B. I often do, you know – think about the Lady B. I’d watched a YouTube video last night, you see, about the genetic origins of hazel eyes – which the Lady B has to complement her very dark hair – and the fact that they’re commoner in Ireland than most places. It encouraged the speculation that the Lady B is not (physically) a throwback to some ancestor from the regions around the Mediterranean as I’d often suspected, but has an element of the dark Irish in her antecedence.

And that led me to another realisation. The good Lady once told me that she was attending a course on some aspect of computing with her sister, and members of the group had remarked that they couldn’t tell them apart. To me that was nonsense because to me they didn’t – and still don’t – look even slightly alike. And further, neither of the girls look like their mother. And that was when I realised that when I look at somebody I don’t just see the outward physical form. I add to it a quickly formed sense of the person’s innate characteristics, and so their appearance takes on a different quality. Maybe I’m weird. Who can tell?

After that I decided to research the author Algernon Blackwood, the well known writer of paranormal and mystical novels and short stories. He’s especially known for his stories The Willows and The Wendigo, and the great Lovecraft himself considered Blackwood to be possibly the best of all such writers. I read The Willows and a few others many years ago and was very impressed myself, so today I finally got around to finding out a bit more about him. It turned out that he was very much like me in his attitudes and interests, which pleased me.

The ear, tooth, and sinuses are pretty much back to normal, by the way. Time now to make the usual highly laboured attempt to persuade my old friend (and he really is old) computer to play YouTube videos. The Lady Guanyin usually helps eventually. 

Another Encounter from the New World.

Having made the acquaintance of the girl from Brazil yesterday, today I encountered another woman from the New World. New York this time. She’s a volunteer in one of Ashbourne’s charity shops, and ingratiated herself into my presence by extolling the virtues of one of a range of appointment calendars which charity shops routinely sell at this time of year. All the monthly pictures are line drawings, you see, which are meant to be coloured in when the recipient is bored in January after the light and glitter of Christmas has passed.

And so we chatted about America and New York for a while, but I forgot to mention that I don’t really see NYC as part of America. It’s always seemed to me that it has the air of an independent city state about it. But I did manage to squeeze in my theory that the USA might benefit from splitting into several separate countries. The clued-up north east could become the first, everything south of the Mason-Dixon line would be the second, the Midwest could be third, California would be a state in its own right because it’s a bit odd, and that just leaves Oregon and Washing State stuck up there in the north-west. I suggested that Canada might be prevailed upon to accept the two orphans as a new province.

Oddly, she didn’t disagree, and that was the end of the conversation. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her whether she knew Zoe Mintz.

A Brief But Exotic Connection.

I watched the women’s football match on Saturday between England and Brazil, and it occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever met a Brazilian. Well you don’t, do you? Australians, Americans, and to a lesser extent the Dutch, buzz around the world like horse flies at a knacker’s yard. Brazilians are a rarity.

But today I was walking around the Shire when I saw a young woman approaching from the opposite direction. I’d seen her twice before and each time she’d smiled, waved, and said ‘hello’, so I thought it was time I elevated the connection.

I opened with some nondescript pleasantry and noticed she had an accent that wasn’t British. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘Brazil,’ she said. ‘That’s interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from Brazil,’ I replied predictably. (I consciously avoided any mention of both horse flies and beach volleyball, since both seemed inappropriate in the circumstances.)

So now I’ve met somebody from Brazil. It was the most exciting thing that’s happened to me for a number of years. I asked her what her name was and she told me, but I don’t remember it. It began with L.

Having a Bejewelled Window.

Having succumbed to an autumn whinge yesterday, I thought I’d balance it up today with something a little more pleasant.

On the opposite side of the lane which runs along the bottom of my garden stands a big old sycamore tree. It’s one of the first local sycamores to adopt autumn colour, and this year has been a particularly vibrant shade of golden yellow. (I expect it has something to do with the warm, dry summer we had this year.)

It stands opposite the front of my house and a little to the right, so if I go into the front bedroom on a sunny morning the sight of it fills the window with its golden glow. To put it simply, the window is full of shiny, golden jewels, and it’s rather pleasant.

(Yes, I know nothing in the material world is innately coloured, but one has to pretend sometimes. And the effect it has on the mind qualifies for the term ‘beautiful.’)

Dour Day.

If days have personalities, today was dour and mean-spirited. A cold, dark, and depressing heaviness hung in the air, seemingly intent  on pressing the life and cheer out of the land and all who move upon it. A light rain left pools of filth on road and field alike. The sky was neither bright nor menacingly dark, but that shade of nondescript grey which leaves the spirit in limbo.

I had to go out to the town this morning and really didn’t want to. The view from the window looked cold and grudgingly hostile. The wind had little power, but its sharpness seemed to bode no good. I went anyway, and felt constantly on the edge of a cold, incisive presence despite several heavy layers of clothing.

Maybe it was all due to the bad night I’d had, a night filled with dreams of being in a familiar place but no longer welcome there, only tolerated. I was woken four or five times feeling chilled, and every movement placed some part of me into the frigid domain of cold cotton sheets. Maybe it was the rewinding of clocks an hour, which we did in Britain today. It happens every year, but today it felt like sending the light of life back towards the darkness whence it came. Or maybe it was just the awareness that the cheerless presence of winter is visible on the horizon and heading my way. I dislike winter.

And maybe tomorrow it will all seem like a mirage.