On Fairies, Firsts, and Football Coaches.

I painted part of a wall today, and when I was clearing up I found three drops of paint on my desk which is on the other side of the room. I examined the possible scenarios by which three errant drops of paint could have found their way to the other side of the room. None were entirely credible, and so I settled on the only available solution: I have a paint fairy.

These little varmints clearly take delight in transporting wet paint to parts of the room where they have no logical right to be. The same thing happened in my kitchen a week or two ago. So now I don’t know whether to speak harshly to them, plead with them to behave, or be glad of the company.

*  *  *

This week’s firsts:

The first butterfly – a Peacock.

The first ants – two outside and one in the kitchen

The first bumble bees.

The first dandelion flowers.

The first bluebells – that’s pretty unusual in March.

The first bat hunting around the house at twilight – great Hurrah for that.

The first hare I’ve ever seen dead on the road.

The last one gave me pause for thought. Apart from being a sad sight, it reminded me that seeing a hare is supposed to be an omen of misfortune. So what does it mean if the animal is dead? Does that magnify the misfortune or reverse it? I’ll try not to worry.

*  *  *

I was reading a football match report today which included an interview with the coach. Not for the first time I noticed that football coaches speak a very strange brand of English. It’s similar to the standard version but with enough differences as to be highly irritating, and the most notable feature is its complete misuse of tenses. I’m inclined to wonder whether football coaches learn this weirdly irrational habit in football coaching schools, or whether they’re not actually human.

17th March and All That.

Notwithstanding my lamentable lack of literary aspiration at the moment, it would be remiss of me not to mention that today is 17^th March. It matters to me, you see, and not because it happens to coincide with the feast day of a certain ancient Irish cleric. It matters to me because it’s the birthday of somebody else.

It sends my mind wandering casually back to a day nearly two decades ago, and the sight of a comely maiden walking her little dog along a little lane near her house. On the surface she was unprepossessing – rat’s nest hair, plain dress representing no sort of style, and a total lack of paint on lips, eyes, or anywhere else. And yet she was compelling in a way I found difficult to rationalise. Eventually she became the Queen Regnant of my consciousness and has remained so ever since.

And so today I wanted – as I do every 17^th March – to send her a birthday greeting. I can’t do so because I undertook nine years ago to remain silent unless approached, and approached I never am. (And I regard undertakings to be sacrosanct.) Yet send them I do, silently through the ether from what has become a somewhat impoverished consciousness, in the hope that it will be received at some deeper level. It carries with it my regret that I never explained to her that there was never any hint of the libidinous about my interest. I simply ached for her presence and her good opinion. Nothing more.

*  *  *

And an almost totally unconnected little curio: I discovered only last night that St Patrick’s Day was treated in Ireland until relatively recently – some time in the 1970s if I heard correctly – as a religious observance requiring pubs to remain closed. It appears that the message never made it to New York. Maybe the telegram rests still in what remains of the post box on the Titanic.

(I’m doing deconstructed communication again. I wonder why. Just be thankful I didn’t make the intended post on Trump’s latest attempt to convince the world of his inadequacy. It’s the one thing he’s very good at.)

Doubting Even a Reset.

I’ve had so many posts running through my head recently but lacked the will to type them up. There is, however, one subject that keeps prodding me insistently, so I’ll make it mercifully brief:

Let’s face it, Iran desperately needs a regime change. Not for the sake of America or Israel, or the rest of the world come to that, but for the sake of the Iranian people. They suffered when Iran was a monarchy, and they've continued to suffer ever since. Let’s also face the fact that the USA, Israel, and Russia are also desperately in need regime change, in that case mainly for the sake of the world in general.

That’s the start of the issue. It goes on from there, but I won’t presume on anyone’s patience by wading through individual factors, presumptions, and considerations. The final line in the argument is simple enough: the human genome is defective and needs excising from the human animal. From time immemorial humanity has allowed itself to be ruled by those with the will and determination to achieve power, wealth and (dare I say it?) greatness on the blood and suffering of the innocent.

And so getting rid of the likes of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah won’t cut the ice. It will take a global nuclear war or environmental catastrophe on a scale greater than the Younger Dryas to do that. Or maybe even that won't do. There are those who believe – with some evidence that is not unconvincing – that it has happened before, and yet still the angels continue to be ruled by chimpanzees utterly lacking any ethical or humanitarian dimension.

So where do I go from here? I haven’t a clue.

Understanding Donald.

I saw this morning that Trump referred to Keir Starmer's intransigence with the statement ‘we’re not dealing with Winston Churchill here.’

Well now, have you noticed that whenever anybody disagrees with Donald Trump or declines to toe the Trumpian line, his immediate response is always to hurl a cheap insult at them and imply, at the very least, that they’re ‘losers’?

I should think the psychologists must love studying him. I’m not a psychologist, but I suspect I’m not too far from the truth in suspecting that he’s a prime case of arrested development as a result of defective potty training.

Meeting Mrs Lopsided.

I spent five minutes this morning renewing my fond acquaintance with a lovely lady collie dog in Mill Lane who I haven’t seen for several weeks. And then an elderly woman came walking uncertainly down the path holding a new-looking smart phone which appeared to be troubling her. She told me it wasn’t actually hers, and then said ‘A man keeps telling me the time. I don’t know why.’

For those unfamiliar with the appellation, Mrs Lopsided is the delightfully dotty MC of the 1955 Ealing comedy, The Ladykillers. It’s in the top half dozen of my favourite films. If the French have M Hulot, we have Mrs Wilberforce (AKA 'Mrs Lopsided'.)

Notes on the Iran Thing.

Last night I felt moved to write quite a long post about yesterday’s big event, but I ended up doing other things instead and today I’ve lost interest, so I’ll just offer a couple of brief notes instead.

As usual I’m intrigued to know what was buzzing around among the cobwebs in Trump’s head, and the best I could come up with went something like: ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll send a bunch of brave American boys and some fine, expensive American ships to go shoot fish in a barrel. Then everybody will know how important I am and will stop laughing at me. They might even stop asking how close I was to Jeffrey Epstein and his kinky lifestyle.’

I doubt that too many people will mourn the loss of the tyrant Khameni, not even in Iran, but let’s not forget that there are tyrants on both sides. While considering this fact I imagined a comparable scenario. Let’s suppose the boys of the Chicago police department – fine, upstanding specimens to a man, no doubt – were complicit with Al Capone in the planning and prosecution of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. It sounded about right.

I wonder whether Trump will be landed with one humdinger of a fatwa. (No fake blood this time – allegedly.)  But maybe not. I wonder whether fatwas can only be declared for blasphemy, not merely having a congenital dislike of Muslims, killing a head of state, and showing scant regard for what Donald likes to call ‘shithole countries.’ Must look it up.

I knew some Iranians once. They were all honest, honourable, and humorous men. I even had a fight with one of them which was entirely my fault, but he was the one who apologised. Nice guys. And maybe it’s worth bearing in mind that Persia is generally recognised as having been the cradle of civilisation, lacking only candyfloss and Disney to add gravitas. Does that count for anything? I don’t know.

Signing off now.