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.

Being Proud of Being British...

My YouTube recommendations are currently awash with exaggerated stories of how nice we Brits were to German combatants after WWII. They carry headlines like These German POWs Thought They Were Going to Be Ill-Treated in Britain, but actually… And this is followed by a picture of a nice British Army officer talking to them nicely. There was These German POWs Thought They Would Suffer Badly From the Cold in a British Winter, but actually…, and is illustrated with a picture of a nice British Army officer handing out heavy winter coats. And what about the picture of women in uniform parading through the streets with a nice British Army officer in attendance, accompanied by the headline These Women POWs Were Amazed That They Were Allowed to Parade Through the Streets Without Chains. There’s even one showing captured Japanese ‘comfort women’ in uniform, naturally expecting a fate worse than death, but actually nobody touched them.Or so it is claimed.

It’s all silly propaganda, of course, but there was one I found amusing. These German POWs Thought They Would Be Poisoned in British Camps it began, but actually... And then an obviously AI-generated picture shows a group of wild-eyed German soldiers reaching out in a state of ecstasy for a parcel of… fish and chips (wrapped in sheets of old newsprint as they were in those days.) Fish and Chips was, after all, the proletarian dish which put the ‘Great’ in Great Britain. Didn’t you know?

A Short Note on Immigrants.

One of the main features filling the media and parliamentary debate at the moment is the question of illegal immigrants. I gather there’s a complex economic argument on both sides of the equation, but the objection I’ve mostly experienced has favoured the emotional response. ‘There are just too many of them,’ say even those who see themselves as kind and liberally minded. ‘These people are uncouth foreigners invading our country and swamping our civilised culture.’ And they’re usually inclined to presume a proclivity for criminal intent as well.

I wonder how many of them realise that the people we now call the English came here in boats as what we would now term ‘illegal immigrants.’ And the same is true of white people in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. And when they did, they didn’t just swamp the existing culture, they took ownership of it.

And let’s not also forget that major population shifts have been happening all over the world since time immemorial, usually in pursuit of better opportunities and living standards, and we just happen to be living through the latest of them.

Perception and the Matter of Beauty.

This year has been unusually dry so far. Rainy days have been relatively rare, but now we’re getting a spell of daily light rain. It’s reminded me of something that happened a few years ago in Ashbourne and which I reported on this blog. I make no apology for re-posting it because I have a couple of things to add.

I was walking past the library on my way back to Sainsbury’s in Ashbourne today. Light rain was falling from a leaden sky and the pedestrian areas were liberally scattered with puddles.

I saw a girl of around twelve or so sitting on one of the benches near the library steps, next to a long haired and bedraggled dog with floppy ears – a Cocker Spaniel I think, or at least a spaniel cross. As I approached, she took her raincoat and covered the dog’s back, and as I drew level she was busy pulling the hood over the dog’s head. I had to stop and watch, didn’t I? Of course I did.

I could have explained to her that the hair of a healthy dog is liberally oiled and so it doesn’t suffer from the rain quite as we do, but why spoil the moment? Here is a light spirit performing an act of self-sacrifice for an animal. It was a mild day and so the girl was in no danger, and she was probably waiting for a parent to collect her soon anyway. I wanted to speak to her but she seemed reluctant to engage, so I simply smiled broadly and thought ‘You’re OK, kid’ as loudly as I could. And then I walked on.

It struck me while I was remembering this that another person witnessing the little scene might have perceived it differently. Such a person might have scolded the girl for being stupid, telling her that dogs don’t need coats and instructing her to take the coat back and put it back on. And here we have another illustration of my favourite sound bite: perception is the whole of the life experience. But let’s take it a step further and consider the question of beauty.

I’ve long held the view – ever since I read Richard Bach’s Illusions – that beauty, like colour, is not a component of material reality. It doesn’t exist there, but only in the mind of the perceiver. Just as nothing is inherently coloured, so no-one is beautiful in an objective sense. You might say that I’m regurgitating the old maxim that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and in a way I am, but not as it’s generally perceived. It’s usually taken to be a way of expressing the fact that it’s simply a matter of variable taste.

