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.