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.