I think the true meaning of the phrase goes deeper than that. To my mind the old adage should really say that ‘beauty is in the mind of the beholder’ because that’s the only place where beauty truly exists. Richard Bach’s reluctant messiah says to his disciple ‘the sunset is an illusion; the beauty is real.) So it is with the perfectly formed features of a popular actress. The pretty face is an illusion; the personality, the kindness, and the capacity to promote light and goodness are the qualities which make the beauty real. And because we humans are convinced of our individuality in our self-centred worlds, the beauty is only real when it’s observed. (I suspect a quantum theorist might agree with me.)

Incompetent Algorithms and Other Silliness.

There’s an advertising panel at the side of my Hotmail inbox which is currently giving me a message instead of an ad. It reads:

Oops. An error occurred during a connection to adsdkprod.azureedge.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because an error in the transmission was detected.

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

And then there’s a blue button carrying the words Try Again

Are they kidding me? For several years now it has become increasingly apparent that there are all manner of sundry people and organisations collecting information on me, presumably from emails, blog posts, and so on. They seem to know everything about me from my shoe size to what I had for breakfast today. That being the case, how have they missed the obvious fact that I regard advertising as one of the world’s most iniquitous pollutants? I know to which sector of society it pays grovelling obeisance, how it encourages social division, how it treats the majority of the population as half-baked simpletons only there to be manipulated, and how it helps the corporate world take more and more control of society’s functions. So why would I ‘contact the website owners’? Why would I want to ‘inform them’ of the problem? Why in heaven’s name would I Try Again?

*  *  *

Sometimes this ad panel carries a different message which begins: You appear to be using an ad blocker, which I’m not. It then invites me to upgrade to a (paying) version of Outlook so I can have more space in my inbox. My inbox in its present form shows me the name of the sender, a preview of the subject line, and the date on which it was sent. What more do I need in order to decide whether to open the email or consign it to perdition’s flame? And more to the point, I suppose: are there really people out there who pay this charge in order to get something that is of no value? This is more than the subtle manipulation which is the stock-in-trade of the ad industry; this is a blatant case of trying to kid the gullible.

And this is the world created by the mega-rich capitalists, a world largely unknown to us Brits when we had a sane and settled mixed economy. And then Mrs Thatcher came along…

On the Chastening and the Chocolate.

I made my 39^th visit to the Royal Derby Hospital today – cardiology this time. I submitted to the usual ‘obs’ (blood pressure, temperature, blood oxygen) and was then treated to a consultation with a consultant. He tapped my chest and back with a stethoscope and remarked, upon reading my file, ‘I see you’re resistant to the prescription of medications.’ (You can’t hide anywhere these days, you know. Our affairs and opinions are spattered around like cat vomit on the wallpaper.)

I gave him the full lecture on why I’m resistant to the prescription of medications and he nodded, so I asked: ‘Am I discharged?’ He said he would refer me back to the GP, which as far as I know means I’m no longer a member of the Royal Derby Hospital Cardiology Club. Being black balled is quite a chastening experience, but I expect I’ll get over it.

And then the real adventure began.

I decided I wanted a cup of hot chocolate. There are a number of vending machines at RDH, but the only one I’d ever seen which dispensed hot drinks was at the opposite corner of the great monobloc behemoth and one floor up. I decided I was worth it and set out on the journey.

They’d changed it. It was a fancy new modern one and I’d had enough trouble using the old one, so I scanned it carefully. There were lots of lit up pictures of different hot drinks (including hot chocolate, thankfully.) There was lots of text, none of which had anything to do with how to operate it or how much anything cost. But there was a white panel which said to start, tap here. I tapped there. Choose your drink said the electronic display. I tapped the hot chocolate picture and all the other pictures disappeared. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. You have £0.00 credit, said the display.

Well I knew there wouldn’t be any credit because I hadn’t put any money in yet, so why’s it telling me what I obviously know already? Thinks: Maybe it isn’t telling me anything; maybe it’s a convoluted way of asking me to put money in; maybe that’s the way modern machines think. (It’s been a long time since I was a revenue inspector, you see. That was in the days before machines had learned to think backwards.)

I stuck my courage to the sticking place and fed a shiny £1 coin to the machine. Nothing. Hmmm… ‘Should I cut my losses and go home chocolate-less, or should I risk another £1 coin? I felt adventurous so I reluctantly gave this half-witted piece of modern technology another coin.

