A Rare and Welcome Occurence.

I was given a gift today. The receiving of gifts is something of a rarity in my life, so it always comes as a shock when it happens.

Remember the young woman in the coffee shop I mentioned last week, the one to whom I remarked that her irrepressible niceness seemed authentic? She served my coffee today and asked me how I was.

‘Or are you still not sure?’ she continued. I told her about the latest scans being clear, and she smiled.

‘Have this one on me,’ she said when I held out the price of an Americano with cream.

I felt – and probably looked – incredulous. I asked ‘Why?’

She said nothing, just looked back at me and smiled nicely. No compliments, forced or otherwise, just a smile. Isn’t that sweet? And genuine, so it seems I was right.

It’s at such times that the weight of living life among my species is considerably lightened, and I suspect the Lady Fu was behind it. The nargles were conspicuous by their absence.

*  *  *

I really must stop referencing Harry Potter. People will begin to think I’m strange.

On Being Targeted.

I keep getting an advert from ebay on my email home page for a non-wired soft bra. I’m not quiet sure how today’s supposedly targeted advertising manages to think that I might be interested in such a product – and I can only make an educated guess at what a non-wired soft bra is anyway, since lingerie never appealed to me, not even when it had an attractive young woman strapped into it – but the point is this:

It’s called the Naturana 86954. Makes it sound like the latest surface-to-air missile, doesn’t it? I wonder whether Trump has ordered a few with which to threaten the Iranians (or whoever he happens to be threatening today.)

Stress and Stuff.

It occurred to me today that life is too short to be wasted on pursuing a career.

It’s not a position I’m taking seriously and so I don’t need to explain or defend it. I certainly haven’t wasted my life on pursuing a career, but that had more to do with my need of freedom and a predilection for radical change when the situation permitted.

And yet I’m still tempted to wonder whether people in the developed world are less happy these days than they used to be, now that they’re forced to endure the twin stresses of aspiration and competition from an early age. It seems that nowhere is this truer than in Japan where they have an alarmingly high rate of school age suicide. (I gather they have an unenviable rate of working age suicides, too.) Is that merely coincidental?

For most of history people simply got on with following the road allotted to their class. In the case of the class in which I grew up, it meant that the men went off and laboured in the fields, factories and coal mines, while the women submitted themselves to a different form of labour and then spent their days tending to the consequences. Hardly an ideal situation, I know, but if it’s stress you’re concerned about you do have to wonder whether we’ve simply jumped from the rock to the hard place.

But this is all tediously familiar, and I really must resist the tendency to be tedious now that I’ve been released from limbo and sent back to the land of the living (albeit temporarily, I expect.) I need to rediscover my sense of humour if I’m to have a place to call home.

*  *  *

I haven’t seen my friend the llama for a long time. I wonder whether it was something I said.

*  *  *

The Shire is unusually colourful this autumn. Even my favourite oak tree in Church Lane had golden leaves today. Oak trees are not normally associated with autumn colour, that distinction being reserved more for the beeches and sycamores. I’ve certainly never seen this particular oak dressed in golden leaves before, yet there it was as I walked up the rise, washed by the pale autumnal sun and looking quite resplendent.

*  *  *

I hope there’s pudding.

Falling on Stony Ground.

I put a comment on a YouTube track by Natalia Tsarikova a couple of months ago. It was complimentary, but then digressed in the middle paragraph which read:

I only ever met one Russian woman in my whole life. She was working as a checkout operator in an English supermarket and patted my hand in congratulation when I successfully identified her accent. She didn't look like Natalia, though. I suspect she might have been a goat herder from Siberia, but who can tell?

Now, isn’t that worth 100 likes? It didn’t get any. The man who wrote:

Very Good. Nice song and music…

… got 146. I decided that either YouTube commenters have no taste, or foreign people (foreign to me, that is) just don’t get my sense of humour. (Having said which, a lot of British people don't get my sense of humour either.) But then I console myself with the sure and certain conviction that approbation by all but the chosen few is of no consequence.

Your Culture Needs You.

This is one of the many recruiting posters devised for and on behalf of Her Excellency Mother Culture. The subtext reads:

If you join me in the glorious wage slave revolution, if you toe the line with only a minimum of acceptable questioning, if you agree that the privations attaching to the primitive persuasion are the due reward of the lower life forms, if you accept that the space between the tram lines as defined by me is the only proper place to subsist, if you follow my commands and conditioning at all times, and if your aspirations are limited to those which I say are worthy, then you, too, can have little glass ornaments to make your Christmas season all the more joyful.

I sometimes wonder how we got here.

Reasons to Feel Fortunate.

I went to the hospital for yet another procedure today. When you go to hospitals for procedures they run you through a questionnaire first, to find out whether you’re allergic to latex, have any metal parts fitted, are wearing clean socks just in case you have to take your shoes off… that sort of thing. One of the questions they routinely ask is ‘do you have any problem with your kidneys?’

Only a 50% deficiency.

‘I’m sorry?’

Well, I know it sounds like the Monty Python sketch about the man with three buttocks, but I have a 50% deficiency in the kidney department. One of your blokes cut me open and removed one of them back in March. Whether he took it home and fried it up with some onions and a dash of Tabasco sauce – and if he did, whether he ate it himself or fed it to his dog – I wouldn’t know. On the other hand he might have done neither, in which case I’m curious to know whether the poor little organ was given a proper funeral as was undoubtedly its due, but nobody ever said.

