Imbolc Oddities.

Soon after the clock struck 12 last night…

(What’s brown and sounds like a bell? Du-u-u-ng. I like that one.)

… I remembered that it was the start of the Celtic season of Imbolc, and so I did my usual ‘white rabbits-plus-two-repetitions’ thing as I always do at the start of every month. (Imbolc is a particularly propitious time, you see, because spring is when rabbits are known to multiply. And it’s impossible to know whether superstitions have any effect or not. It’s no good saying ‘I did the white-rabbits-with-two-repetitions thing and nothing good happened’, but you can never know whether something bad would have happened if you hadn’t. See?) And then I listened to lots of Celtic music on YouTube before going to bed.

Now, it is a fact that most of the odd things that happen to me happen in bed. Last night I was dreaming that I belonged to some sort of organisation which was twinned with a German organisation of like mind, and we came by the intelligence that our German friends had made us some soup. The problem was that we were unaware of how much soup they’d made, and so we didn’t know whether there would be enough to go around and that was causing consternation. In fact, so much consternation was being caused that it woke me up, and guess what – I felt chilled. There was no obvious reason to feel that way because it wasn’t a particularly cold night, the bedroom heater was working perfectly, and I was covered with a good quality flannel sheet and a 17 tog duvet. But chilled was what I felt, so I pulled the covers around my head and began to feel my whole body warming up rapidly. That was reassuring until I noticed that my hands were warming to an alarming degree, so alarming that I began to fear that they were about to burn. Seriously! And then they returned to normal.

So what was that all about? The German connection was probably the result of having read about the spat between Mrs Merkel and Mr Merz over the AfD thing (I did say I was keeping an eye on German nationalism, didn’t I?) Maybe the desire for soup was engendered by the fact of feeling chilled. But what about the burning hands? Was that biological, psychological, or paranormal? It’s never happened before so how can I know? But I might add that I’ve started to get intermittent sharp pains at the base of my fingers when I grip things, so maybe there’s a connection.

All I did today was pay my electric bill, which hopefully should ensure that I’ll have a functioning heater in my bedroom for at least another month. And this morning’s walk was uneventful, being entirely devoid of rabbits, Germans, or creatures with flaming talons.

And I know this post is tedious, but I wanted to get something on the blog to mark the start of Imbolc. Such things matter to a mind which spends most of its energy on the question of whether there’s anything meaningful about living a life.