There was a clatter somewhere lower than my waistline and a paper cup appeared. And then there was the sound of splashing liquid in the same vicinity. Success! I had my cup of hot chocolate. And then there was a satisfying tinkling sound even lower still. I investigated and found 30p change in the little bay at the bottom. Adventure over. Now we drink the hot chocolate with a satisfying sense of victory.

So tell me, why couldn’t this 21^st century piece of equipment have a printed notice giving the price of the various drinks? I checked several times and there was none. And why didn’t the display read: Please insert £1.70 or more. Change given, instead of You have £0.00 credit?) Am I just old fashioned or have modern machine designers lost the taste for simple logic?

Today's YouTube Spots.

There’s a video appeared on my YouTube recommendations. It has a picture of a dog with its teeth barred, and carries the catch line:

Pregnant Man’s Dog Becomes Vicious.

Having scratched my head for a few minutes, I eventually realised that the words “pregnant” and “man’s” should be the other way round, so maybe whoever wrote it wasn’t a native English speaker. I wonder whether there’s a market for a freelance YouTube editor.

*  *  *

Something else which is currently proliferating (trending?) on YouTube is the misogynistic video. There are lots of them, typically characterised by pictures of women looking tearful and terminally depressed. The standard message, usually being sung from the rooftops by smug men (although a few of the uploads are from women), promotes the view that since women’s issues achieved prominence, men don’t want them any more. Whole regiments of attractive women can no longer attract men, apparently, and they’re now in the depths of Hades with nothing to occupy their empty lives except abject regret at their foolishness. Poor little petals, eh? It’s a shame for them.

One of the more notable has a picture of a bloated, ugly old man whose face exudes the oily appearance of smugness and self congratulation. It carries the line:

Now that women have equality, they don’t want it any more.

That’s interesting because it carries the clear implication that he thinks women shouldn’t expect or have equality. And that brings to mind something I’ve said on this blog before: Old men tend to assume that advanced age is a natural guarantee of wisdom. It isn’t. I’ve generally found that what old men presume to be wisdom is more often than not simply the impression arising from having their feet firmly stuck in a concrete block of tradition and conditioned prejudice.

This whole movement is an insult to my heroes the suffragettes, and I don’t like it.

The Promise of a Leisurely Future.

YouTube is currently loaded with videos in which very clever people tell us that AI will make humanity obsolete in just a few short years from now. They call it ‘the singularity.’ Some say it will bestow us with immortality, while others say it will kill us all. I haven’t yet decided which of the two is more pleasurable to the ear. Meanwhile, other clever people tell us that we don’t actually exist anyway, we only think we do, so I don’t suppose it matters very much.

The Devil Inside the DVD Player.

I’m drowning in troubles at the moment. Several of them involve the computer, and several of the several manifest inside the DVD player. It’s developed a bad case of Arkwright’s Till, you see, which term will only be recognised by those who watched the old British sitcom Open All Hours avidly (and with repeats) as I did. Briefly, what happens is this:

You open the tray with the regulation button and attempt to place the DVD into it. Sometimes the mechanism stays compliant and allows you to close it with the same button, but sometimes it has a little brainstorm and tries to drag your hand into the casing – presumably with the intention of enjoying a free meal – before you’ve let go of the disc. It can be quite alarming until you’re used to it, which I’m not.

Today's YouTube Note.

One of my YouTube recommendations today has a banner headline over the thumbnail picture. It reads:

PUTIN HAS FALLEN

The tense says it all. Putin is gone. No more President Putin.

And then there is the introduction underneath the thumbnail, which says:

‘Protests in Russia: Young Russians are Threatening Putin’s Rule.’

Now we have a different story: Putin is still there but his position is being threatened by young people. How, I might ask, when Putin still has the loyalty of the military?

I strongly suspect that ‘threatening’ should be replaced by ‘unhappy with’, and now we have a very different story.

This is today’s YouTube – fake news and wild exaggerations on every line, in process of which even the more innocuous claims promise: ‘this will terrify you!’ ‘Terrify’ is the current buzz word on YouTube uploads. And I’m led to believe that social media is just the same. Is it any wonder that the world is in such a muddled mess when it’s virtually impossible to take anything you read in the media seriously? The overly rapid rise in technology is bringing the stupider and seedier side of the human condition to the fore and nobody seems to care. I wish I didn't.

Mixed Encounters.

The Lady Fu was bestowing her favours on me in Ashbourne today. I was getting smiles and friendly comments from all quarters. And then everything went dark.