‘So you only have one kidney?’

Yes.

That conversation should have happened, but didn’t unfortunately. They didn’t ask me any questions about kidneys today so I needn’t have bothered rehearsing it. Instead they asked a very small number of questions and then got on with the uncomfortable, briefly painful, and considerably demeaning business of examining the inside of my bladder.

Have you ever seen the inside of a bladder? It’s disgusting. The veins look like those little mealworms you find under stones when the ground is damp. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that there were no beetles, earwigs or wood lice in evidence. And the young registrar performing the procedure with all the studied indifference of a North Korean torture consultant didn’t find anything untoward either. That’s two reasons to feel fortunate.

And did you know that you don’t have to take your shoes off when they examine the inside of your bladder? That’s a pity because I’d been especially diligent in ensuring that my socks were fresh on this morning so as to avoid the shame of costing the NHS a squirt of air freshener subsequent to my departure.

Oh, and they also advised me, upon being questioned, that the CT scans I had three weeks ago (on the results of which I have been fretting less than manfully for twenty one days) also showed nothing untoward. It appears I’m as clean as I was before this whole damn business started and am quite likely to live through another winter after all. I suppose that’s three reasons to feel fortunate. There’s a possibility that I might even start blogging again before too long.

*  *  *

But tonight the DVD player in my computer packed up when I still had five episodes of Father Ted to watch. Is fortune faltering, I wonder.

A Flawed Aspiration.

I sometimes amuse myself through the empty evening hours by reading the profiles of other bloggers whose listed favourites have something in common with mine. I suppose I’m curious to know whether Hermione Granger is hiding among the flotsam and jetsam of mankind, playing hide and seek for amusement now that Hogwarts has faded into the ether of history and she’s been cast adrift among the muggles. I haven’t found her yet – and never expect to. I suspect her cloak of invisibility is sewn tightly shut and that the nargles are probably behind it.

What I did find tonight was a woman who listed among her interests the desire to inspire others to fulfil their hopes and dreams in life. I find that arrogant, didactic, presumptuous and ego-driven. It seems to me that inspiring others is fine as long as you don’t do it consciously. It’s fine as long as you do it by simply being yourself. Most of all, it’s fine as long as you take no credit for any effect your example might have.

(Tomorrow is scheduled to be a day of inconvenience, discomfort and revelation. Big revelation. I admit to feeling rather more than nervous.)

Second Hand Humour.

My sense of humour is the latest casualty of The Situation. That’s a disappointment because it’s usually the last of my personality traits to fall asleep when the days turn dark, but fall asleep it has. I can, however, still recognise humour in others.

Last night I was reading some comments on a YouTube compilation of Harry Potter scenes. One man – presumably not a native English speaker – said that he would love to be at Hogwarts where he could wear an invisible clot and spend his time making poisons.

I chose not to correct his deficient vocabulary. It seemed churlish, given that his amusing imperfection in the matter of my language is more than matched by my complete ignorance of his.

One Duty Done.

I finally got around to telling the woman in the coffee shop that her irrepressible niceness seemed authentic, and that such a quality is not as common as one might reasonably expect in the catering trade. (Well, there are certain things you just have to do when you have reason to suspect that the grim reaper might be coming too close for comfort.) She assured me that it was, and demonstrated the fact by confiding that people find her chirpiness irritating first thing in the morning.

Such a short and superficial conversation, but still a minor obligation discharged. And if it does transpire that I’m to carry on regardless, maybe it will serve as a signal to start a little bridge-building.

Not Getting Emma Watson.

At the moment I'm highly nervous about what I might learn from my friendly consultant later this week with regard to my future prospects. That’s why I haven’t been adding sweet and sour little nothings to this blog. Nevertheless, something is irritating me and so I decided to come out of my shell and let off some steam.

Ever since my recent three week love affair with the Harry Potter movies (and Hermione Granger in particular) I’ve been watching quite a few themed compilations on YouTube. So what does the Google machine - which is programmed to assess my every whim and offer me more of like kind - now give me as a recommended topic? It gives me Emma Watson.

So let me ask a question here. Why would I be interested in Emma Watson just because she played the incomparable Hermione Granger in a series of movies? Emma Watson is an actor, effectively a mobile mannequin. None of the roles Ms Watson has played or ever will play can be relied upon to give any indication of her own nature. Such intelligence is known only to her and those close to her. It certainly isn’t known to me and I see no reason why it should be.

Let’s put this simply, albeit figuratively: To those who don’t know her, Emma Watson isn’t real. To fans of Harry Potter, however, Hermione Granger is very real. What’s more, she’s the closest I’ve ever encountered to the perfect woman. For all I know, Emma Watson might be about as interesting as a plate of cold cabbage. And the point is this: I really don’t care whether she is or not, which is why I'm not interested in watching videos about her. Or let’s put it another way: when it comes to the matter of drama, it’s the characters who are important, not the actors.

So please, clever people at YouTube, do stop assuming that I’m one of those drooling inadequates who hang around stage doors no matter what the climatic conditions in the hope of having the opportunity to say ‘Please, Miss Watson, please may I have your autograph. I thought you were absolutely brilliant.’ I’m not, so please stop it.