As I was about to head out I stopped for a quick smoke by one of the garbage bins outside Sainsbury’s, and was surprised to see the Lady B walk past with her youngest daughter. She was only inches away but showed no sign of recognition.

I watched her walk to her car in one of the nearby parking bays and strap her little girl into a child seat, and then she turned to look briefly in my direction before climbing into her car and driving away.

That made me a little sad, but what was even sadder was that she looked unhappy. The daylight always sinks noticeably when the Lady B looks unhappy.

*  *  *

But on a lighter note…

Sightings of the twilight bats have been in short supply this year. I’ve occasionally seen a single bat hunting around one of the trees by the lane at the bottom of my garden, but no more than that.

Yesterday evening was different. There were two of them and they were hunting around my house. I was so pleased to see them that I called a ‘hello’ quite loudly, at which point one of them flew down to my eye level, performed a loop, and then flew back up to the roof to continue feeding. I think I might be allowed the luxury of seeing it as a reciprocal greeting, don’t you?

The Corporate Double Vision Trick.

This blog has comprised mostly inconsequential asides lately, hasn’t it, so let’s have an outcry for a change just to keep the title honest. Imagine this:

You’re contracted to a large company for the supply of something-or-other and you have very low regard for them because their systems and general conduct suck, but you stay with them because it’s more convenient or you have no other realistic option. But then you have a problem and need to call them to get it sorted, so that’s what you do through gritted teeth.

Having sat through all the obstacles they lay in your path to make your teeth ache with the ever-increasing pressure, you eventually find yourself talking to a customer service advisor who is affable, helpful, knowledgeable, and probably even sympathetic. He or she deals with your problem efficaciously, everything is now fine, and your teeth can go back to the state of rest which is their normal condition. (Careful selection of customer service advisors is a good way of aping Macbeth’s dictum that ‘fair face must hide what the false heart does know.’)

OK, so what happens next? You receive an email from the company which approximates to:

Bearing in mind the contact you just had with Kerry, our customer service advisor, how likely are you to recommend our company to other people?

What do you do? If you’re so buoyed by satisfaction and relief that you click 5 stars out of 5 you’d be lying, because the only person to whom you would recommend this company would be your worst enemy on a day when you were feeling particularly vindictive. If, on the other hand, you click 1 star out of 5, it might reflect badly on dear Kerry and that would be inaccurate and grossly unfair.

(Now, suppose you run out with your football team to play a game and notice that each end of the pitch has two goals. You ask the referee: ‘Which goal is the correct one?’ ‘Oh they’re both correct,’ says the ref, ‘but what you need to understand is that whichever goal the ball enters will be automatically deemed the wrong one, so you won’t score.’)

That’s the game the big companies seem to be playing, and so you decline to reply to their manipulative and damn silly questionnaire.

Preamble.

Autumn announced its presence in true seasonal fashion today. The pale yellow leaves which have been creeping up on us for a few weeks suddenly broke forth in greater numbers as they hung in the cold air suffused with a heavy mist. It was one of those days when ancient cobwebs become suddenly visible for having donned their jewellery of silver dewdrops, and I felt the iced fingers of winter preparing to take hold of the land on the northern horizon.

On a happier note I did receive unsolicited smiles from two ladies and two dogs today. No, that’s a lie. The dogs responded to smiles from me, but it was good to be recognised and made welcome by a whippet and a black Labrador.

And then I saw a young woman with a Mohican hair cut, and asked her whether such a style is making a comeback. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘just me.’ I congratulated her on being different, and she said ‘thank you.’

The Oddness of the Lambs.

The land to the back and side of my house comprises a large field containing a small flock of sheep. Some of them are lambs born in the spring and now fully grown, and yesterday I watched intrigued as these adult ‘lambs’ started behaving like young ones.

They were galloping around the field, leaping, bucking, and head butting each other in play fights. I’ve never seen grown up lambs do that before and gave some thought to the possible reasons.

Lambs get very short lives, and those not being retained to bolster the flock get moved on in the autumn while their flesh is still succulent enough to please the palates of non-vegetarians. And so I wondered whether these guys were somehow aware of danger and were showing off their physical prowess as prey animals do in the wild when there are predators about. Then again they might all be females and have somehow come to realise that they are being retained, in which case maybe they were celebrating.

Both possibilities seem equally fanciful, but I think I’ll stick with the latter since I’m not non-vegetarian.

Surveillance?

While I was out clearing the road grids and channels yesterday, somebody stopped and asked me: ‘Did you know you can eat acorns?’ He went on to explain that there is a lot of soaking involved and a particular way of cooking them, but they’re said to taste like sweet chestnuts. The best answer I could give was: ‘I think I’ll leave them to the squirrels. They can’t afford to shop at Sainsbury’s.’

Nevertheless, I was intrigued and made a mental note to research the subject some time later. After that it went completely out of my head. I thought no more about it, didn’t research it, didn’t mention it to anyone else, and made no mention of it on the blog, by email, or through any other medium.

Today there’s a recommendation on my YouTube home page which tells me how to harvest, prepare, and cook acorns. I’m quite sure I’ve never seen it before because that’s the sort of thing which would pique my curiosity and be memorable.

So is this purely coincidental, the universal consciousness proving its mettle, or could it be that even the quiet lanes of rural England are now infested with tracking devices which can recognise individuals and even have access to their Google accounts? I’ve experienced coincidences of this type before and always shrugged them off, but how many does it take before you have to start wondering?

Recalling the Priestess.

I had a vivid dream last night in which there was a knock on the door, and when I opened it the priestess was standing there. She’d located my address in order to pay a surprise visit.

I remember nothing more about the dream, but when I woke up my mind went quickly to some adverts appearing in my YouTube recommendations offering the provision of an AI girlfriend. (You can even decide what she will look like, they say. Most accommodating.) And that led me to wonder whether the priestess had been an AI construct all along.

All those deep discussions betraying the advanced precocity of her worldliness and wisdom. All those partings and reconciliations. All her travelling around the globe. All her wild but ultimately failed relationships. Her relocation from the New World to the Old until she wound up a mere 140 miles from where I live. And finally my realisation that I no longer had anything to offer her and maybe it was time to break the chain.

For thirteen years we seemed important to one another, and yet we never met or even spoke on the phone. The whole relationship was conducted via email, the last of which was sent by me two years ago and said ‘I’m not worth knowing any more.’

So was she real or merely a program in some advanced computer somewhere? Will I ever know the answer to that before I die? And are we all maybe nothing more than programs in an advanced computer being operated by a previous, highly evolved culture of computer builders as some suggest? Are we all just pieces of AI and is there someone out there deciding what we should look like?

I doubt it myself. My instinct with regard to the nature of reality is becoming ever surer that the key to understanding existence is to understand consciousness. The ancient sages said they did, and the evidence is there for those who care to look. And yet we all seem to have forgotten it in the process of what the clever people call the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, I hope the priestess is happy.

Today's YouTube Gem.

Some months ago I put a complimentary comment on a YouTube video which studied the facts around some mysterious ancient artefacts. The man who presented it did so calmly, rationally, and without unwarranted speculation or hyperbole. Today someone entered a reply to my comment which read (and this was copied and pasted from the channel so it’s exactly as it appeared):

Few and far Between Nowadays like joe friday "Just the facts" directly whiler so many others are overly BSOP!!!

What am I supposed to make of it? I read it several times, and on about the fourth I came to the tentative conclusion that he was agreeing with me. I also presumed that English is not his native language, and so I admired him for trying. And it did remind me – if I needed any reminding – that speaking a foreign language is at least as much about grammar, syntax, and conventions as it is about vocabulary. Knowing the words is good as long as you put them in the right order. (Then again, he might have been an American whose vote contributed to putting Donald Trump into the White House.)

A Nurse and a Nugget.

I’ve established the intention (not ‘set a target’, note; I have nothing to do with targets) of making an average of one post a day throughout October. I’d like to make 200 or more posts for the year, you see, and I’m not doing very well so far. I’ve never made fewer than 200 posts in a year, and since blogging is my only activity of note I would like to continue in similar vein.

But nothing much happened today, unless you count meeting a very lovely nurse called Vicky in the course of having my anti-flu and anti-Covid snake venom topped up, and I think I’ve made sufficient reference to my soft spot for nurses – especially the lovely ones – already. I like, admire, and respect nurses. Did I say?

And so my only recourse on this otherwise dull, cold, uneventful, and windy day is to offer another example of the amusing stuff offered to me by the YouTube algorithm. I assume this one was chosen as a result of my recent interest in the matter of extra-terrestrials. It says (and the upper case letters are lifted straight from the page):

ALIENS DON’T

LIKE CHRISTIANS

 

Alien Encounters

Halted in the Name

Of Jesus – why?

Creation Ministries International

I consider this educational. I sometimes think I’m a bit strange, but this sort of thing is way over a line that I’ve never come close to crossing. Strangeness evidently comes in many forms.

YouTube Nuggets.

We all know, do we not, that YouTube is full of garbage theses days. A very great deal – possibly the majority – of the content comprises shameless propaganda, deliberate distortions, fake news, and wild speculation presented as established fact. And it’s all agonisingly transparent, made all the more so by rank sensationalism and the sort of ludicrous hyperbole that would make even an American politician blush.

But occasionally it’s amusing, and so I thought I’d look out for the odd bit of entertainment here and there which could become a regular feature of the blog. I can’t post the thumbnails for reasons previously stated, but I can copy the text which usually has three elements: The title, the brief description, and the name of the channel. First up is today’s little delight:

Women’s Brains Are OBSOLETE

Women: Their Logic Saved Humanity, but Makes Them Unbearable.

It’s God’s Plan.

Funny, eh? I thought so.

(Although I might confess to the fact that I did live with two women in my life who were pretty unbearable, but that’s not a big enough sample to prove the rule. I never lived with a man who was unbearable. Oh yes I did… my stepfather. But he never saved humanity so he doesn’t count.)

Lydia (and Things.)

I met Lydia and Gwen in the lane today. Lydia is a young woman who lives with her man and baby daughter further down the lane. Gwen is her new whippet puppy. Gwen was very wriggly and most anxious to meet the new human; Lydia wasn’t.

But she was amiable enough in a quiet sort of way, and I wanted to tell her that I’ve never known a woman called Lydia (nor even a man come to that.) The only Lydia I’ve ever come across was the subject of Groucho’s famous song, the one that goes Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you seen Lydia? Lydia the tattooed lady. I would have sung it to her as well, but she seemed anxious to move on and who can blame her? But at least I got a dog fix out of the encounter.

Later on it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody has yet referred to me as ‘the old chap who lives up the lane.’ I wouldn’t like that very much. I’d prefer it if they said ‘…you know, that bloke who looks like he belongs in a bell tower.’ One of my favourite ditties is the one that begins: When you look like Quasimodo and your eyes have lost their glint… It’s on the blog somewhere.

And I saw the Lady B twice driving her car. I couldn’t tell whether she waved or not. I did.

Watching and Being Watched.

I was standing outside Sainsbury’s today, idly observing the flotsam drifting past on the way to the store. I saw a young couple, and the question presented itself as it has been doing since I was a teenager: what is a woman like that doing with a man like him? I’m quite good at understanding women, but their choice of partners has always been a mystery to me.

*  *  *

But then a young woman of around twenty walked past – tall, slim, and a natural blonde. Natural blondes are relatively rare in the UK, and so I wondered whether she was a Nordic or even a Pleiadian. I’ve been taking an interest in extra-terrestrials lately, you see, and am beginning to learn a bit about the different species. These include the Pleiadians, the Greys, the Tall Whites, the Reptilians, and the Nordics (who I gather are thought to be descendants of earlier Pleiadians if my memory serves me right.)

According to those in the know, these extra-terrestrials have been living on earth since before modern homo sapiens colonised it. Some stay hidden, while others move freely among us using various disguises to remain hidden in plain sight. This doesn’t, however, apply to the Nordics who look so like the people of the Nordic countries that we can’t tell them apart. It’s why they’re called the Nordics.

So that was interesting, especially when it occurred to me that if these ETs have been around for as long as that, maybe they could make a case for calling us the aliens.

*  *  *

Earlier today I was in a charity shop perusing the merchandise when I noticed a woman nearby, also perusing the merchandise, accompanied by a baby in a buggy who stared and stared and stared at me. It was a bit freaky being stared at by a baby. We don’t know what they’re thinking, do we? We don’t know to what extent they’re capable of rational, or even judgemental, thought. They might even be highly psychic at that age and be reading our thoughts, or watching a picture reel of our lives to date so they know all about us.

 

I tried a tentative wave but received no response. Freakier still.